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.
Interpretation
Improving our memory enhances our understanding of both the world and ourselves.
In this quote, Joshua Foer emphasizes the interconnectedness of memory, experience, and wisdom. He suggests that memories serve as the foundation for our understanding of the world around us, and that possessing a better memory not only allows us to accumulate more knowledge but also provides deeper insights into our own identity and existence. This relationship indicates that enhancing our memory can lead to a richer, more reflective life.
In practice
In a graduation speech, one could use this quote to inspire students to value their memories as they move forward in life.
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.
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.
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.
The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be, all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.
There may be some substitute for hard facts, but if there is, I have no idea what it can be.
All too often, we spend our days waiting for the ideal path to appear in front of us. We forget that paths are made by walking, not waiting.
While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world's greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecatio n, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight. Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.
You'll never know everything about anything, especially something you love.
Rose early to seek God and found Him whom my soul loveth. Who would not rise early to meet such company?
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