QuoteProject
I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.
Brian Greene
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Memory plays a crucial role in our perception of time.

In this quote, Brian Greene suggests that memory is not merely a sensory experience but rather a fundamental aspect of how we perceive the flow of time. He implies that our memories shape our understanding of past experiences and influence our awareness of time's passage, making the relationship between memory and time both complex and profound.

Themes

MemoryTimePerceptionPhilosophyConsciousness

In practice

Example use cases

A philosopher might use this quote to illustrate a lecture on the nature of consciousness.

More from Brian Greene

My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.
Brian GreeneRead
All mathematics is is a language that is well tuned, finely honed, to describe patterns; be it patterns in a star, which has five points that are regularly arranged, be it patterns in numbers like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 that follow very regular progression.
Brian GreeneRead
According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.
Brian GreeneRead
So: if you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now, and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime.
Brian GreeneRead
Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can't get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?
Brian GreeneRead
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
Brian GreeneRead

Similar quotes

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
Lawrence DurrellRead
No more fear of hunger. A new kind of freedom. But what then ... what? What would my life be like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of food. Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is. The idea scares me some.
Suzanne CollinsRead
We're [President Barack Obama and I] clear on the fact that we have to stay humble and prayerful. We have to dig down deep to our roots. When things come together, we know some of it is Barack, some of it is us-but a lot of it has nothing to do with either of us.
Michelle ObamaRead
Buddhism teaches us not to try to run away from suffering. You have to confront suffering. You have to look deeply into the nature of suffering in order to recognize its cause, the making of the suffering.
Nhat HanhRead
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
Kurt VonnegutRead
exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.
Edward SaidRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.