Joshua Foer Quotes
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Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.
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The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.
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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.
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The fact that books today are mostly a string of words makes it easier to forget the text. With the impact of the iPad and the future of the book being up for re-imagination, I wonder whether we'll rediscover the importance of making texts richer visually.
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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.
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What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity.
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...who we are and what we do it is fundamentally a function of what we remember.
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Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we’ve got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of creativity and its sources. Imagine is his best book yet.
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All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn't know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting.
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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.
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Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.
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Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.