List of Joshua Foer Quotes

Truman Capote Famously Claimed To Have Nearly Absolute Recall Of Dialogue And Used His Prodigious Memory As An Excuse Never To Take Notes Or Use A Tape Recorder, But I Suspect His Memory Claims Were Just A Useful Cover To Invent Dialogue Whole Cloth.

Since At Least The Middle Ages, Philosophers And Philologists Have Dreamed Of Curing Natural Languages Of Their Flaws By Constructing Entirely New Idioms According To Orderly, Logical Principles.

What Distinguishes A Great Mnemonist, I Learned, Is The Ability To Create Lavish Images On The Fly, To Paint In The Mind A Scene So Unlike Any Other It Cannot Be Forgotten. And To Do It Quickly. Many Competitive Mnemonists Argue That Their Skills Are Less A Feat Of Memory Than Of Creativity.

Someday In The Distant Cyborg Future, When Our Internal And External Memories Fully Merge, We May Come To Possess Infinite Knowledge. But That's Not The Same Thing As Wisdom.

The Fact That Books Today Are Mostly A String Of Words Makes It Easier To Forget The Text. With The Impact Of The Ipad And The Future Of The Book Being Up For Re-imagination, I Wonder Whether We'll Rediscover The Importance Of Making Texts Richer Visually.

Back When I Lived In Brooklyn, I'd Sometimes Take The Q Train All The Way Out To Coney Island And Back, And Work On My Laptop. There's Something About Pushy New Yorkers Looking Over Your Shoulder That Really Makes You Produce Sentences.

Invented Languages Have Often Been Created In Tandem With Entire Invented Universes, And Most Conlangers Come To Their Craft By Way Of Fantasy And Science Fiction.

Languages Are Something Of A Mess. They Evolve Over Centuries Through An Unplanned, Democratic Process That Leaves Them Teeming With Irregularities, Quirks, And Words Like 'knight.'

Now More Than Ever, As The Role Of Memory In Our Culture Erodes At A Faster Pace Than Ever Before, We Need To Cultivate Our Ability To Remember. Our Memories Make Us Who We Are. They Are The Seat Of Our Values And Source Of Our Character. Competing To See Who Can Memorize More Pages Of Poetry Might Seem Beside The Point, But It's About Taking A Stand Against Forgetfulness, And Embracing Primal Capacities From Which Too Many Of Us Have Became Estrangedmemory Training Is Not Just For The Sake Of Performing Party Tricks; It's About Nurturing Something Profoundly And Essentially Human.

All Across Africa, The Pacific And The Americas, We Find Cultures That Didn't Know About Mouth Kissing Until Their First Contact With European Explorers. And The Attraction Was Not Always Immediately Apparent. Most Considered The Act Of Exchanging Saliva Revolting.

Over The Last Few Millennia We've Invented A Series Of Technologies - From The Alphabet To The Scroll To The Codex, The Printing Press, Photography, The Computer, The Smartphone - That Have Made It Progressively Easier And Easier For Us To Externalize Our Memories, For Us To Essentially Outsource This Fundamental Human Capacity.

Our Lives Are Structured By Our Memories Of Events. Event X Happened Just Before The Big Paris Vacation. I Was Doing Y In The First Summer After I Learned To Drive. Z Happened The Weekend After I Landed My First Job. We Remember Events By Positioning Them In Time Relative To Other Events.