- Dec 2021
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Garrido-Vásquez, P., & Rock, T. (2021). Judgments of truth are independently modulated by affect and repetition. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/qajkb
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blogs.orient.ox.ac.uk blogs.orient.ox.ac.uk
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Texts can be substantially modified by other hands in subsequent re-publications, even while still retaining their original authorial (or revelatory) attribution. At other times, modification can be generated silently and less deliberately via the subtly transformative medium of memorisation: we must recall that Tibetan scholars carry huge tracts of literature around in their minds, which they can access instantly without recourse to a written book, but sometimes it comes out in a form ever so slightly different from other or previous iterations. I think one can even say that the Buddhist tradition often understands authorial attributions as a conventional shorthand indicating the accepted presiding spiritual authority in a given literary instance, rather than as the sole or exclusive literary agency that created it.
Tibetan literature seems to exhibit strong signs of a prior oral tradition despite having the technology of literacy. Tibetan scholars have memorized huge amounts of literature, but when written down it can vary slightly from other versions.
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www.nature.com www.nature.com
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Adamo, S., Michler, J., Zurbuchen, Y., Cervia, C., Taeschler, P., Raeber, M. E., Sain, S. B., Nilsson, J., Moor, A. E., & Boyman, O. (2021). Signature of long-lived memory CD8+ T cells in acute SARS-CoV-2 infection. Nature, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04280-x
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learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com
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Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception ofprivate property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towardsinequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities wererelatively free of ranks and hierarchies
What impact might this have on Lynne Kelly's thesis about memory in early societies with an imbalance of power?
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onlinelibrary.wiley.com onlinelibrary.wiley.com
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Sloman, S. A. (2021). How Do We Believe? Topics in Cognitive Science, 0(2021), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12580
Tags
- cognitive science
- unfamiliar circumstance
- dual system of thinking
- human thought
- is:article
- pattern recognition
- knowledge
- information processing
- causal reasoning
- memory
- representational scheme
- sophisticated associative model
- predictability
- lang:en
- generalizability
- representational language
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- Nov 2021
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tvrctkmytfln.gitee.io tvrctkmytfln.gitee.io
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As with themov instructions, the two operands cannot both be memory locations.
binary operation 的两个操作数可以是 memory location 吗?
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This operand can be either a register ora memory location.
unary 的操作数可以是什么?
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local variables such as x are often kept in registers rather thanstored in memory locations. Register access is much faster than memory access.
local variables 通过会存在哪里,为什么?
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One important feature is that memoryreferences in x86-64 are always given with quad word registers, such as %rax, evenif the operand is a byte, single word, or double word.
memory reference 属于那种 register 类型?
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Wagner, U., & Echterhoff, G. (2021). Socially induced false memories in the absence of misinformation. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f8eyr
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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But it should be observed that it is experience in mass, the experience of institutions, the experience of a generation, and not individual experience, which is of value.
Sounds somewhat akin to Hidalgo's thesis of the personbyte in ever growing groups.
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scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org
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This seems a lot like the same longevity questions that the Internet Archive and IndieWeb are working on or the @RJI's Dodging the Memory Hole conference for born digital news.
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www.edutopia.org www.edutopia.org
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As the book recounts, annotation is a centuries-old practice. For example, decorative images called drolleries were added in the margins of medieval texts as visual comments on themes in the text.
I've not seen it argued elsewhere (yet), but I would make a case that the majority of drolleries weren't so much comment on themes in text as that they were loci placed into the books at either intervals or in particular locations as part of the practice of the art of memory. They act as signposts to which the reader can more easily memorize portions of books by attaching the ideas on those pages to the dramatic and absurd images painted into them as suggested by Rhetorica ad Herennium (https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL403/1954/volume.xml).
Cross reference: The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates (University of Chicago, 1966).for the historical practice of memory in the West, though she doesn't mention drolleries at all.
cc: @remikalir
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www.lynnekelly.com.au www.lynnekelly.com.au
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site.pennpress.org site.pennpress.org
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Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.
This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).
Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond
This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.
This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?
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www-degruyter-com.proxy.library.carleton.ca www-degruyter-com.proxy.library.carleton.ca
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Whether or not they viewed gentrification as positive or negative, residents used memory as a vehicle to stake claim to the area or to resist changes.
How did my participants talk about absented place? There is a connection between land custodianship and the overall gentrification of the city. (Perhaps this is a stretch, bu certainly something to consider).
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lilianweng.github.io lilianweng.github.io
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two major memory consumption of large model training: The majority is occupied by model states, including optimizer states (e.g. Adam momentums and variances), gradients and parameters. Mixed-precision training demands a lot of memory since the optimizer needs to keep a copy of FP32 parameters and other optimizer states, besides the FP16 version. The remaining is consumed by activations, temporary buffers and unusable fragmented memory (named residual states in the paper).
深度网络训练中的显存开销主要是哪些?
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It partitions optimizer state, gradients and parameters across multiple data parallel processes via a dynamic communication schedule to minimize the communication volume.
ZeRO-DP 的原理是什么?
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www.lib.uchicago.edu www.lib.uchicago.edu
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How can these modern translations and related translations be compared and contrasted to the original passage of the stories in their original bardic traditions?
Cross reference the orality work of Milman Parry, et al.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Basically you take an idea, convert that idea into a character then whenever you want to think about that idea you imagine yourself as that character and then explain that idea to yourself through that character. For example: We first take an idea (lets use automation) Then we turn it into a character (lets see automation as a mass of cogwheels and pistons moving around randomly) Then you imagine yourself as that character and see the world through that characters eyes (in this case we would be disgusted by humanity because of how slow and inefficient it is) Now when we are asked a question about automation or when we want to think about automation we can imagine ourselves becoming that character and we can speak through them to answer that question
Related to the idea of putting oneself into another ideas' shoes discussed a bit in Annie Murphy Paul's book The Extended Mind.
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docs.google.com docs.google.com
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So the big secret then is, how did he know that this note here exists? How could he remember that this existing note was relevant to the new one he was writing? A mystery we haven't solved yet.
I'm surprised to see/hear this!
How did Niklas Luhmann cross link his notes? Apparently researchers don't quite know, but I'd suggest that in working with them diligently over time, he'd have a reasonable internal idea from memory in addition to working with his indices and his outline cards.
The cards in some sense form a physical path through which he regularly traverses, so he's making a physical memory palace (or songline) out of index cards.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Excerpting requires effort and thus combats natural laziness; inhis regimen there is no reading without taking notes, which would be idleand vain, and no time wasted because every free moment can be put to usereading over one’s notes (seeA,p. 84).
Even early in the history of note taking treatises Jeremias Drexel acknowledges the idea that good note taking, and particularly excerpting, takes work.
Modern students seem to have now lost both the ars memoria as well as the note taking arts which helped supplant it. We really need to be able to regain both of these traditions, but it will obviously take commitment to do the work.
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Drexel emphasizesthe difficulty of image-based arts of memory and how short-lived are theirresults: “Great labor places so many images of things in this treasury ofmemory; but no amount of labor has managed to preserve them there forlong without excerpts” (A, p. 3). Instead, for Drexel excerpting is the onlysure way to retain material for the long term. Drexel insists too that, farfrom detracting from memory, note taking is the best aid to memory.
Jeremias Drexel is certainly a writer who complains about the work of the ars memoria, particularly for long term memory and supplants it with writing/note taking.
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pedagogues in the humanist tradition, from Erasmus to Drexel,were routinely hostile to the arts of memory.
On Erasmus’s preference for “study, order and care” over places and images, see Erasmus,De ratione studii(1512), quoted in Yates,The Art of Memory,p. 127
What other pedagogues were hostile to memory?
This is another point in the decline of memory traditions from the 1500s onward.
What effect did cheaper books and paper have on this decline?
Keep in mind that Erasmus had written a treatise on commonplacing which was also a point in the history of note taking though Blair doesn't acknowledge his contributions in her list here. Also Agricola and Melanchthon
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ste-nography was only developed for German in 1834); st
Ann Blair indicates that stenography was only developed for German in 1834.
Is there a reference for this? When was it developed for other languages? How does this fit in with the timeline for memory and the major system?
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One seventeenth-century teacher concluded thatnote taking must have been practiced even by the followers of thepriscasapientiafamous for their reliance on memory and their contempt of writ-ing: “How else would their writings survive to us?
However from examples in oral cultures we know that there are other mnemonic traditions which allow the preservation of knowledge.
cross-reference: Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power
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́herange of storage media operative in different historical contexts includesthe marked stone tokenW the clay tabletW the knotted cord or quipuW the paX
pyrus scroll and the sheet of parchment.
Which others is she missing from a mnemonics perspective? I'm impressed that she indicates the khipu, but there are certainly other indigenous methods from oral cultures.
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- Oct 2021
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Notes, which are a sort of external memory, a “paper memory” Montaigne called them, must bear a very small proportion to reading; but they can cover more ground than memory, they can supply for it, and so take the strain off it and help our work in a measure that is hard to assign.
Notes allow us to forget, but they're also a foothold for future memorization.
What is the source of Montaigne calling notes "paper memory"?
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The creative faculty largely depends on the wis- dom and controlled activity of the memory.
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Fifty data are no better than one, if they all stand only in the same relation to the fundamental idea; un- coordinated they remain fruitless,
The style is dramatically different, but this easily could appear in pieces on zettelkasten today.
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Look always for what connects this thing with that, what condi- tions are necessary for this and for that; let this co- ordination, and not scattered fragments, fix itself in your memory. A
A surprising number of references to connecting ideas and knowledge...
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On the pretext that you may have to catch any train, you do not learn the Railway Guide by heart.
Generally good advice, but some people in modern times take this too far. Perhaps we ought to memorize more that could be useful in our everyday lives.
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We do not live by memory, we use our memory to live.
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It might seem that St. Thomas recommends this, when he writes in his Sixteen Precepts: “Lay up in the treasury of your mind all that you can, like a man aiming at fill- ing a vessel.”
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PREPARATION FOR WORK
This whole section looks the most interesting and promising to me: reading, memory, and notes!
I'll likely read these first and at best skim the rest depending on content.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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There's a new book out that touches extending the mind beyond the body that gives an overview of the past decade or so of psychology and neuroscience in the areas of thinking and memory.
I've seen several references to it in my reading over the past few months, but this review in particular put it over the edge for me to read: https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/. Here are my notes on it for those interested in quick highlights.
Those interested in the overlap of psychology and memory will likely appreciate some of the researched mind hacks which are mentioned. I have a feeling those interested in education and pedagogy will also appreciate it. Some of the reviews and discussions remind me of @LynneKelly's work with students in Australia though I suspect that Paul is writing here from a very western-centric point of view. In particular I'm curious about the sections on thinking with movement/gesture, walking, and using one's surroundings/natural spaces/built spaces which I suspect will have some familiar overlaps with songlines and memory palaces.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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The Bruniquel cave, in southwest France, is believed to be a Neanderthal dwelling 100,000 years before humans in Europe. Stalagmites in the cave may have been arranged as walls, and possibly as a fireplace. Charred bone found in the walls date to 175,000 years ago.
This cave is apparently fairly deep. Cross reference this with deep cave fires and asphyxiation research.
- Article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/25/neanderthals-built-mysterious-cave-structures-175000-years-ago
- Related journal article: http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature18291
Is it possible that such a place was used as a memory palace? Being secluded away and the play of fire inside would certainly fit some of Lynne Kelly's criteria from Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies. More evidence would be needed however.
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>LynneKelly </span> in "Ancient Australian Aboriginal Memory Tool Superior to ‘Memory Palace’ Learning" - Neuroscience, Psychology, and Health - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>10/19/2021 09:26:03</time>)</cite></small>
I don’t think the methods were worked out as much as evolved with the human brain. I suspect those who started using mnemonics survived and bred better than those who didn’t.
I have been pointed to this discovery of a Neanderthal cave many times, with archaeologists suggesting to me that it points to Neanderthal use of a memory palace. It would need more evidence to be convincing, but that would go back a very long time.
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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https://web.archive.org/web/20210323175407/https://www.pmemory.com/
This memory courses' website seems to have gone down sometime in the past six months or so. Fortunately I'd gotten a copy of most (?) of their system before it went down. I'm adding it to my list of systems to take a look at.
It generally went by PMemory and in some cases by Ruslan M Phenomenal Memory (GMS). See also: https://brainlearns.com/courses/ruslan-m-phenomenal-memory-gms/
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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I don’t think the methods were worked out as much as evolved with the human brain. I suspect those who started using mnemonics survived and bred better than those who didn’t.
I've had this same suspicion for a while. Might be interesting to try to collect some evidence to support it.
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I have been pointed to this discovery of a Neanderthal cave many times, with archaeologists suggesting to me that it points to Neanderthal use of a memory palace. It would need more evidence to be convincing, but that would go back a very long time. the Guardian – 25 May 16 Neanderthals built mysterious cave structures 175,000 years ago 2 Constructions discovered deep in a French cave rank among the earliest human building projects ever discovered, but their purpose remains unclear
Interesting article to read and build evidence as Kelly suggests.
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The Natural Navigator (Tristan Gooley) is worth a look as it is how these people would have seen the world. We live in a world of clock and compass while they lived by a circle, wind and light. I also wonder what other surviving memory methods there are out there like maybe the Story Knife from Alaska?
These may be worth looking into.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Mattias Ribbings book Vagen till Masterminne at the moment that is based on GMS and it is mind blowing what he accomplished with these techniques.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Lynne Kelly's excellent book Memory Craft (Pegasus, 2020) has 6 pages of Appendix A which lists 31 memory methods along with examples, what they might be used for, and references to where they're described in the book. It's one of the most comprehensive lists I've seen to date and in particular covers a variety of methods used by indigenous cultures which aren't discussed in many other (Western focused) texts.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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I just bookmarked this article published today in Current Biology for later reading and annotation. While the article isn't specifically focused on memory, the fact that it touches on visual structures, emotion, music, and movement (dance) which are core to some peoples' memory toolkits, I thought that many here would find it to be of interest.
One of the authors provided the following tl;dr synopsis:
"Across the world, people express emotion through music and dance. But why do music and dance go together?
We tested a deceptively simple hypothesis: Music and movement are represented the same way in the brain."
- Article: Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception01283-5) (Current Biology, 2021)
- Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/254961v4
For those who haven't integrated song or dance into their practices, searching around for the idea of songlines will give you some background on their possible uses.
cc: @LynneKelly
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www.cell.com www.cell.com
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Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)01283-5
This portends some interesting results with relation to mnemonics and particularly songlines and indigenous peoples' practices which integrate song, movement, and emotion.
Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/254961v4
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Across the world, people express emotion through music and dance. But why do music and dance go together? <br><br>We tested a deceptively simple hypothesis: Music and movement are represented the same way in the brain.
— Beau Sievers (@beausievers) October 12, 2021<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Beau Sievers </span> in "New work published today in Current Biology Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception With @ThaliaWheatley @k_v_n_l @parkinsoncm @sergeyfogelson (thread after coffee!) https://t.co/AURqH9kNLb https://t.co/ro4o4oEwk5" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>10/12/2021 09:26:10</time>)</cite></small>
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www.science.org www.science.org
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Mateus, J., Dan, J. M., Zhang, Z., Rydyznski Moderbacher, C., Lammers, M., Goodwin, B., Sette, A., Crotty, S., & Weiskopf, D. (n.d.). Low-dose mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccine generates durable memory enhanced by cross-reactive T cells. Science, 0(0), eabj9853. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj9853
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www.cogsciwa.com www.cogsciwa.com
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Www.cogsciWA.com. (n.d.). Www.CogsciWA.Com. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://www.cogsciwa.com/
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Blomberg, B., Mohn, K. G.-I., Brokstad, K. A., Zhou, F., Linchausen, D. W., Hansen, B.-A., Lartey, S., Onyango, T. B., Kuwelker, K., Sævik, M., Bartsch, H., Tøndel, C., Kittang, B. R., Cox, R. J., & Langeland, N. (2021). Long COVID in a prospective cohort of home-isolated patients. Nature Medicine, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01433-3
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www.researchsquare.com www.researchsquare.com
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Divergent trajectories of antiviral memory after SARS-Cov-2 infection. (2021, June 15). https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-612205/v1
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- Sep 2021
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=578JJeLN9Kw
Short and basic... nothing new to me, but clever intro.
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tracydurnell.com tracydurnell.com
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Note to self: mind garden is the first term I came across for this type of note-taking, but perhaps in the way I use this site, it would be more accurate to think of it as a commonplace book?
I love the phrase mind garden here. It almost feels to me like a portmanteau concept that ties together the ideas of mind (or memory) palace and digital garden.
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journals.plos.org journals.plos.org
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Pluviano, S., Watt, C., & Della Sala, S. (2017). Misinformation lingers in memory: Failure of three pro-vaccination strategies. PLoS ONE, 12(7), e0181640. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181640
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Some interesting finds Josh.
Related to some of the bullet journal (aka BuJo) and journaling space you will eventually come across the idea of "morning pages" which is a technique where you spend a block of time (usually in the morning, but ideally just before you want to do your creative thinking work) where you write for a set amount of time or number of pages. The goal of this method (and to some extent bullet journaling) is to clear the cruft and extraneous details out of your head to be able to better prioritize and focus on your creative work. There's a relatively large group of people doing this as a technique, so even knowing the phrase can help one to find the literature.
Tangentially related to this and memory (via our old friend rhetoric), I've been doing some significant research into the commonplace book tradition and general note taking with an eye towards knowledge acquisition, creation, and spaced repetition systems. This has led into research into the areas of the zettelkasten, digital note taking, digital gardens and the like. All fascinating areas which overlap memory via rhetoric. I suspect that many mnemonists in the Renaissance used commonplace books as physical written memory palaces, though I've yet to find anything in my research that directly links them other than the relationship they have in the long tradition of rhetoric in Western culture. Since you mention music and writing lyrics, I recently noted that Eminem has a commonplace technique which he calls "stacking ammo" by which he compiles ideas for his lyrics. His method is certainly less structured than a traditional commonplace book, but the overall form traces back to our friends Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.
If you delve into some of the Bullet Journal and journaling literature you'll find a subculture of people (YouTube has hundreds of people with entire channels dedicated to the topic) who write into their daily/weekly planners and decorate them with stickers, washi tape, photos, calligraphy, drawings, etc. I've called some of this "productivity porn" before, but if you search commonplace book on Instagram or Pinterest you'll find examples of people whose journals and notes are becoming physical memory palaces where the visuals are likely helping them remember portions of their lives or what they're writing. The stickers and images to some extent are serving the purpose of drolleries seen in Medieval manuscripts as mnemonic devices.
And finally, tangentially related to all of this is another interesting sub-genre of memory and note taking called sketchnotes which combines active listening, writing, and drawing into a mnemonic related note taking activity. I'm actually a bit surprised to find so little on the technique here on the forum. Searching for sketchnotes on social media will provide lots of examples and there are many "What are sketchnotes" short videos on YouTube that will give you an idea of what's going on. Many of these talk about a memory component, but not being mired into the sub-topic of rhetoric, they're usually not using the same framings we would (here on the forum), though the effects one might expect are the same.
Some related richer resources for these areas, to help people from going down the rabbit hole within the performative social media spaces:
- How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking–for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens
- This touches on note taking within a zettelkasten framing, but is also applicable to the commonplace book tradition
- Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde
- This is one of the bibles in the space and gives a solid overview of what, why, how, etc.
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton
- How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking–for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa84hA3OsHU
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Josh Cohen</span> in Aphantasia Video: Living without Mental Imagery (Wired) - Neuroscience, Psychology, and Health - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>09/19/2021 21:25:12</time>)</cite></small>
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Mnemonist and prolific memory researcher/writer Lynne Kelly also describes herself as having aphantasia and indicates that it isn't a problem for her either. She's described some of her experiences here: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?page_id=4236
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Ebook devices are extremely compatible with an idea of bookiness that values holding and carrying a potentially large number of books at once; that prefers direct flow from start to finish over random access; that reads for the meaning and force of the words as text first, if not primarily; and that isn’t concerned with the use of books as stores of reader-added information or as memory palaces.
Intriguing reference of a book as a memory palace here.
The verso/recto and top/middle/bottom is a piece of digital books that I do miss from the physical versions as it serves as a mnemonic journey for me to be able to remember what was where.
I wonder if Ian Bogost uses the method of loci?
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sakai.duke.edu sakai.duke.edu
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Voice is lost
Can we, like Shepherds, tell a merry Tale? Stephen Duck, The Thresher's Tale (poem)
There's a link here to shepherds and a bardic tradition. In some sense, shepherds have lots of time to kill during the day and thus potentially tell stories. But they're also moving around their environment which also makes it easier for them to have used songline-like methods for attaching their memories to their environment.
How far back might this tradition go in our literate culture?
I also wonder at the influence of time on oral traditions as the result of this. Lynne Kelly describes calendrical devices in a variety of indigenous settings in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies for potential use in annual spaced repetition. What about the spaced repetition within daily cycles of regular work as described in this paper with respect to shepherds, fishing communities, and crofting?
The daily cycle of life may have been a part of the spaced repetition for memory.
How might we show this?
A quick example that comes to mind is the French children's song Alouette, Gentille Alouette which details how one kills, cleans, and dresses a chicken for cooking.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA
Learning styles have been debunked.
Learning styles: V.A.R.K. model originated by Neil Flemiing stands for:
- visual
- auditory
- reading/writing
- kinesthetic
References:
Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119. — https://ve42.co/Pashler2008
Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The scientific status of learning styles theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271. — https://ve42.co/Willingham
Massa, L. J., & Mayer, R. E. (2006). Testing the ATI hypothesis: Should multimedia instruction accommodate verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style?. Learning and Individual Differences, 16(4), 321-335. — https://ve42.co/Massa2006
Riener, C., & Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change: The magazine of higher learning, 42(5), 32-35.— https://ve42.co/Riener2010
Husmann, P. R., & O'Loughlin, V. D. (2019). Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy students’ study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning styles. Anatomical sciences education, 12(1), 6-19. — https://ve42.co/Husmann2019
Snider, V. E., & Roehl, R. (2007). Teachers’ beliefs about pedagogy and related issues. Psychology in the Schools, 44, 873–886. doi:10.1002/pits.20272 — https://ve42.co/Snider2007
Fleming, N., & Baume, D. (2006). Learning Styles Again: VARKing up the right tree!. Educational developments, 7(4), 4. — https://ve42.co/Fleming2006
Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: Effects on comprehension. Journal of educational psychology, 107(1), 64. — https://ve42.co/Rogowskyetal
Coffield, Frank; Moseley, David; Hall, Elaine; Ecclestone, Kathryn (2004). — https://ve42.co/Coffield2004
Furey, W. (2020). THE STUBBORN MYTH OF LEARNING STYLES. Education Next, 20(3), 8-13. — https://ve42.co/Furey2020
Dunn, R., Beaudry, J. S., & Klavas, A. (2002). Survey of research on learning styles. California Journal of Science Education II (2). — https://ve42.co/Dunn2002
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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The minds of other people can also supplement our limited individual memory. Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, named this collective remembering “transactive memory.” As he explained it, “Nobody remembers everything. Instead, each of us in a couple or group remembers some things personally — and then can remember much more by knowing who else might know what we don’t.” A transactive memory system can effectively multiply the amount of information to which an individual has access. Organizational research has found that groups that build a strong transactive memory structure — in which all members of the team have a clear and accurate sense of what their teammates know — perform better than groups for which that structure is less defined.
Transactive memory is how a group encodes, stores, and shares knowledge. Members of a group may be aware of the portions of knowledge that others possess which can make them more efficient.
How can we link this to Cesar Hidalgo's ideas about the personbyte, etc.?
How would this idea have potentially helped oral cultures?
She uses the example of a trauma resuscitation team helping to shorten hospital stays, but certainly there are many examples in the corporate world where corporate knowledge is helpful in decreasing time scales for particular outcomes.
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The burgeoning field of embodied cognition has demonstrated that the body — its sensations, gestures and movements — plays an integral role in the thought processes that we usually locate above the neck.
Worth delving into this area of research for memory related effects.
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punctumbooks.com punctumbooks.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Suzanne Conklin Akbari</span> in Growing a Research Network: Approaches to Global Book History | Penn Libraries (<time class='dt-published'>09/12/2021 21:11:23</time>)</cite></small>
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thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com
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https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-005-interview-with-chris-aldrich/
This didn't turn out too badly for a half an hour. As ever I dislike listening to my own voice.
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/
A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.
I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.
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Bigger is better.
Research shows that high-resolution monitors make thinking easier. This also seems true of classrooms which use large posters and maps as teaching aids at lower grades.
Why don't we use these methods as we grow older?
When used in mnemonic traditions, one can use vast spaces to create memory palaces that become thinking vistas within the brain. How can we better leverage these effects while still maintaining the effectiveness of focused journeys?
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Schools don’t teach students how to restore their depleted attention with exposure to nature and the outdoors, or how to arrange their study spaces so that they extend intelligent thought.
I'm reminded of Lynne Kelly's use of Indigenous Australian memory techniques which do both of these things at the same time: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?p=4794
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Paul likes to quote the philosopher who first came up with the idea of the extended mind, Andy Clark, when he says that humans are “intrinsically loopy creatures”.
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Small motions are so important that Paul devotes an entire chapter to the value of gestures. “Gestures,” she says, “don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; they carry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch” (69). Gestures strengthen our ability to give form to thoughts, they increase the effectiveness of communication, they help groups understand each other, they create and direct attention.
This likely underlies some of the thoughts I've had about dance and movement and which are touched on by indigenous cultures as documented in Lynne Kelly's work.
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We have piles of good research from the last few decades into how brains actually work. Or, if not how brains work (much remains mysterious!), what they like and don’t like.
We're also dramatically missing thousands of years of indigenous experience as well.
Tags
- zettelkasten
- mnemonic pedagogy
- dance
- instructional design
- songlines
- commonplace books
- psychology
- indigenous cultures
- mnemotechniques
- thinking spaces
- read
- posters
- thinking
- neuroscience
- memory
- gestures
- tools for thought
- extended mind
- nature
- philosophy
- movement
- pedagogy
- memory palaces
- Lynne Kelly
- method of loci
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Psychologist Jerome Bruno suggests we're 22x more likely to remember facts when told through story.
General plan for his approach
- immersion
- learn
- activate
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Michael Mina on Twitter: “With all the news of vaccines & immunity, did you know measles infections destroy immunity and cause ‘Immune Amnesia’, increasing risk of all other infections Our research in ‘15 & ‘19 discovered this & the abbreviated story is written up nicely here: 1/ https://t.co/t5DKoQljxM” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved September 7, 2021, from https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1435037668027641861
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www.timeshighereducation.com www.timeshighereducation.com
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Cognitive scientists have found also that when we answer a question in our own words, we integrate the information better into our long-term memory.
Reference for this?
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Researchers found that students remembered passages of text better when the extracts began with a question, for example, “Is this evidenced?”
Reference for this?
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Seek out the silliest, craziest, wildest ideas as metaphors. The most bizarre ideas capture attention and are unforgettable.
Where have we heard this before?
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Wu, K. J. (2021, September 3). What We Actually Know About Waning Immunity. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/waning-immunity-not-crisis-right-now/619965/
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https://fs.blog/2021/07/mathematicians-lament/
What if we taught art and music the way we do mathematics? All theory and drudgery without any excitement or exploration?
What textbooks out there take math from the perspective of exploration?
- Inventional geometry does
Certainly Gauss, Euler, and other "greats" explored mathematics this way? Why shouldn't we?
This same problem of teaching math is also one we ignore when it comes to things like note taking, commonplacing, and even memory, but even there we don't even delve into the theory at all.
How can we better reframe mathematics education?
I can see creating an analogy that equates math with art and music. Perhaps something like Arthur Eddington's quote:
Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories–
distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody.
I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three. —Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (1882-1944), a British astronomer, physicist, and mathematician in The Nature of the Physical World, 1927
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fs.blog fs.blog
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Schedule time to read and review these notes.
This is an incredibly important part of the process for absorbing, creating links, and remembering one's notes. A sad pity that it's a single sentence in its own paragraph.
This should have been underlined.
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Active reading helps you make connections within your latticework of mental models. Connections help retention.
Connections ARE retention. They are memory.
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marksstorm.medium.com marksstorm.medium.com
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Zweig continues: “This weakness, which Montaigne endlessly bemoans, is in fact his strength. An inability to remain fixed at a certain point allows him always to go further. With him nothing is ever set in stone. He never stops at the boundary of past experiences; he does not rest on his empiricism; he amasses no capital; before properly consuming them his spirit must acquire experiences over and again. So his life becomes an operation of perpetual renewal: ‘Unremittingly we begin our lives anew.’
Stefan Zweig on the benefit of Montaigne's lack of a good memory.
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- Aug 2021
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slate.com slate.com
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The earliest attested manicules appeared in the Domesday Book, the exhaustive survey of England carried out for William I in 1086.
I wonder if we can find a direct link to the manicule and the use of the hand as a mnemonic device?
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medievalbooks.nl medievalbooks.nl
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Then there are the really exotic hands, which are turned into a visual feast. Fig. 7 shows and an arm that was turned into the body of a dragon, while the hands in Fig. 8 (which look like ladies’ gloves) are attached to the wrong location on the human body. These hands are not just meant to point out an important passage, they must also have been intended to bring a smile on the reader’s face.
Far beyond this, they're most likely used as mnemonic devices to associate the important information with a more memorable image for storing in one's memory palace.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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I'd start with the basics of 0-9 of the Major System and then introduce the method of loci. Once they've got those two basics down reasonably I'd expand their Major system up to 99 at a minimum.
The tougher part then is expanding your pedagogy to build these tools into the curriculum so that you're actively using them with your content.
You might appreciate the experience from Lynne Kelly here: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?p=4794. Her excellent book Memory Craft also has some interesting examples and stories for children including the use of what she calls rapscallions for use in multiplication tables, languages, and other educational applications. Her book also has a wealth of other methods and potential applications depending on the subjects you're teaching.
I'd love to hear your experiences as you progress with your class.
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West, Theatres and Encyclopaedias, ch. 2; Garberson ‘Libraries, Memory and the Spaceof Knowledge’. For a multicultural introduction to the architectural imagery of early modern memory practices, seeSpence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.
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The interaction between topical arrangement and early modern spaces like theatres,libraries and museums has been emphasized by a number of scholars and my thoughts on this
This brings up the idea of how much architects did or didn't build and structure their spaces with the ideas of memoria within rhetoric?
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In recent decades there have been a number of stud-ies that have shown how humanist approaches to commonplacing not only evolved in tandemwith attempts to coherently arrange naturaliain studioli, wunderkammernand museums, butalso facilitated the conceptual development of natural history. Key works that led up to this rein-terpretation were Walter Ong’s work on Ramus, Frances Yates’s history of the art of memory,Tony Grafton’s defence of humanistic textual practices and, crucially, Paolo Rossi’s argumentthat Francis Bacon used topical logic to organize his lists and tables.7Once the topical box wasopened, a number of seminal studies on commonplacing natural knowledge followed. Keyentries in this canon are works written by Ann Blair, Ann Moss, Jonathan Spence and HowardHotson.8
Lots of references to add or read here.
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collect.readwriterespond.com collect.readwriterespond.com
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https://collect.readwriterespond.com/how-to-remember-more-of-what-you-read/
Some useful looking links here. Thanks Aaron.
I've been digging deeper and deeper into some of the topics and sub-topics.
The biggest problem I've seen thus far is a lot of wanna-be experts and influencers (especially within the Roam Research space) touching on the very surface of problem. I've seen more interesting and serious people within the Obsidian community sharing their personal practices and finding pieces of that useful.
The second issue may be that different things work somewhat differently for different people, none of whom are using the same tools or even general systems. Not all of them have the same end goals either. Part of the key is finding something useful that works for you or modifying something slowly over time to get it to work for you.
At the end of the day your website holds the true answer: read, write, respond (along with the implied "repeat" at the end).
One of the best and most thorough prescriptions I've seen is Sönke Ahrens' book which he's written after several years of using and researching a few particular systems.
I've been finding some useful tidbits from my own experience and research into the history of note taking and commonplace book traditions. The memory portion intrigues me a lot as well as I've done quite a lot of research into historical methods of mnemonics and memory traditions. Naturally the ancient Greeks had most of this all down within the topic of rhetoric, but culturally we seem to have unbundled and lost a lot of our own traditions with changes in our educational system over time.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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It was today as I was doing Chinese vocabulary that it struck me. I tried to add words using the locations from memory because it was cold, and I didn’t want to go out. I know each of the houses in the songline, but adding vocabulary is way way easier when I walk and do the learning in the physical space. I couldn’t do it from home.
I seem to recall reading anecdotes of aboriginal peoples who knew areas and water holes in places they'd never visited in their lives. I'm wondering how they may have encoded these in songlines for places they'd never been to and physically seen.
It would seem that it's better to use a physical space when you have access to it, but I don't think I have as much issue adding things to pre-existing palaces/songlines as Kelly describes here. I wonder how this works out for others?
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I am beginning to think that the significant difference is that with songlines, learning is always done in the physical ‘memory palace’ which is constantly revisited. It can be recalled from memory, but is encoded in place. For me, that is way more effective, but I have aphantasia and very poor visualisation, so it may not be as big a factor for others. So recalling your childhood home can be a memory palace, but not a songline.
Lynne Kelly is correct here that we need better delineations of the words we're using here.
To some of us, we're taking historical methods and expanding them into larger super sets based on our personal experiences. I've read enough of Kelly's work and her personal experiences on her website (and that of many others) that I better understand the shorthand she uses when she describes pieces.
Even in the literature throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance we see this same sort of picking and choosing of methods in descriptions of various texts. Some will choose to focus on one or two keys, which seemed to work for them, but they'd leave out the others which means that subsequent generations would miss out on the lost bits and pieces.
Having a larger superset of methods to choose from as well as encouraging further explorations is certainly desired.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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How To Do Sketchnoting (Even If You "Can't Draw"!)
a lesson with Emily Mills of the Sketchnote Academy
Types of Sketchnotes
- Lecture based
- Experience based
Skills for sketchnotes
- Listening
- looking for ideas, high level
- Writing
- Drawing
Pairing images and words together to be dynamic and memorable.
One doesn't need to be the greatest artist to do sketchnotes.
memorable >> masterpiece recognizable >> realistic big ideas >> nitty gritty
Basic drawing
Seven building blocks for drawing
- dot
- straight line
- crooked line
- curvy line
- circle
- triangle
- square
Rules
- The fewer elements, the easier
- Rearrange rotate, reorient shapes
People
- standard stick person
- A person
- oval person
- star person
Containers and connectors
Boxes are boring, so add frames or more interesting Use containers to separate information that is different from the rest or to highlight.
- boxes
- frames
- nails/thumbtacks
- star "pow" outline
- box with a shadow
Tell people where to read next
- Create a really clear header
- help people with connectors (dotted lines, arrows, numbering)
Start out small first as it's more intimidating to use bigger formats
Tools
- Sketchone marker (thin point ink, pigment or permanent and not water-based, otherwise bleedover in coloring)
- Tombow dual brush markers for color
- two grey tones, one lighter and one darker
- small handful of colors (red, blue, yellow, green)
How to Sketchnote
- Step 1: Header
- Step 2: Layout (top to bottom/left to right is usually more intuitive) Pre-plan this. Think about connectors.
- Step 3: Consistency
- headers, characters, size of writing,
- Step 4: Refine
- check spelling
- whiteout for mess ups (gellyroll white gel pen)
- ensure connectors are obvious
- Step 5: Guiding shapes (to help flow of information on page)
- stippling
- cloud outlines
- lines in the negative space (also creates contrast)
- Step 6: Coloring in
- greys first, dark then light
- highlighting connectors
- shadows on boxes, ribbons, connectors
- color should be more of a highlight than a background filler (it's not a coloring book)
Higher contrast notes are better
Resources
- 👉🏻 Find Emily (and her awesome resources!) at https://www.emilyamills.com
- 👉🏻 The Sketchnote Academy free course: https://www.sketchnoteacademy.com
- 👉🏻 The Art of Visual Note taking by Emily Mills
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Named after Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, in psychology the Zeigarnik effect occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. It postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition.
People remember interrupted or unfinished tasks better than completed tasks.
Examples: I've had friends remember where we left off on conversations months/years later and we picked right back up.
I wonder what things effect these memories/abilities? Context? Importance? Other?
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The Zeigarnik effect should not be confused with the Ovsiankina effect. Maria Ovsiankina, a colleague of Zeigarnik, investigated the effect of task interruption on the tendency to resume the task at the next opportunity.
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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Liu, Q., & Chai, L. (2021). Opinion Dynamics Models with Memory in Coopetitive Social Networks: Analysis, Application and Simulation. ArXiv:2108.03234 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03234
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomnema
Hypomnema (Greek. ὑπόμνημα, plural ὑπομνήματα, hypomnemata), also spelled hupomnema, is a Greek word with several translations into English including a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, an anecdotal record, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.
Compare and contrast the idea of this with the concept of the commonplace book. There's also a tie in with the idea of memory, particularly for meditation.
There's also the idea here of keeping a note of something to be fixed or remedied and which needs follow up or reflection.
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Local file Local file
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Yeo, “Notebooks as Memory Aids” (II, G), locates Locke’s views at a crucialjuncture in the status of memory, when commonplace books were seen assites for ordering information and not as prompts for recalling it.
Interesting datum along the timeline of commonplacebooks and memory. Worth logging and following.
Note the difference in the ideas of ordering information versus being able to recall it. How does this step in the evolution figure for the concept of the zettelkasten?
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Local file Local file
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asignificant barrier to progress in computer science was thefact that many practitioners were ignorant of the history ofcomputer science: old accomplishments (and failures!) areforgotten, and consequently the industry reinvents itself every5-10 years
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Local file Local file
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Moss shows how Protestant pedagogues such as Johann Sturm at Strasbourg used commonplace books in the schoolroo
What was the relationship, if any, between Johann Sturm, a Protestant pedagogue, and Petrus Ramus? Any link here in the offloading of memory into the commonplace book as a means of sidelining the ars memoria?
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- Jul 2021
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drkimburns.com drkimburns.com
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How do you remember what you read?
I too keep a commonplace book. First it was (and in part still is) on my personal website. Lately I've been using Hypothes.is to annotate digital documents and books, the data of which is piped into the clever tool (one of many) Obsidian.md, a (currently) private repository which helps me to crosslink my thoughts and further flesh them out.
I've recently found that Sönke Ahrens book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers is a good encapsulation of my ideas/methods in general, so I frequently recommend that to friends and students interested in the process.
In addition to my commonplace book, I also practice a wealth of mnemonic techniques including the method of loci/songlines and the phonetic system which helps me remember larger portions of the things I've read and more easily memorized. I've recently been teaching some of these methods to a small cohort of students.
syndication link: https://drkimburns.com/why-i-keep-a-commonplace-book/?unapproved=4&moderation-hash=d3f1c550516a44ba4dca4b06455f9265#comment-4
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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In the Western tradition, these memory traditions date back to ancient Greece and Rome and were broadly used until the late 1500s. Frances A. Yates outlines much of their use in The Art of Memory (Routledge, 1966). She also indicates that some of their decline in use stems from Protestant educational reformers like Peter Ramus who preferred outline and structural related methods. Some religious reformers didn't appreciate the visual mnemonic methods as they often encouraged gross, bloody, non-religious, and sexualized imagery.
Those interested in some of the more modern accounts of memory practice (as well as methods used by indigenous and oral cultures around the world) may profit from Lynne Kelly's recent text Memory Craft (Allen & Unwin, 2019).
Lots of note taking in the West was (and still is) done via commonplace book, an art that is reasonably well covered in Earle Havens' Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2001).
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www.frontiersin.org www.frontiersin.org
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Aizpurua, A., Migueles, M., & Aranberri, A. (2021). Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 666977. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.666977
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www.nature.com www.nature.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jill Rosen </span> in Team finds brain mechanism that automatically links objects in our minds | Hub (<time class='dt-published'>07/24/2021 18:07:51</time>)</cite></small>
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https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/09/how-the-mind-links-objects/
A study that quantifies association within the brain and indicates the region where it occurs.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Facebook AI. (2021, July 16). We’ve built and open-sourced BlenderBot 2.0, the first #chatbot that can store and access long-term memory, search the internet for timely information, and converse intelligently on nearly any topic. It’s a significant advancement in conversational AI. https://t.co/H17Dk6m1Vx https://t.co/0BC5oQMEck [Tweet]. @facebookai. https://twitter.com/facebookai/status/1416029884179271684
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"The earlier systems of writing were extremely difficult to learn," says Schwartz, the Whiting Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. "There were thousands of symbols used in very complicated ways, which meant that only a very small group of people could ever learn how to write or read. With the invention of the alphabet, it meant that a much larger number of people could, in theory, learn how to read and write. And so it ultimately led to the democratization of writing. And of course it is the system that all Western European writing systems used because Greeks, who borrowed the Semitic alphabetic system, then used it to write their own language."
Early writing systems used thousands of symbols and were thus incredibly complex and required heavy memorization. This may have been easier with earlier mnemonic systems in oral (pre-literate societies), but would have still required work.
The innovation of a smaller alphabetic set would have dramatically decreased the cognitive load of massive memorization and made it easier for people to become literate at scale.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Bird sound encoding
I was at the bookstore yesterday and ran into two new useful resources that looked interesting in this space.
Specific to birdsong, there was
200 Bird Songs from Around the World by Les Beletsky (Becker & Mayer, 2020, ISBN: 978-0760368831)
Read about and listen to birds from six continents. A beautiful painting illustrates each selection along with concise details about the bird's behavior, environment, and vocalizations. On the built-in digital audio player, hear each bird as it sings or calls in nature with audio of the birds provided by the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
This could be useful in using the book itself as a memory palace in addition to the fact that the bird calls are built directly into the book for immediate playback while reading/memorizing. There are a few other related books with built in sound in this series as well.
The other broader idea was that of
"A bird a day"
I saw the book A Bird A Day by Dominic Couzens (Batsford, 2021, ISBN: 978-1849945868) to help guide one towards learning about (or in our context maybe memorizing) a bird a day. It had names, photos, and other useful information which one might use to structure a palace to work at in small chunks. I know there are also many other related calendars which might also help one do something like this to build up a daily practice of memorizing data into a palace/journey/songline.
The broader "Thing-a-day" calendar category might also be useful for other topics one might want to memorize as well as to have a structure set up for encouraging spaced repetition.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Has anyone read The Memory Arts in Renaissance England 16?
@Josh I'd picked up a copy of this recently and have started into it. The opening is a quick overview of some general history, background, and general techniques.
The subtitle is solidly accurate of the majority of the book: "A Critical Anthology". The bulk of the book are either translations or excerpts of pieces of memory treatises in English throughout the Renaissance. They also include some history of the texts, their writers, and some analysis of the pieces.
Some of us have been digging up old editions of books and struggling with reading and creating context. These authors have done yeoman's work on a lot of this and collected some of the more interesting historical works on the memory arts and added lots of context, at least for works in English (and focused on England) during the Renaissance. It's a great text for those interested in the history as well as more readable versions of some of the (often incomprehensible) middle/late English. They also have some analysis often conflicting with statements made by Frances Yates about some of the more subtle points which her broad history didn't cover in detail.
Given it's anthology nature, its a nice volume to pick up and read self-contained portions of at leisure based on one's interest. It isn't however comprehensive, so, for example, they've got "translated portions" of part of Peter of Ravenna's The Phoenix, but not all of it, though they do outline the parts which they skip over. (Cross reference https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/peter-of-ravenna/27737.) Other segments are only a page or so long and may contain tangential passages or even poems about the art to better situate it for scholars/students looking at it historically.
I've corresponded a bit with Bill Engel, one of the authors who has been wonderfully helpful. He said he's got another related book Memory and Morality in Renaissance England (Cambridge) coming out later this summer as well as a few other related books and articles thereafter. Some are mentioned on his site: https://www.williamengel.org/.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Has anyone here read the book Excavating the Memory Palace: Arts of Visualization from the Agora to the Computer by Seth Long? It looks interesting.
I picked up a copy of it in April and have made it through the introduction and first chapter. He’s a professor writing from the perspective of a rhetorician and is generally extending some of the academic research started by Frances Yates. I’ll write more as I have time, but I’m in the midst of a few dozen books at the moment. I wish I could focus on this and one or two others.
I’ll note that for those interested, it’s likely based on a shorter journal article that the same author wrote in 2017 with a similar title: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07350198.2017.1281691 A little digging around should uncover a free copy of it. If you’re desperate, I have a digital copy he emailed me a while back.
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www.inc.com www.inc.com
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For the second keynote, I took copious notes and followed the spaced interval formula. A month later, by golly, I remember virtually all of the material. And in case if you're wondering, both talks were equally interesting to me--the difference was the reversal of Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve.
Not exactly a real scientific trial, but...
Note also that the other part was his having taken notes and actively engaged with the material as he heard it. The notes also formed the basis of his ability to do the spaced repetition.
Mnemonic methods could be used in place of the note taking for the properly trained. Visual memory just goes to expand on it.
This is an awfully fluff article that's probably too prescriptive. I wonder how many people it influences to try it out? How successful will they be without a more specific prescription?
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Ebooks don’t have those limitations, both because of how readily new editions can be created and how simple it is to push “updates” to existing editions after the fact. Consider the experience of Philip Howard, who sat down to read a printed edition of War and Peace in 2010. Halfway through reading the brick-size tome, he purchased a 99-cent electronic edition for his Nook e-reader:As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern …” Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text. For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern …”A search of this Nook version of the book confirmed it: Every instance of the word kindle had been replaced by nook, in perhaps an attempt to alter a previously made Kindle version of the book for Nook use. Here are some screenshots I took at the time:It is only a matter of time before the retroactive malleability of these forms of publishing becomes a new area of pressure and regulation for content censorship. If a book contains a passage that someone believes to be defamatory, the aggrieved person can sue over it—and receive monetary damages if they’re right. Rarely is the book’s existence itself called into question, if only because of the difficulty of putting the cat back into the bag after publishing.
This story of find and replace has chilling future potential. What if a dictatorial government doesn't like your content. It can be all to easy to remove the digital versions and replace them whole hog for "approved" ones.
Where does democracy live in such a world? Consider similar instances when the Trump administration forced the disappearance of government websites and data.
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Libraries in these scenarios are no longer custodians for the ages of anything, whether tangible or intangible, but rather poolers of funding to pay for fleeting access to knowledge elsewhere.
A major archiving issue in the digital era is that libraries are no longer the long term storage repositories they have otherwise been for the past two thousand years.
What effects will this have on the future? Particularly once the financial interests of the owning companies no longer exists?
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How a memory palace works When we’re learning something new, it requires less effort if we connect it to something we already know, such as a physical place. This is known as elaborative encoding. Once we need to remember the information, we can “walk” around the palace and “see” the various pieces. The idea is to give your memories something to hang on to. We are pretty terrible at remembering things, especially when these memories float freely in our heads. But our spatial memory is actually pretty decent, and when we give our memories some needed structure, we provide that missing order and context. For example, if you struggle to remember names, it can be helpful to link people you meet to names you already know. If you meet someone called Fred and your grandmother had a cat called Fred, you could connect the two. Creating a multisensory experience in your head is the other part of the trick. In this case, you could imagine the sound of Fred meowing loudly. To further aid in recall, the method of loci is most effective if we take advantage of the fact that it’s easiest to remember memorable things. Memory specialists typically recommend mentally placing information within a physical space in ways that are weird and unusual. The stranger the image, the better.
This notion of using spatial memory to encode other concepts - or even the P-A-O sytem where a 2 digit number encodes a person performing an action is an interesting idea for someone like me who forgets quite a bit.
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www.heise.de www.heise.de
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Ohne zu schreiben, kann man nicht denken; jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvoller, anschlussfähiger Weise.
You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way. —Niklas Luhmann
(Source of the original??)
This is interesting, but is also ignorant of oral traditions which had means of addressing it.
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“It certainly makes me want to improve my own record-keeping and organization,” he says. “I think there’s a lot people can learn not just about building a comedy routine but about approaching mortality honestly. There’s a real sense of impermanence in all of what he saved.”
This links together the ideas of memory, commonplace books, and mortality.
This also underlines the idea that commonplaces could be very specific to their creators.
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- Jun 2021
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www.artkavanagh.ie www.artkavanagh.ie
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Art Kavanagh </span> in note (<time class='dt-published'>06/16/2021 06:24:59</time>)</cite></small>
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
the idea of an "[[associative trail]]" here brings to mind both the ars memorativa and the method of loci as well as--even more specifically--the idea of songlines.
Bush's version is the same thing simply renamed.
<small><cite class='h-cite ht'>↬ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jeremy Dean</span> in Via: ‘What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’ - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>06/09/2021 14:50:00</time>)</cite></small>
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
I feel like Western culture has lost so much of our memory traditions that this trite story, which I've seen often repeated, doesn't have the weight it should.
Why can't we simultaneously have the old system AND the new? Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale touch on this in their coinage of the third archive in Songlines.
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Local file Local file
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Seth Long takes a closer look at the number of memory treatises from 1550-1650 to come up with a more concrete reason for the disappearance of mnemonic imagery (and the method of loci) in English rhetoric and pedagogic traditions. Some writers have attributed it to the rise of more writing and publishing. Long extends Frances Yates' idea of its decline to the rise of Ramism by presenting some general data about the number and quality of memory treatises published during the time period in question. Comparison of this data with European continental publications helps to draw some more concrete conclusions.
In particular, he highlights an example of a Ramist sympathizer re-writing a previous treatise and specifically removing the rhetorical imagery from the piece.
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in the early1600s, the encyclopedist Johann Heinrich Alsted, a Calvinist, published treatises on both Ramus and Giordano Bruno, whosemnemonic system utilized zodiac imagery. To my knowledge, there is no English equivalent of a scholar who found value inboth Ramus and Bruno.
It would be interesting to note other authors who found value in both Ramus and Bruno.
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Green and Murphy,Renaissance Rhetoric; Plett,English Renaissance; Middleton,Memory Systems; British Library,Incunabula Short Title Catalogue. Green and Murphy were the primary source. Middleton and Plett, who compiled memorytreatises as a distinct category, allowed me to add extra titles to Green and Murphy’s listings. An Excel file containing the266 early modern treatises graphed here can be emailed upon request.
Sources of data for this paper. I'd definitely love to get a copy of this Excel file. Might be worth expanding to other languages, countries, and timeperiods as well.
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Yet even thisdecline is followed by an unexpected resurgence in mnemonics in the 1800s, when Connors claimsthat writing was replacing speaking in school settings (127).
I would question this statement, as annotated separately in this article. I have a feeling that the mnemonic tradition into the 1800's was more heavily influenced by the rise of the idea of the major system and not so much by the memory palace or the method of loci. This definitely seems to be the case in the United States based on my readings.
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Quintilian is skeptical of the art of memory. His preferred scheme is to divide words on the page intosmall, memorizable chunks, each subdivision serving as a sort oflocusin page-space. Indeed, Quintilian even suggests thatthe best mnemonic image one can construct is simply an image of the tablet or papyrus on which one wrote (11.2.27–32).
And for renaissance scholars, this quote may be the reason that drolleries are so widespread in illuminated manuscripts.
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Not only does England fail to producemany memory treatises post-1600, the memory treatises she does produce are largely devoid of theinventive images that mark earlier English treatises and that continued to mark treatises on thecontinent
Are these methods still heavily used on the continent (aka Europe)? Surely these methods waned there as well at some point as I don't think they're still heavily used in modern times.
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Butler then moves on toquote—not Cicero, as Wilson does—but Quintilian, who among classical authorities is the mostskeptical about the art of memory’s efficacy (see endnote 4). Echoing Quintilian’s complaint, Butlersays that it is probably more difficult to construct a memory palace than simply to remember thingsby rote (54–55).
Construction is definitely work. The question about how much it may be should be addressed on a continuum of knowing or understanding particular concepts as well.
Creating palaces for raw data de-novo, as in a memory championship, takes a lot of practice for speed and the lack of relationships. However in a learning setting, it may be better to read, grasp, and understand material and then create a palace to contain the simple raw facts which might then also bring back other bits of the knowledge and understanding.
This might be a useful idea to explore further, gather some data, and experiment with.
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Herdson also discusses how toconvert numbers and letters into such uninspiring mental pictures as a candle, a foot, a pipe, and similarhousehold items.
What relation does Henry Herdson's The Art of Memory Made Plaine (1651, 1654) have to the potential development of the major system. The description here sounds like it's relatively similar. Who/What were his precursors, and who may have been influenced by his version of this system which sounds very similar.
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Other treatises exemplifying the retreat of imagery from the fourth canon include Henry Herdson’sThe Art of Memory Made Plaine, which saw two printings in 1651 and another in 1654, and ThomasFuller’s 1641 bookThe Holy State and the Profane State, which contains a section“On Memory.”
Add these to our list.
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Willis is more concerned with the construction of a perfectly orderedmental place system than with imagery.
How similar or dissimilar is this over description in Mnemonica by John Willis to the palace built using Noah's Ark by Hugh of St. Victor?
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Willis’s primary interest was shorthand writing—he is chiefly noted forArt of Stenographie—andhis memory treatise is clearly influenced by shorthand’s mechanism of one-to-one correspondence.
John Willis's Mnemonica (Latin 1618, English 1621, 1654, and 1661) covers memory, but he was apparently more interested in shorthand writing and also wrote Art of Stenographie.
I'll have to read this for a view into the overlap of memory and shorthand with respect to the development of the major system. Did this influence others in the chain of history? It definitely fits into the right timeline.
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Another English memory treatise that diminishes the role of stimulating imagery is JohnWillis’sMnemonica, published in Latin in 1618, with English translations printed in 1621, 1654,and 1661.
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William Fulwood’sCastel of Memorie—printed in 1562, 1563, and 1573—is a curious treatisededicated almost entirely to medicinal and herbal remedies for improving the memory
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Methodaids the mental grasping—the memory—of the complex content with which one is engaged; it“relieve[s]theburdenplacedonmemory,”writes Sharon Crowley,“by calling on the assistance of reason”(35).
I definitely use reason as a memory technique this way.
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Though he doesnot discuss mnemonics, Thomas Sloane similarly argues that classical invention—a process thattakes not only logic but also“sense, imagination, and emotions”into consideration—is irreparablyneutered by Ramism (137).
This makes me wonder what the relation of this mode of "limited" thinking (represented by Ramism) has with Max Weber's ideas of Protestant work ethic? If we're not being creative like we may have been in the past, does it help us to focus on the mundane drudgery of our work at hand?
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Though it is often assumedthat mnemonics were used to memorize speeches, the importance of memory to theinventionofspeech was readily apparent to ancient orators—thus the famous praise of memory as athesauruminventorum(Herennium3.16.28). As Cicero writes inDe Oratore, the orator must commit tomemory“the whole past with its storehouse of examples and precedents,”as well as a knowledgeof all laws general and civil, for without such memories, the orator is left speechless (1.17–18).Expanding on Cicero’s point, Quintilian claims that“it is the power of memory alone that bringsbefore us all the store of precedents, laws, rulings, sayings, and facts which the orator must possessin abundance . . . and hold ready for immediate use”(Institutio11.2.1). The art of memory was thusto be used to recollect not only pre-written orations but also knowledge from a variety of sources tobe called upon when constructing new texts, speakingex tempore, or responding to an interlocutor’sarguments.
Too often, this seems to me to be a missing piece that few talk about now. Those posting to the Art of Memory forum are usually talking about the need to memorize for memorization's sake. Rarely are they talking about or noticing the second or third level order changes as the result of an improved memory.
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In my view, the most detrimental result of this change to rhetorical theory is the loss of theclassical outlook that imagination and memory are central to invention
I can agree with this.
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William Perkins, an influential Puritan theologianknown today for having tutored John Robinson, founder of the Congregationalist Church.
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Regarding theinfluence of iconoclasm, the inaugural moment can be set circa 1536–1541, during Henry VIII’sdissolution of the monasteries.
Long places the influence of iconoclasm in the destruction of the method of loci at the time period of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries around 1536-1541.
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I offer general remarks on the need for a more detailed history of the canonof memory, which is often (but erroneously) assumed to be a casualty of writing (Corbett andConnors 22) or“modernist”ideologies (Crowley; Pruchic and Lacey). The former argument isdemonstrably untrue; the latter is on the right track but incomplete.
I've often heard mnemonists talk about the effects of writing as being part of its downfall in western traditions. Are their guesses simply that, or had they read works like these?
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contemporary scholars have instead analyzed these arts as“logical tool[s],”early examples of iconic logic and cipher encryption (Gatti 5). Mary Carruthers, Lina Bolzoni, andJanet Coleman are among those who have removed the magical charm from Yates’s dreamlike arts ofmemory, describing mnemonic precepts as manifestations of psychological processes, not invitationsto explore the occult skeletons in rhetoric’s closet.
I've generally gleaned most of the gist of this from Yates directly myself.
I've dipped into some of Carruthers' work, but not the others yet, though based on our present situation of memory, I can see that this is likely the case.
I want to pull up the other researchers he mentions here to read their material as well.
Tags
- protestantism
- memory texts
- Ramism
- Giordano Bruno
- reason
- shorthand
- religion
- memory
- monasteries
- Frances A. Yates
- Janet Coleman
- want to read
- mnemonic techniques
- pedagogy
- mnemonic devices
- invention
- thinking tools
- memory palaces
- Hugh of St. Victor
- rhetoric
- Max Weber
- Quintilian
- memory for thinking
- John Willis
- iconoclasm
- drolleries
- read
- Noah's Ark
- memory work
- major system
- Major System
- creativity
- Peter Ramus
- data science
- open questions
- Henry VIII
- Lina Bolzoni
- Cicero
- Western death of memory
- method of loci
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- May 2021
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localhost:4000 localhost:4000
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Polar is an integrated reading environment to build your knowledge base. Actively read, annotate, connect thoughts, create flashcards, and track progress.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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To more easily memory text verbatim, practice methods for reclling the information rather than simply repeating it.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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With some continued clever searching today along with some help from an expert in Elizabethan English, I've found an online version of Robert Copland's (poor) translation from the French, some notes, and a few resources for assisting in reading it for those who need the help.
The text:
- The art of memory, that otherwyse is called the Phenix A boke very behouefull and profytable to all professours of scyences. Grammaryens, rethoryciens dialectyke, legystes, phylosophres [and] theologiens. Petrus, Ravennas, ca. 1448-1508 or 9., Copland, Robert, fl. 1540-1547. [Imprynted at London: In Fletestrete at the sygne of the George by Wyllyam Myddylton, [ca. 1545]]
This is a free text transcription and will be easier to read than the original black-letter Elizabethan English version.
For those without the background in Elizabethan English, here are a few tips/hints:
For the more obscure/non-obvious words:
- Middle English Dictionary (online) from University of Michigan
- Project Gutenberg Middle English Dictionary
Finally, keep in mind that the letter "y" can often be a printer's substitution for the English thorn character) Þ, so you'll often see the abbreviations yͤ for "the" and yͭ as an abbreviation for "that".
Copland's original English, first printing of Ravenna can be accessed electronically through a paid Proquest account at most universities. It is listed as STC 24112 if you have access to a firewall-free site that lets you look at books on Early English Books Online (EEBO). A photocopy can be obtained through EEBO reprints on Amazon. Unless you've got some reasonable experience with Elizabethan black-latter typography, expect this version to be hard to read. It isn't annotated or modernized.
@ehcolston I'm curious to hear what the Wilson/Pena text looks like. I'm guessing it's not scholarly. I think Wilson is a recent college grad and is/was a publishing intern at a company in the LA Area. I'm not sure of Pena's background. I suspect it may be a version of the transcribed text I've linked with a modest updating of the middle English which they've self-published on Amazon.
Of course, given the multiple translations here, if anyone is aware of a more solid translation of the original Latin text into English, do let us know. The careful observer will notice that the Latin version is the longest, the French quite a bit shorter, and the English (Copland) incredibly short, so there appears to be some untranslated material in there somewhere.
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I haven't searched all the versions of Peter of Ravenna's name (yet) in all locations, but I recall hearing of an Italian version as well (and it's likely that there was one given its popularity).
A bit of digging around this morning has uncovered a digital copy of a French translation in the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé (Paris).:
Given the date and the scant 16 pages, this is likely to be the edition which was the source of Robert Copland's English translation. As the edition doesn't appear to have an author, it's possible that this was the reason that Copland's translation didn't list one either.
The Latin -> French -> middle English -> modern English route seems an awfully muddy way to go, but without anything else, it may have to suffice for some of us for the moment.
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As someone who knows both methods and has likely practiced them in reasonable depth, I'm curious what Dr. @LynneKelly thinks. I'd love to see this same study done to include song, dance, painting, etc. to expand the potential effects.
If nothing else, it's good to see some positive research on the methods which will hopefully draw more attention to the pedagogy and classroom use.
Dr. Reser said the Monash School of Rural Health is considering incorporating these memory tools into the medical curriculum once teaching returns to a post-COVID normal. “This year we hope to offer this to students as a way to not only facilitate their learning but to reduce the stress associated with a course that requires a lot of rote learning,” he said. —https://scitechdaily.com/ancient-australian-aboriginal-memory-tool-superior-to-memory-palace-learning-technique/
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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hazelfaceHazel3dAs you likely know, “back in the day” stories, poetry, and religious texts were passed down from generation to generation. My big question is “how”. Does anyone know how this was done historically? Or how you would do it yourself today? I do some verbatim memorization for fun and have a process/formula I’m comfortable with. I’m really curious what sort of procedure I could build if I was limited Thank you!
In both older and current cultures we see stories, songs, poetry, and a variety of knowledge passed down orally. Some of these, like Homer, were eventually written out and passed down using the written word. Texts, once extant, were generally passed around by copying out or mass printing, but generally were not memorized and passed along via orality or memory techniques. Obviously there are examples of people memorizing large portions of text personally, but this has generally not been the major mode of passing knowledge from one generation to the next.
Dr. Lynne Kelly's text book Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) does a solid job of covering some of the techniques in the archaeological and even contemporary records on this score.
We have modern anthropologists attesting the oral methods you describe from several peoples around the world. Kelly's book, based on her Ph.D. thesis, does a good job of summarizing many of these. She and Dr. Margo Neale also recently published Songlines: The Power and Promise (Thames & Hudson, 2020) which covers current Australian Aboriginal tribes which use these oral techniques for knowledge transmission as well. The techniques do vary from culture to culture, but on the whole they tend to share many features.
As others have mentioned, Walter Ong's work, and the book Orality and Literacy (Routledge, 1982) in particular, will provide some additional context.
On your question of practicality, I'd recommend Kelly's book Memory Craft which currently outlines the broadest number of mnemotechniques out there and provides some advice about which methods are best/better for particular applications. Following this, if necessary, you might focus in on the methods you're interested in most and hone in on other texts, audiobooks, or posts here in the forum.
Everyone's abilities and needs are slightly different, so experiment a bit to see what appeals to and/or works best for you.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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@chrisaldrich, I’ll be intested to see how you help bring together your knowledge to create a more mnemonic way to visualize and remember bird calls and traits. I’ve also added your blog to my news reader with all the good ideas there as well. Thanks for all your great feedback!
https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/bird-sound-encoding/63013/15
I'll apologize in advance for the noisy-ness of my website. I use it as a commonplace book and post almost everything I do on the web there first (including social media). If it gets to be too much, you can subscribe to individual topics of interest (like https://boffosocko.com/category/Memory/feed/, which is sure to include any bird related work) so that you're just getting what you want instead of the overzealous firehose which can be upwards of 10 to 20,000 posts a year, depending on how much of my stream I make public.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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I must stop equating songlines and memory palaces - the professor and student involved see the complexity of songlines as a level higher than memory palaces because so much knowledge and understanding is layered. The first post-grad working on my stuff, and she’s found fault already! And rightly so. They are also arguing against some researcher who claims that the peg system and the method of loci are equivalent. That is part of the research project, but I haven’t read the psychology papers they have sent yet.
songlines != memory palaces
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journals.plos.org journals.plos.org
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Consistent with the notion that exploitation of spatial memory is among the most effective memorization techniques, an early MRI study of competitors in the World Memory Championships showed that 90% of the memory athletes employed some variation of the method of loci for rapid learning and accurate recall of information [30].
What were the others using? Only the major system perhaps? Or were they the marginal under-performers?
If there were solid performers in the other 10%, what method(s) were they using?
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It is worth noting that no instructions were provided to the participants with respect to sequence, yet this measure exhibited the largest effect size of any of the parameters measured
They should have mentioned this before. Not knowing what the function does, I'm curious to see how abysmal the sequence numbers were for the control group.
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Both methods of loci improved upon the already high level of recall among medical students relative to those who received no memory training.
I'm saddened to see the erasure of the Australian Aboriginal approach (possibly better termed Songlines or Dreaming for specificity) here only to have it lumped into the Western method. This is worse when their general results show the Australian approach to be significantly better.
This may be due to over-familiarity with the techniques which are broadly similar, but for rigor and respect they should remain separate in this paper.
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After 10 minutes, the word lists were collected and students were asked to write down as many of the list items as they could recall within five minutes.
Were students asked or told if they'd be tested with this on long-term memory?
Personally, I'd have used a simple major system method to memorize such a list for short term memory, but would have used other techniques for long term memory.
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These “Songline” stories are ancient, exhibit little variation over long periods of time, and are carefully learned and guarded by the Elders who are its custodians [7].
What is the best way we could test and explore error correction and overwriting in such a system from an information theoretic standpoint?
Tags
- memory research
- long term memory
- research methods
- evolution
- short term memory
- songlines
- indigenous cultures
- mnemotechniques
- error correction
- read
- information theory
- major system
- mnemonic devices
- open questions
- erasure
- memory championships
- education reform
- pedagogy
- memory sequence
- method of loci
Annotators
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www.jeffpippen.com www.jeffpippen.com
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List of butterflies.
Used in the memory research study at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0251710#pone-0251710-t001
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scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com
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Great news on Memory. Was song and art used too?
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augmentingcognition.com augmentingcognition.com
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www.supermemo.com www.supermemo.com
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crookedtimber.org crookedtimber.org
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“Monetising what we see as sacred knowledge, our way of being – driving, walking – is sacred knowledge and the only people who should have any purview over that is our community. … What if we look at what the data could do for our community and how to achieve that? … We are gathering our data because we love our people, we want a better future for the next generations. What if all data was gathered for those reasons? What would it look like?”
A great quote and framing from Abigail Echo-Hawk.
This reliance on going to community elders (primarily because they have more knowledge and wisdom) is similar to designing for the commons and working backward. Elders in many indigenous cultures represent the the commons.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to innovate and explore the evolutionary space for better answers, but going slow and fixing things is far more likely to be helpful than moving fast and breaking things as has been the mode for the last fifteen years. Who's watching the long horizon in these scenarios?
This quote and set up deserves some additional thought into the ideas and power structures described by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture
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hyperlink.academy hyperlink.academy
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The announcement of my memory course.
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brainbaking.com brainbaking.com
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There’s this thing I simply call “365”. With each new year (or sometimes at the end of a notebook, when I feel like it), I make a 2-page spread mind map of things that kept me busy. It’s more or less an analog tag cloud and it’s extremely rewarding to make. You get to browse through previous journals, look at things you’ve written down and actually managed to pull of, and take note of that in one or two words. That creates a thick cloud full of the things that defined you for the last year. It’s actually quite incredible to look at. When I’m done doing that, I try to underline the words that meant more to me than others. Applying the retrospective principles from software development on your own personal life and writing down what made you glad, mad or sad actually helps you do something about that.
This is an example of spaced repetition being done as retrospective and hiding some of the value of making the important things stand out and reviewing them for better long term retention.
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The palest ink is better than the best memory - Chinese proverb.
Faint ink and faint memories compared....
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Petrus Ramus
Just making note of the fact that Petrus Ramus was the advisor of Theodor Zwinger and apparently influcnced Jean Bodin, about whom Ann M. Blair writes about in Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age.
I suspect these influences may impinge on my work on the history of memory and its downfall due to Ramism since the late 1500s and which impacts the history of information.
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newrepublic.com newrepublic.com
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We still do not understand how information practices from the worlds of learning, finance, industry, and administration cross-pollinated. From the fourteenth century onward, accountants developed complex instructions for note-taking to describe holdings and transactions, as well for the recording of numbers and calculations. By the seventeenth century, merchants, and indeed ship captains, engineers, and state administrators, were known to travel with trunks of memoranda, massive inventories, scrap books, and various ledgers and log books that mixed descriptive notes and numbers. By the eighteenth century, tables and printed forms cut down on the need for notes and required less description and more systematic numerical notes. Notaries also were master information handlers, creating archives for their legal and financial documents and cross-referencing catalogue systems.
I'm noticing no mention here of double entry book keeping or the accountant's idea of waste books.
There's also no mention of orality or memory methods either.
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gutenberg.net.au gutenberg.net.au
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He remembered
childhood memory finally returns, of mother and sister
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It was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she said vaguely. It frightened him a little.
Julia's memory issues with war
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Annotators
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Orbis Pictus, or Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures), is a textbook for children written by Czech educator John Amos Comenius and published in 1658. It was the first widely used children's textbook with pictures, published first in Latin and German and later republished in many European languages.
This would seem to be the sort of ancestor of the bestiary that might be used as a mnemonic tool, but given it's 1658 publication date, it's likely the case that this would have been too late for it to have served this purpose for most (without prior knowledge).
Apparently the Encyclopaedia Britannica labeled it as “the first children’s picture book.”
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press.uchicago.edu press.uchicago.edu
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>JHI Blog </span> in Collective Memory - JHI Blog (<time class='dt-published'>05/12/2021 21:55:54</time>)</cite></small>
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jhiblog.org jhiblog.org
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“He who hasn’t lost anything in his head can’t find anything in there either,” Lichtenberg joyfully declared (a few days after praising the word ‘nonsense’ over weightier notions such as ‘chaos’ or ‘eternity’).
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gordonbrander.com gordonbrander.comPensees1
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There are rumors Pascal wrote the Pensées on notecards, and pinned these cards to a wall, connecting related thoughts with yarn. An early example of hypertext?
This certainly fits into the broad general ideas surrounding note taking, commonplace books, and zettelkasten as tools for thought. People generally seemed to have used relatively similar methods but shoehorned them into the available tools they had at the time.
This also, incidentally isn't too far off from how indigenous peoples the world over have used memory techniques (memory palaces, songlines, etc.) to hold together and pollinate their own thinking.
Raymond Llull took things a step further with his combinatoric methods, though I've yet to see anyone attempting that in the area of digital gardens.
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As the author Ursula Le Guin once put it, if you wish to understand that which is enduring, you’re better off exploring the capaciousness of myths than fine-tuning present lines of reasoning. “True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is.”
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Greene, C., & Murphy, G. (2020). Individual differences in susceptibility to false memories for COVID-19 fake news. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rvec8
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www.pnas.org www.pnas.org
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Xie, W., Campbell, S., & Zhang, W. (2020). Working memory capacity predicts individual differences in social-distancing compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2008868117
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github.com github.com
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Exact memorization of individual lines like this is difficult at best, even with these methods.
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journals.sagepub.com journals.sagepub.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Vox</span> in (16) How I memorized an entire chapter from “Moby Dick” - YouTube (<time class='dt-published'>05/04/2021 22:24:24</time>)</cite></small>
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journals.sagepub.com journals.sagepub.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Vox</span> in (16) How I memorized an entire chapter from “Moby Dick” - YouTube (<time class='dt-published'>05/04/2021 22:24:24</time>)</cite></small>
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- Apr 2021
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plasticbag.org plasticbag.org
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The creation of the permalink built-in memory – links that worked and remained consistent over time, conversations that could be archived and retraced later. The permalink stopped all weblog conversations being like that guy in Memento…
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Greene, S. by M. F. (n.d.). You Won’t Remember the Pandemic the Way You Think You Will. The Atlantic. Retrieved 13 April 2021, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/05/how-will-we-remember-covid-19-pandemic/618397/?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share
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www.tandfonline.com www.tandfonline.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Ruth SchusterApr. 8, 2021</span> in Israeli archaeologists crack mystery of cave paintings done in the dark - Archaeology - Haaretz.com (<time class='dt-published'>04/12/2021 13:50:12</time>)</cite></small>
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www.haaretz.com www.haaretz.com
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He adds that the ethnographic record shows that with rare exceptions, rock art is indeed associated with ritual and beliefs. “The concept of ‘art for art’s sake’ is a relatively recent western attitude,” he says – and if anything, the propensity for drawing in the dark seems to support that assumption.
Here again, the sentence reads well if we replace rituals and beliefs with mnemonic practice.
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Whitley says: “The conceptual and practical division between the supernatural/sacred/religious world and the mundane realm is a largely modern and western conceit that has become especially prominent since the Protestant Reformation. Many traditional peoples saw/see no separation between daily versus religious life; many don’t even recognize that they have a ‘religion’ per se. I then concur with the notion that many prehistoric peoples felt a strong connection to the supernatural and the cosmos.”
This fits into a mnemonic perspective of life as being something greater than religion or ancestor worship. The ancestor worship part comes in because they're a thing to attach our memories of needed culture and knowledge to. They're also important because they're the ones that discovered the knowledge and helped to hand it down.
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“In western North America alone, for example, rock art was exclusively made by shamans among some tribes. But in others it might also be made by puberty initiates – boys and/or girls – and in others include adults experiencing life crises too (e.g., the death of a spouse),” Whitley says. But throughout North America, it seems artistic creation was associated with visionary experiences and the perceived receipt of supernatural power.
Shamanic instances could support knowledge preservation and communication to following generations.
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“We also commonly see repetitions of motifs – an iconographic system – in corpora of rock art, again indicative of communicative rather than purely decorative intent,” Whitley says. “By this I don’t imply that rock art has no aesthetic component. In many cases it clearly does. But that doesn’t seem to have been its goal or main justification.”
The fact that it was just for "art's sake" is a motivating clue for supporting use of these as mnemonics.
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Arguing in favor of cosmic connectivity, à la Whitley: why would anybody create art in places that are very difficult to see and dangerous to enter, if the goal is purely aesthetic or decorative?
If these were used for societal memory purposes, the privacy of the caves as well as the auditory and even halucinatory effects could have helped as well.
What sorts of other things would we expect to see in such instances? Definitely worth looking at Lynne Kelly's ten criteria in these situations, though some of them are so old as to be unlikely to have as much supporting evidence.
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mymodernmet.com mymodernmet.com
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In 2019, an unusually dry summer caused the waters of the Valdecañas Reservoir to recede, revealing a monument that has come to be referred to as the “Spanish Stonehenge.” NASA satellites captured images of the exposed stones known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, which experts suspect may have been built sometime in the second or third millennium BCE.
Might be worth looking this up to see how it might or might not relate to pre-Celtic migration patterns as they relate to other standing stones in the Celtic and Celtic fringe areas.
Sad that the markings are wearing away in addition to making studying the area much more difficult.
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www.wanikani.com www.wanikani.com
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WaniKani
Signed up for an account on Apr 6, 2021 at 19:40.
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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I asked Seyal if Pinterest had ever considered a feature that let users mark a life event complete. Canceled. Finished. Done. “We would have to have a system that thinks about things on an event level, so we could deliver on the promise,” Seyal said. “Right now we just use relevance as a measure.” But had Pinterest considered that, in the long run, people might be more inclined to use the app if it could become a clean space for them when they needed it to be, a corner of the internet uncluttered with grief?
This would be a great feature for IndieWeb creators to consider.
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And, Eichhorn notes, there’s been surprisingly little written about the specific impact of our digital culture on memory.
This is definitely a ripe area for research.
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“Forgetting used to be the default, and that also meant you could edit your memories,” says Kate Eichhorn, who researches culture and media at the New School in New York City and wrote the book The End of Forgetting. “Editing memories” in this context refers to a psychological process, not a Photoshop tool. The human brain is constantly editing memories to incorporate new information and, in some cases, to cope with trauma.
Possibly worth reading for some of my research?
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To hear technologists describe it, digital memories are all about surfacing those archival smiles. But they’re also designed to increase engagement, the holy grail for ad-based business models.
It would be far better to have apps focus on better reasons for on this day features. I'd love to have something focused on spaced repetition for building up my memory for other things. Reminders at a week, a month, three months, and six months would be a useful thing for some posts.
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Our smartphones pulse with memories now. In normal times, we may strain to remember things for practical reasons—where we parked the car—or we may stumble into surprise associations between the present and the past, like when a whiff of something reminds me of Sunday family dinners. Now that our memories are digital, though, they are incessant, haphazard, intrusive.
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I still have a photograph of the breakfast I made the morning I ended an eight-year relationship and canceled a wedding. It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now digitally fossilized in a floral dish we moved with us when we left New York and headed west. I don’t know why I took the photo, except, well, I do: I had fallen into the reflexive habit of taking photos of everything. Not long ago, the egg popped up as a “memory” in a photo app. The time stamp jolted my actual memory.
Example of unwanted spaced repetition via social media.
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www.lynnekelly.com.au www.lynnekelly.com.au
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We cannot transfer beliefs or customs from one culture to another, but we can transfer generalisations from multiple cultures about how humans maintain critical knowledge when they are dependent on memory.
Almost every anthropology source I've read in the last six months has highlighted some version of this.
If our short history of experience with archaeology is any indicator, it can be very dangerous (and painfully wrong) for us to transfer our customs and beliefs onto other cultures and civilizations which don't have our culture or knowledge base.
However we can more easily transfer broad generalizations from and across various cultures when we discuss how humans used memory and orality (within their cultures) particularly when they would never have interacted with each other.
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In Australia, we are so fortunate to be able to learn from a continuous culture dating back over 60,000 years. We have ample evidence from our Aboriginal cultures of robust knowledge of landscape and skyscape events dating back 17,000 years. (See Patrick Nunn’s amazing book, The Edge of Memory). That is how powerful these methods can be and why they have developed in so many disparate cultures.
bookmarking Patrick Nunn's The Edge of Memory for future reading
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Firstly, an entire tribe moving from Wales to the Salisbury Plain took their encyclopaedia with them. This would require the circle to be erected in the same order as in Wales and oriented in the same direction. In effect, these people were taking their database of knowledge with them, the structure in the stones, and the data in their memories. Secondly, a different tribe conquering those in Wales might identify just how effective this memory technique is and steal only the technology. Essentially, they stole the database structure and filled it with their own data. The bluestones are particularly suited to a mnemonic purpose due to the blotches and blobs in their material makeup.
Perhaps there's a third possibility not mentioned here?
Perhaps the group at Waun Mawn, traded a portion of their knowledge and database to a more powerful and potentially more central nearby group of people? The evidence indicates that many of the people buried at Stonehenge were originally from the area of Wales where some of the stones originated. The fact that some stones remained behind may mean that some of the needed local encyclopedia stayed behind.
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Local file Local file
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Equally, Waun Mawn did not become the core of a monument complexof the kind known around other great stone circles, such as the Ring of Brodgar, Aveburyand Stonehenge. Its development as a major centre in the earlier Neolithic (seeFigure 1)appears to have been curtailed by early dismantling. Although the region was probably notentirely evacuated—the four remaining stones at Waun Mawn possibly symbolise the iden-tities of those groups who remained local—it may have been extensively depopulated. Onlyfurther research into settlement and land-use employing other lines of evidence, such as paly-nology, will provide answers.
Interesting to think that some of these stones may have stayed behind to represent the knowledge of the group that stayed behind. If the stones can be thought of as "books", some of the extra empty ones were relocated with the knowledge of other books moved into them in new contexts.
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mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk
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He also introduced a code by which numbers were translated into words to aid memorising them. The code was as follows: 1=p,a;2=b,e;3=c,i;4=d,o;5=t,u;6=f,ar,ra;7=g,er,re;8=l,ir,ri;9=m,or,ro;0=n,ur,ru1 = p, a; 2 = b, e; 3 = c, i; 4 = d, o; 5 = t, u; 6 = f, ar, ra; 7 = g, er, re; 8 = l, ir, ri; 9 = m, or, ro; 0 = n, ur, ru1=p,a;2=b,e;3=c,i;4=d,o;5=t,u;6=f,ar,ra;7=g,er,re;8=l,ir,ri;9=m,or,ro;0=n,ur,ru. So to remember a number such as 314159 one produced a word such as 'cadator' which then translated back into 314159. The assumption here was that 'cadator' was easier to remember than 314159.
Sadly no reference to which book or portion in which this segment appears.
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