Top 120 Joshua Foer Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “And suddenly, I realized the system that I was in did not know what intelligence was, didn’t know how to identify smart and not smart.”

— Joshua Foer

102. “Matthews contends. You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.”

— Joshua Foer

103. “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

104. “To use Simonides’ technique, all one has to do is convert something unmemorable, like a string of numbers or a deck of cards or a shopping list or Paradise Lost, into a series of engrossing visual images and mentally arrange them within an imagined space, and suddenly those forgettable items become unforgettable.”

— Joshua Foer

105. “A strong memory was seen as the greatest virtue since it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge.”

— Joshua Foer

106. “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

107. “Socrates thought the unexamined life was not worth living. How much more so the unremembered life?”

— Joshua Foer

108. “The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,” Ed explained to me between breaths into his clenched fists. “That’s what elaborative encoding is.”

— Joshua Foer

109. “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

110. “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 become estranged. That’s what Ed had been trying to impart to me from the beginning: that memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it’s about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.”

— Joshua Foer

111. “In addition to the Ad Herennium, there would be translated excerpts of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria and Cicero’s De Oratore for me to read, followed by a collection of medieval writings on memory by Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter of Ravenna.”

— Joshua Foer

112. “Despite having apparently conquered his most debilitating social problems, to this day, Daniel says he still can’t shave himself, or drive a car. The sound of the toothbrush scratching his teeth drives him mad. He says he avoids public places, and is obsessive about small things. For breakfast, he measures out exactly forty-five grams of porridge on an electric scale.”

— Joshua Foer

113. “For S, the first piece of information in a list was always, and without fail, inextricably linked to the second piece of information, which could only be followed by the third. It didn’t matter whether he was memorizing Dante’s Divine Comedy or mathematical equations; his memories were always stored in linear chains. Which is why he could recite poems just as easily backward as forward.”

— Joshua Foer

114. “Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.”

— Joshua Foer

115. “From Barry White to the color white to milk to the Milky Way is a long voyage conceptually, but a short jaunt neurologically.”

— Joshua Foer

116. “Folklorists have compared oral poems to pebbles worn down by the water.”

— Joshua Foer

117. “Instead of thinking of enhancing my memory as analogous to stretching my height or improving my vision or tweaking some other fundamental attribute of my body, Ericsson encouraged me to think of it more like improving a skill – more like learning to play an instrument.”

— Joshua Foer

118. “Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can’t explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they’re happening.”

— Joshua Foer

119. “In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.”

— Joshua Foer

120. “If they’re not practicing deliberately, even experts can see their skills backslide. Ericsson shared with me an incredible example of this. Even though you might be inclined to trust the advice of a silver-haired doctor over one fresh out of medical school, it’s been found that in a few fields of medicine, doctors’ skills don’t improve the longer they’ve been practicing.”

— Joshua Foer

121. “I think that with only one data point, we don’t know,” he told me. “But it’s rare for someone to make the kind of commitment you made, and I think your willingness to take on the challenge may make you different. You’re clearly not a random person, but on the other hand, I’m not sure there’s anything in how you improved that is completely outside the range of what a motivated college student could do.”

— Joshua Foer

122. “All that differentiates us from them is our memories. Not the memories that reside in our own brains, for the child born today enters the world just as much a blank slate as the child born thirty thousand years ago, but rather the memories that are stored outside ourselves – in books, photographs, museums, and these days in digital media.”

— Joshua Foer

123. “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.”

— Joshua Foer

124. “Indeed, one would be hard put to say which was more real for him: the world of imagination in which he lived, or the world of reality in which he was but a temporary guest.”

— Joshua Foer

125. “Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories. 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.”

— Joshua Foer

126. “Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.”

— Joshua Foer

127. “Even if facts don’t, by themselves, lead to understanding, you can’t have understanding without facts. And crucially, the more you know, the easier it is to know more.”

— Joshua Foer

128. “But perhaps Daniel exemplifies an even more inspiring idea: that we all have remarkable capacities.”

— Joshua Foer

129. “It’s rare for someone to make the kind of commitment you made, and I think your willingness to take on the challenge may make you different.”

— Joshua Foer

130. “We all reach OK plateaus in most things we do. We learn how to drive when we’re in our teens and then once we’re good enough to avoid tickets and major accidents, we get only incrementally better. My father has been playing golf for forty years, and he’s still – though it will hurt him to read this – a duffer. In four decades his handicap hasn’t fallen even a point. How come? He reached an OK plateau.”

— Joshua Foer

131. “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. 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.”

— Joshua Foer

132. “The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory.”

— Joshua Foer

133. “Indeed, the single best predictor of an individual’s chess skill is not the amount of chess he’s played against opponents, but rather the amount of time he’s spent sitting alone working through old games.”

— Joshua Foer

134. “I’d upgraded my memory’s software, but my hardware seemed to have remained fundamentally unchanged.”

— Joshua Foer

135. “Some researchers have theorized that shutting off certain left-brain activities somehow liberates right-brain skills that had been latent all along. Indeed, people have been known to suddenly acquire savantlike abilities later in life, after a traumatic injury to the left side of the brain.”

— Joshua Foer