140 Quotes by Joshua Foer

I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It’s only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today.

Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it’s about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you’d never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn’t just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.

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.

To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.

Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human.

The best memorizers in the world – who almost all hail from Europe – can memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark, considered the ‘four-minute mile of memory.’

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.