Quotes from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“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. That's why it's so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“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 from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“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, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“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, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“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, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember...No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory...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. 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 became estranged...memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“...who we are and what we do it is fundamentally a function of what we remember.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“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 from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“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, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. 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 memories. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. 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, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“William James wrote (in Principles of Psychology in 1890): "In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units..." Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“Forgotten phone numbers and birthdays represent minor erosions of our everyday memory, but they are part of a much larger story of how we've supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological crutches—from the alphabet to the BlackBerry. These technologies of storing information outside our minds have helped make our modern world possible, but they've also changed how we think and how we use our brains.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“I don’t think I’m an exceptionally bad reader. I suspect that many people, maybe even most, are like me. We read and read and read,
and we forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michel de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the
sixteenth century: “I leaf through books, I do not study them,” he wrote. “What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s.
It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued;
the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.” He goes on to explain how “to compensate a
little for the treachery and weakness of my memory,” he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical
judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of what the tome was about and what he thought of it.  ”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“More than anyone I’d ever met, he seemed to participate in life as if it were art, and to practice a studied, careful carefreeness. His sense of what is worthy seemed to overlap very little with any conventional sense of what is useful, and if there were one precept that could be said to govern his life, it is that one’s highest calling is to engage in enriching escapades at every turn.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“People assume that memory decline is a function of being human, and therefore natural,” he said. “But that is a logical error, because normal is not necessarily natural. The reason for the monitored decline in human memory performance is because we actually do anti-Olympic training. What we do to the brain is the equivalent of sitting someone down to train for the Olympics and making sure he drinks ten cans of beer a day, smokes fifty cigarettes, drives to work, and maybe does some exercise once a month that’s violent and damaging, and spends the rest of the time watching television. And then we wonder why that person doesn’t do well in the Olympics. That’s what we’ve been doing with memory.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, studies elderly patients with a relatively common form of brain disease called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. He’s found that in some cases where the FTD is localized on the left side of the brain, people who had never picked up a paintbrush or an instrument can develop extraordinary artistic and musical abilities at the very end of their lives. As their other cognitive skills fade away, they become narrow savants.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“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, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“what we call expertise is really just “vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain.” In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it’s a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it’s fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgment about the book. Even these are likely to fade. Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude: I remember magical realism and that I enjoyed it. But that’s about it. I don’t even recall when I read it. About Wuthering Heights I remember exactly two things: that I read it in a high school English class and that there was a character named Heathcliff. I couldn’t say whether I liked the book or not.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“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.

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...But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and our society. What we've gained is indisputiable. But what have we traded away?”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“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 from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

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