Joshua Foer Quotes:
No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.
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
We reserve the term ‘genius’ for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term ‘genius’ was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.
Joshua Foer
If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.
Joshua Foer
As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.
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
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
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
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
Sequencing – the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader – matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
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
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
There is a short window at the beginning of one’s professional life, when it is comparatively easy to take big risks. Make the most of that time, before circumstances make you risk averse.
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
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
Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.
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