Top 100

Top 120 Joshua Foer Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

Joshua Foer Quote: “Somewhere in your mind there’s a trace from everything you’ve ever seen.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “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 Quote: “Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “I decided to make memorizing a part of my daily routine. Like flossing. Except I was actually going to do it.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?”
Joshua Foer Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Episodic memories are located in time and space: They have a where and a when attached to them. Semantic memories are located outside of time and space, as free-floating pieces of knowledge.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “In his essay “The First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton describes a switch from “intensive” to “extensive” reading that occurred as books began to proliferate. Until relatively recently, people read “intensively,” says Darnton. “They had only a few books – the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two – and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “Socrates thought the unexamined life was not worth living. How much more so the unremembered life?”
Joshua Foer Quote: “Camillo’s reputation was resurrected in the twentieth century thanks to the efforts of the historian Frances Yates, who helped reconstruct the theater’s blueprints in her book The Art of Memory, and the Italian literature professor Lina Bolzoni, who has helped explain how Camillo’s theater was more than just the work of a nut job, but actually the apotheosis of an entire era’s ideas about memory.”
Joshua Foer Quote: “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.”
PREV 1 2 3 NEXT
Reading Quotes
Procrastination Quotes
Motivational Quotes
Inspirational Entrepreneurship Quotes
Positive Quotes
Albert Einstein Quotes
Startup Quotes
Steve Jobs Quotes
Success Quotes
Inspirational Quotes
Courage Quotes
Life Quotes

Beautiful Wallpapers and Images

We hope you enjoyed our collection of 120 free pictures with Joshua Foer Quotes.

All of the images on this page were created with QuoteFancy Studio.

Use QuoteFancy Studio to create high-quality images for your desktop backgrounds, blog posts, presentations, social media, videos, posters and more.

Learn more