Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Joshua Foer
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.”
“Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?”
“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.”
“A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.”
“...who we are and what we do it is fundamentally a function of what we remember.”
“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.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
memories, memory, pay-attention, lose, memory-loss, life, human-relationships, science, psychology
