Quotes About Memory

By the time you listen to this, I'll no longer remember what I said. I'll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They're either picking up or not picking up.

The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.

You're saying maybe you're taking something that has the side effect of impairing memory." "Either I'm taking something and I don't remember or I'm not taking something and I don't remember. My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps.

Where were you when James Dean died?" he said in a threatening voice.

We're not here to capture an image. We're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura.

vomiting, shortness of breath, like they said before." "What does it cause?" "Heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu." "Déjà vu?" "It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That's not all. They're not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore." "What are they calling it?" He looked at me carefully. "The airborne toxic event.

It doesn't cause nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, like they said before." "What does it cause?" "Heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu." "Déjà vu?" "It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That's not all. They're not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore." "What are they calling it?" He looked at me carefully. "The airborne toxic event.

How much myth do we build into our experience of time?

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

We have to change truth a little in order to remember it.

words stick even as lives fly apart.

She wanted to stay focused, one thing following sensibly upon another. There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past

Alfonse invested everything he did with a sense of all-consuming purpose. He knew four languages, had photographic memory, did complex mathematics in his head. He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. The rest of the animals pay only once for every mistake they make. But not us. We have a powerful memory. We make a mistake, we judge ourselves, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves.

adults forget how difficult that task was.

We only need to remember sufficient knowledge to let us get our tasks done. Because so much knowledge is available in the environment, it is surprising how little we need to learn. This is one reason people can function well in their environment and still be unable to describe what they do.

We have become dependent upon our technologies to navigate the world, to hold intelligent conversation, to write intelligently, and to remember.

The most effective way of helping people remember is to make it unnecessary.

Los recordatorios constituyen un buen ejemplo de las compensaciones relativas entre las funciones del conocimiento interno frente a las del externo.

Effective memory uses all the clues available: knowledge in the world and in the head, combining world and mind. We have already seen how the combination allows us to function quite well in the world even though either source of knowledge, by itself, is insufficient.

The traditional measures of STM capacity range from five to seven, but from a practical point of view, it is best to think of it as holding only three to five items.

Muchas equivocaciones se deben a caprichos del pensamiento humano, a menudo porque la gente tiende a fiarse de las experiencias que recuerda, en lugar de utilizar un análisis sistemático.

As a rule, it takes time for information to get into LTM and time and effort to get it out again.

We can see what is in front of us, but not what is behind, just as we can remember what happened in the past, but we can't remember the future. Not only that, but we can remember recent events much more clearly than long past events, captured neatly by the visual metaphor in which the past lines up before us, the most recent events being closest so that they clearly perceived (remembered), with long/past events far in the distance, remembered and perceived with difficulty.