“Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories. …If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of memories can cause competition… leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes… leaving you with nothing.”
The Organized Mind (2014)
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Daniel Levitin76
American psychologist 1957Related quotes
Richard Kadrey (1957) San Francisco-based novelist, freelance writer, and photographer
Source: Kill the Dead
Thomas Beecham (1879–1961) British conductor and impresario
[Beecham admitted to Neville Cardus that he had made this up on the spur of the moment to satisfy an importunate journalist; he acknowledged that it was an oversimplification. (Neville Cardus: 'Sir Thomas Beecham, A Memoir', 1961)]
“Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”
Haruki Murakami book A Wild Sheep Chase
Source: A Wild Sheep Chase
“At eighteen you don't think about memories,
you tell them.”
Nâzım Hikmet (1902–1963) Turkish poet
From Human Landscapes from My Country, Book Two, Section VII
“If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.”
Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
“Use memories. Do not let memories use you.”
Deepak Chopra (1946) Indian-American physician, public speaker and writer
“What you are is the memory, bundle of memories, experiences, thoughts.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher
Source: 1970s, Krishnamurti in India, 1970-71 (1971), p. 56
Context: So you must ask this question, put this question to yourself, whether your mind can be empty of all its past and yet retain the technological knowledge, your engineering knowledge, your linguistic knowledge, the memory of all that, and yet function from a mind that is completely empty. The emptying of that mind comes about naturally, sweetly without bidding, when you understand yourself, when you understand what you are. What you are is the memory, bundle of memories, experiences, thoughts. When you understand that, look at it, observe it; and when you observe it, see in that observation that there is no duality between the observer and the observed; then when you see that, you will see that your mind can be completely empty, attentive, and in that attention you can act wholly, without any fragmentation.