Joshua Foer
Joshua Foer
Joshua Foeris a freelance journalist living in New Haven, Connecticut, with a primary focus on hard sciences. He was the 2006 U.S.A. Memory Champion, which was described in his 2011 book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. He spoke at the TED conference in February 2012...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth23 September 1982
CountryUnited States of America
writing thinking way-forward
Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood.
art memories creativity
The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.
hook firsts easier
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.
cubicles novelty monotony
Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.
islands brooklyn back-when
Back when I lived in Brooklyn, I'd sometimes take the Q train all the way out to Coney Island and back, and work on my laptop. There's something about pushy New Yorkers looking over your shoulder that really makes you produce sentences.
memories names numbers
As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.
important want amount
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.
growing-up heart numbers
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.
memories forgotten-things digital
We've outsourced our memories to digital devices, and the result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small forgotten thing as evidence that they're failing us.
kissing way faces
Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face.
kissing culture mouths
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.
memories trying might
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
memories going-away locks
If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in.
knights language quirks
Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'