The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Joshua Foer

Someday in the distant cyborg future, when our internal and external memories fully merge, we may come to possess infinite knowledge. But that’s not the same thing as wisdom.

Wisdom, Future, Memories

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.

Friends, Today, Heart

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.

Today, Design, End

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.

Culture, Memory, World

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

life, lose, memories, pay-attention

Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can’t explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they’re happening.

brain, neuroscience, science

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

human-relationships, memory, memory-loss

Over the last few millennial, we’ve invented a series of technologies … that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to outsource this fundamental human capacity.

externalize, fundamental, human-capacity, memories, memory, millennial, technology

When we first hear [a] word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.

association, memory

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.

cultivation, discipline, memory

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.

character, habits, human, memory, perception, remembering

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.

experience, memory, wisdom