Joshua Foer Quotes

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.

My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.

Once I'd reached the point where I could squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone.

Pictures help you to form the mental mold.

I like visual imagery in my head.

I don't find that writing about parts of my life had much effect except in some cases to improve my memory. To get into parts of the past I want to recall very vividly, I use a form of directed meditation.

I have a bad memory - thank God for that!

When I'm problem-solving with something, I have, effectively, a CAD program in my head that's like a room that has specific qualities to it that I go to some deal of effort to populate. Textures and smells, something like that.

I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.

Every one complains of a poor memory, no one of a weak judgment.

I sometimes close my eyes during a show because I have drawn a picture of an audience enjoying the show more on the back of my eyelids.

What is twice read is commonly better remembered that what is transcribed.

Imagination is a form of seeing

I have to see the whole scene in my head before I go out and do it. Which I do. I will envision the entire scene before I shoot it.

If you want to play something that you can't, you need to see and hear yourself doing it in your minds eye. It will start to happen

The use of mental imagery is one of the strongest and most effective strategies for making something happen for you.

Visualization is the process of creating pictures in your mind of yourself enjoying what you want. When you visualize, you generate powerful thoughts and feelings of having it now. The law of attraction then returns that reality to you, just as you saw it in your mind.

I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.

If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space then you can make it... The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it.

A bad memory is the mother of invention.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Shut your eyes and see.

We all live best in our imaginations.