Joshua Foer QUOTES

61 " a quote from the venerable martial artist Bruce Lee, which he hoped would serve as inspiration: “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.” I "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

62 " I decided to make memorizing a part of my daily routine. Like flossing. Except I was actually going to do it. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

63 " Thinking about the word “coffee” makes you think about the color black and also about breakfast and the taste of bitterness, that’s a function of a cascade of electrical impulses rocketing around a real physical pathway inside your brain, which links a set of neurons that encode the concept of coffee with others containing the concepts of blackness, breakfast, and bitterness. That much scientists know. But how exactly a collection of cells could “contain” a memory remains among the deepest conundrums of neuroscience. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

64 " He explains that learning texts is worth doing not because it’s easy but because it’s hard. “I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things,” he writes. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

65 " 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 , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

66 " Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved. One might say that the whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the glob of neurons that interprets it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

67 " 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.” Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

68 " If you visit London, you’ll occasionally cross paths with young men (and less often women) on motor scooters, blithely darting in and out of traffic while studying maps affixed to their handlebars. These studious cyclists are training to become London cabdrivers. Before they can receive accreditation from London’s Public Carriage Office, cabbies-in-training must spend two to four years memorizing the locations and traffic patterns of all 25,000 streets in the vast and vastly confusing city, as well as the locations of 1,400 landmarks. Their training culminates in an infamously daunting exam called “the Knowledge,” in which they not only have to plot the shortest route between any two points in the metropolitan area, but also name important places of interest along the way. Only about three out of ten people who train for the Knowledge obtain certification. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

69 " We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

70 " You work now so you can rest later,” he told the student. “You carry your books now so someone else can carry your books later. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

71 " 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 , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

72 " In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

73 " Progressive education reform has accomplished many things. It has made school a lot more pleasant, and a lot more interesting. But it’s also brought with it costs for us as individuals and as citizens. Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

74 " 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 , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

75 " 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 , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

76 " 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 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 , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

77 " Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

78 " I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things, "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

79 " 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 , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

80 " Sometimes I’d take off my earmuffs and memory goggles and turn around to discover that my father had been standing in the doorway, just watching me. "

― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything