I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn’t, and what its potential might be. – Joshua Foer
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. – Joshua Foer
Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all. – Joshua Foer
To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters of memory in the world. – Joshua Foer
Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I’m not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that’s probably more than most. – Joshua Foer
The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where every year somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catch-up. – Joshua Foer
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
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
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
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
Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood. – Joshua Foer
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
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
How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we’re not willing to process deeply? – Joshua Foer
We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. Great memories are learned. At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. We remember when we are deeply engaged. – Joshua Foer
When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind’s collective memory. – Joshua Foer
‘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
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
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. – Joshua Foer
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
There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe. – Joshua Foer
Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your mind’s eye. That’s an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the U.S. Memory Competition. – Joshua Foer
If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you’d never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn’t just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea. – Joshua Foer
Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today. – Joshua Foer
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. – Joshua Foer
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
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. – Joshua Foer
We’re visual creatures. Probably, when we were hunter gatherers… that was the kind of thing that mattered. And remembering, say, phone numbers was, like, not that important when you’re hunting down a mastodon or whatever. – Joshua Foer
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. – Joshua Foer
