Joshua Foer Quotes

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If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.

Joshua Foer

Motivation, Inspiration, Memorable

"Feats of memory anyone can do". TED Talk, www.ted.com. February 2012.

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Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?

Joshua Foer

Memories, Motivation, Short Life

"Feats of memory anyone can do". TED Talk, www.ted.com. February 2012.

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Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

Joshua Foer

Memories, Information, Bigger

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.147, Penguin

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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

Photography, Memories, Technology

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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

Memories, Ideas, World

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.188, Penguin

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To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

Joshua Foer

Mistake, Watches, Failing

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.123, Penguin

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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

World, Remember, Processing

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.148, Penguin

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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

Exercise, Long, One Day

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.61, Penguin

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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

Art, Memories, Creativity

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What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.

Joshua Foer

Meaningful, Memorable, Significant

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To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

Joshua Foer

Memories, Mean, Knowing

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.15, Penguin

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Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

Joshua Foer

Memories, Party, Training

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.188, Penguin

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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

Memories, Eye, Journey

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A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

Joshua Foer

Meaningful, Two, People

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.59, Penguin

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With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.

Joshua Foer

Memories, Mean, Creating

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.112, Penguin

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...who we are and what we do it is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

Joshua Foer

Who We Are, Remember, Function

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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

Memories, Forgotten Things, Digital

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Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.

Joshua Foer

Memories, Facts, Life Experience

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.61, Penguin

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Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

Joshua Foer

Memorable, Speed, Seems

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.62, Penguin

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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

Short Life, Talking, Iphone

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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

Writing, Thinking, Way Forward

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The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.

Joshua Foer

Learning, Practice, Skills

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When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.

Joshua Foer

Important, Want, Amount

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.198, Penguin UK

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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

Growing Up, Heart, Phones

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.100, Penguin

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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, Memories, Habit

Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.188, Penguin

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Born: September 23, 1982
Occupation: Journalist
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