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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects an exploration of the complexities of memory through interactions with various experts.
In this quote, Joshua Foer reveals his quest to delve deeper into the nature of memory by engaging with diverse individuals, including amnesiacs, savants, educators, and scientists. His inquiry seeks to uncover the mechanisms behind memory, understand its failures, and explore its future possibilities, highlighting the multifaceted role memory plays in human experience.
In practice
In a psychology class discussing the complexities of human memory.
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 memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
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.
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.
There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.
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.
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem.
It is impossible to devise an experiment without a preconceived idea; devising an experiment, we said, is putting a question; we never conceive a question without an idea which invites an answer. I consider it, therefore, an absolute principle that experiments must always be devised in view of a preconceived idea, no matter if the idea be not very clear nor very well defined.
Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are.
The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.
To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.