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Joshua Foer

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We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. - Joshua Foer
#Art
#Control
#Memories
#Memory
#Work
We've forgotten how to remember, and just as importantly, we've forgotten how to pay attention. So, instead of using your smartphone to jot down crucial notes, or Googling an elusive fact, use every opportunity to practice your memory skills. Memory is a muscle, to be exercised and improved. - Joshua Foer
#Memory
#Opportunity
#Practice
#Remember
Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face. - Joshua Foer
#Face
#Just
#Kiss
#Short
#Way
Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence. - Joshua Foer
#Action
#Cards
#King
#Person
#Three
One trick, known as the journey method or 'memory palace,' is to conjure up a familiar space in the mind's eye, and then populate it with images of whatever it is you want to remember. - Joshua Foer
#Journey
#Memory
#Mind
#Remember
#Space
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. - Joshua Foer
#Dialogue
#Memory
#Never
#Notes
#Recall
We've outsourced our memories to digital devices, and the result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small forgotten thing as evidence that they're failing us. - Joshua Foer
#Digital
#Memories
#Result
#See
#Trust
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. - Joshua Foer
#Creativity
#Fly
#Great
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#Mind
As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories. - Joshua Foer
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#Colleagues
#Memories
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#Our
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. - Joshua Foer
#Human
#Last
#Memories
#Printing
#Us
The best memorizers in the world - who almost all hail from Europe - can memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark, considered the 'four-minute mile of memory.' - Joshua Foer
#Best
#Cards
#Europe
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'Moonwalking with Einstein' refers to a memory device I used when I memorized a deck of playing cards at the U.S. Memory Championship. When I competed in 2006, I set a new U.S. record by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds. That record has since fallen. - Joshua Foer
#Cards
#Memory
#Minute
#New
#One Minute
During the Middle Ages they understood that words accompanied by imagery are much more memorable. By making the margins of a book colorful and beautiful, illuminations help make the text unforgettable. It's unfortunate that we've lost the art of illumination. - Joshua Foer
#Art
#Beautiful
#Help
#Lost
#Words
If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember. - Joshua Foer
#Life
#Live
#Memorable
#Person
#Remember
We reserve the term 'genius' for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term 'genius' was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling. - Joshua Foer
#Best
#Genius
#Memories
#New
#People
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. - Joshua Foer
#Daily
#Day
#Life
#Long
#Time
What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful. - Joshua Foer
#Colorful
#Makes
#Memorable
#Things
Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. - Joshua Foer
#Culture
#Humor
#Ideas
#Memory
#World
No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today. - Joshua Foer
#Communication
#Design
#End
#More
#Today
One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens. - Joshua Foer
#Age
#Challenges
#Great
#Leisure
#Tools
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