Top 120 Joshua Foer Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.”

— Joshua Foer

53. “Somewhere in your mind there’s a trace from everything you’ve ever seen.”

— Joshua Foer

54. “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.’”

— Joshua Foer

55. “Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.”

— Joshua Foer

56. “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

57. “Once I’d reached the point where I could squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone.”

— Joshua Foer

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It’s only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today.”

— Joshua Foer

62. “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.”

— Joshua Foer

63. “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

64. “Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we’ve got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of creativity and its sources. Imagine is his best book yet.”

— Joshua Foer

65. “Nobody would want to have their attention captured by every triviality, but there is something to be said for the value of not merely passing through the world, but also making some effort to capture it – if only because in trying to capture it, one gets in the habit of noticing, and appreciating.”

— Joshua Foer

66. “Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human.”

— Joshua Foer

67. “Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them.”

— Joshua Foer

68. “Experts see the world differently. They notice things that nonexperts don’t see. They home in on the information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it.”

— Joshua Foer

69. “In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality.”

— Joshua Foer

70. “People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.”

— Joshua Foer

71. “What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.”

— Joshua Foer

72. “It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.”

— Joshua Foer

73. “I decided to make memorizing a part of my daily routine. Like flossing. Except I was actually going to do it.”

— Joshua Foer

74. “My experience had validated the old saw that practice makes perfect. But only if it’s the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice. I’d learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things. This was a tremendously empowering discovery. It made me ask myself: What else was I capable of doing, if only I used the right approach?”

— Joshua Foer

75. “Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It’s the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.”

— Joshua Foer

76. “The brain is like a muscle,” he said, and memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time, like any form of exercise, it’ll make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble. It’s an idea that dates back to the very origins of memory training. Roman orators argued that the art of memory – the proper retention and ordering of knowledge – was a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas.”

— Joshua Foer

77. “Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type 10 to 20 percent faster than your comfort pace and to allow yourself to make mistakes. Only by watching yourself mistype at that faster speed can you figure out the obstacles that are slowing you down and overcome them. By bringing typing out of the autonomous stage and back under conscious control, it is possible to conquer the OK plateau.”

— Joshua Foer

78. “My dad may consider putting into a tin cup in his basement a good form of practice, but unless he’s consciously challenging himself and monitoring his performance – reviewing, responding, rethinking, rejiggering – it’s never going to make him appreciably better. Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.”

— Joshua Foer

79. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.”

— Joshua Foer

80. “What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?”

— Joshua Foer

81. “I was starting to wonder if the sort of memorization practiced by mental athletes was not something like the peacock’s tail: impressive not for its utility, but for its profound lack of utility. Were these ancient techniques anything more than “intellectual fossils,” as the historian Paulo Rossi once put it, fascinating for what they tell us about the minds of a bygone era, but as out of place in our modern world as quill pens and papyrus scrolls?”

— Joshua Foer

82. “The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing – to force oneself to stay out of autopilot.”

— Joshua Foer

83. “I’m working on expanding subjective time so that it feels like I live longer,” Ed had mumbled to me on the sidewalk outside the Con Ed headquarters, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “The idea is to avoid that feeling you have when you get to the end of the year and feel like, where the hell did that go?” “And how are you going to do that?” I asked. “By remembering more. By providing my life with more chronological landmarks. By making myself more aware of time’s passage.”

— Joshua Foer

84. “We usually think about our memory as a single, monolithic thing. It’s not. Memory is more like a collection of independent modules and systems, each relying on its own networks of neurons.”

— Joshua Foer

85. “What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.”

— Joshua Foer

86. “Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?”

— Joshua Foer

87. “As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the “OK plateau,” the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.”

— Joshua Foer

88. “Miller had discovered that our ability to process information and make decisions in the world is limited by a fundamental constraint: We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.”

— Joshua Foer

89. “Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item. Chunking is the reason that phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code and that credit card numbers are split into groups of four. And chunking is extremely relevant to the question of why experts so often have such exceptional memories.”

— Joshua Foer

90. “In his chronic forgetfulness, EP has achieved a kind of pathological enlightenment, a perverted vision of the Buddhist ideal of living entirely in the present.”

— Joshua Foer

91. “Experts see the world differently. They notice things that nonexperts don’t see. They home in on the information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it. And most important, experts process the enormous amounts of information flowing through their senses in more sophisticated ways.”

— Joshua Foer

92. “Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item.”

— Joshua Foer

93. “The idea is to create a space in the mind’s eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the “method of loci” by the Romans, such a building would later come to be called a “memory palace.”

— Joshua Foer

94. “Without time, there would be no need for a memory. But without a memory, would there be such a thing as time? I don’t mean time in the sense that, say, physicists speak of it: the fourth dimension, the independent variable, the quantity that dilates when you approach the speed of light. I mean psychological time, the tempo at which we experience life’s passage. Time as a mental construct.”

— Joshua Foer

95. “If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained.”

— Joshua Foer

96. “Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory. A striped skunk making a slam dunk is a stickier thought than a patterned mustelid engaging in athletic activity.”

— Joshua Foer

97. “I’m convinced that remembering more is only the most obvious benefit of the many months I spent training my memory. What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.”

— Joshua Foer

98. “What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.”

— Joshua Foer

99. “It is said that a student of sexing must work through at least 250,000 chicks before attaining any degree of proficiency. Even if the sexer calls it “intuition,” it’s been shaped by years of experience. It is the vast memory bank of chick bottoms that allows him or her to recognize patterns in the vents glanced at so quickly. In most cases, the skill is not the result of conscious reasoning, but pattern recognition. It is a feat of perception and memory, not analysis.”

— Joshua Foer

100. “Eventually, our brains may be connected directly and seamlessly to our lifelogs, so that our external memories will function and feel as if they are entirely internal. And of course, they will also be connected to the greatest external memory repository of all, the Internet. A surrogate memory that recalls everything and can be accessed as naturally as the memories stored in our neurons: It would be the decisive weapon in the war against forgetting.”

— Joshua Foer