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" Museum of Miniatures PRAGUE The artistic works in this collection are not displayed on canvases, but on poppy seeds, insects, needles, and strands of hair. Viewable by magnifying glass or telescope, the creations include animals painted on the leg of a mosquito, a chessboard with chess pieces on the head of a pin, and a parade of camels marching through the eye of a needle. Some of the insects on display are also dressed and decorated, such as a flea wearing horseshoes and wielding a pair of scissors, a key, and a padlock. The steady-handed creators of these marvels, including Siberian micro-miniaturist Anatoly Konenko, work between heartbeats to prevent hand tremors from ruining their paintings. Strahovské nádvoří 11, Prague. Get a tram to Pohořelec. 50.087046 14.388449 "
― Joshua Foer , Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
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" 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 memory. 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. 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 , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
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" All of our memories are, like S’s, bound together in a web of associations. This is not merely a metaphor, but a reflection of the brain’s physical structure. The three-pound mass balanced atop our spines is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion neurons, each of which can make upwards of five to ten thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your brain will have physically changed. "
― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
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" 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. The diagnostic accuracy of professional mammographers, for example, doesn’t get more accurate over the years. Why would that be? For most mammographers, practicing medicine is not deliberate practice, according to Ericsson. It’s more like putting into a tin cup than working with a coach. That’s because mammographers usually only find out if they missed a tumor months or years later, if at all, at which point they’ve probably forgotten the details of the case and can no longer learn from their successes and mistakes. One field of medicine in which this is definitively not the case is surgery. Unlike mammographers, surgeons tend to get better with time. What makes surgeons different from mammographers, according to Ericsson, is that the outcome of most surgeries is usually immediately apparent—the patient either gets better or doesn’t—which means that surgeons are constantly receiving feedback on their performance. They’re always learning what works and what doesn’t, always getting better. This finding leads to a practical application of expertise theory: Ericsson suggests that mammographers regularly be asked to evaluate old cases for which the outcome is already known. That way they can get immediate feedback on their performance. "
― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
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" It’s a point well illustrated by Michel Siffre, a French chronobiologist (he studies the relationship between time and living organisms) who conducted one of the most extraordinary acts of self-experimentation in the history of science. In 1962, Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calendar, or sun. Sleeping and eating only when his body told him to, he sought to discover how the natural rhythms of human life would be affected by living “beyond time.” Very quickly Siffre’s memory deteriorated. In the dreary darkness, his days melded into one another and became one continuous, indistinguishable blob. Since there was nobody to talk to, and not much to do, there was nothing novel to impress itself upon his memory. "
― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
