Quotes About Memory

To Midshipman Badcock, watching from two ships behind the Victory, the scene was one he would never forget.

I can remember the Winter of the Hundred Slain as a man may remember some bad dream he dreamed when he was little, but I cannot tell just how much I heard when I was bigger and how much I understood when I was little. It is like some fearful thing in a fog, for it was a time when everything seemed troubled and afraid.

The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.

To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

Experiments show that just as the brain can build new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can weaken or dissolve with neglect.

The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas.

A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.

Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can't even get started.

The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness.

Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." The

Some of the test subjects were given cards that had both words printed in full, like this: Hot: Cold Others used cards that showed only the first letter of the second word, like this: Hot: C The people who used the cards with the missing letters performed much better in a subsequent test measuring how well they remembered the word pairs. Simply forcing their minds to fill in a blank, to act rather than observe, led to stronger retention of information.

Personal memory shapes and sustains the "collective memory" that underpins culture.

When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that "the art of remembering is the art of thinking," he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it's well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine.

Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web's information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we're forced to rely more and more on the Net's capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.

Memory, for Seneca as for Erasmus, was as much a crucible as a container. It was more than the sum of things remembered. It was something newly made, the essence of a unique self.

The generation effect requires precisely the kind of struggle that automation seeks to alleviate.

That hasn't happened. Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

In a renowned 1956 paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," Princeton psychologist George Miller observed that working memory could typically hold just seven pieces, or "elements," of information.

These include all the tools we use to extend or support our mental powers—to find and classify information, to formulate and articulate ideas, to share know-how and knowledge, to take measurements and perform calculations, to expand the capacity of our memory.

By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.

Fully transferring an explicit memory from the hippocampus to the cortex is a gradual process that can take many years.

Evidence suggests, moreover, that as we build up our personal store of memories, our minds become sharper.

hypertext readers often "could not remember what they had and had not read.