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.
I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, βMay I come in?β is not true laughter. No! He is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person, he choose no time of suitability. He say, βI am here.
There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five.
Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune. He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power.
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
Novelty has charms that our minds can hardly withstand.
Spend too much time alone with your own words, and your writing grows anemic, in dire need of a transfusion.
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