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
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.
motivational experts steps
Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.
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.
book creativity imagine
Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we’ve got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of creativity and its sources. Imagine is his best book yet.
memories mean creating
With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.
memories may infinite
Someday in the distant cyborg future, when our internal and external memories fully merge, we may come to possess infinite knowledge. But that's not the same thing as wisdom.
book ipads impact
The fact that books today are mostly a string of words makes it easier to forget the text. With the impact of the iPad and the future of the book being up for re-imagination, I wonder whether we'll rediscover the importance of making texts richer visually.
memories facts life-experience
Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.
crafts way fiction
Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.
memories party character
Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it's about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have became estrangedmemory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.
memories europe cards
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.'
kings groups three
Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence.
memories cards records
'Moonwalking with Einstein' refers to a memory device I used when I memorized a deck of playing cards at the U.S. Memory Championship. When I competed in 2006, I set a new U.S. record by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds. That record has since fallen.