856 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2022
    1. ConradCeltes, a German poet of some renown,‘born in 1459, made the great discoverythat the alphabet could be substituted in

      Mnemonics for the places or pictures used by his predecessors. The historians of Mnemonics, especially Aretin, Reventlow, and the learned and famous bibliographer, Edward Marie Oettinger, in Leipzic, to whom I owe the above-mentioned and some of the following details on the history of Mnemonics, give a dozen other names of authors on Mnemonics belonging to this epoch.*

      Edward Pick mentions Conrad Celtes in passing for having "made the great discovery that the alphabet could be substituted in Mnemonics for the places and pictures used by his predecessors. He doesn't provide a textual source for the information.

      Pick indicates that his primary sources were Edward Marie Oettinger, (Johann Christoph Freiherr von) Aretin, and (Carl Otto) Reventlow who may have more detail on Celte's potential influence on the major system as well as potential alternate names from that era.

      see also: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Maria_Oettinger<br /> - History of Mnemonics by J. Ch, Baron von Aretin

    1. I can't tell you how many times I've rushed home from a run and shouted, "Nobody talk to me, I have to write this down!" while I dripped sweat all over my computer or my note cards as frantically tried to get it down before I lost the thought.

      Evidence that Ryan Holiday doesn't have any memory practice.

      Surprising?...

    1. The first important modification of the method of the Romans was that invented by the German poet Konrad Celtes, who, in his Epitoma in utramque Ciceronis rhetoricam cum arte memorativa nova (1492), instead of places made use of the letters of the alphabet.
    2. Reasonable overview of history. Worth digging into to flesh out more fully with respect to the major system in particular.

      https://theodora.com/encyclopedia/m2/mnemonics.html

    1. CELTES, KONRAD (1459-1508), German humanist and Latin poet, the son of a vintner named Pickel (of which Celtes is the Greek translation), was born at Wipfeld near Schweinfurt. He early ran away from home to avoid being set to his father’s trade, and at Heidelberg was lucky enough to find a generous patron in Johann von Dalberg and a teacher in Agricola. After the death of the latter (1485) Celtes led the wandering life of a scholar of the Renaissance, visiting most of the countries of the continent, teaching in various universities, and everywhere establishing learned societies on the model of the academy of Pomponius Laetus at Rome. Among these was the Sodalitas litteraria Rhenana or Celtica at Mainz (1491). In 1486 he published his first book, Ars versificandi et carminum, which created an immense sensation and gained him the honour of being crowned as the first poet laureate of Germany, the ceremony being performed by the emperor Frederick III. at the diet of Nuremberg in 1487. In 1497 he was appointed by the emperor Maximilian I. professor of poetry and rhetoric at Vienna, and in 1502 was made head of the new Collegium Poetarum et Mathematicorum, with the right of conferring the laureateship. He did much to introduce system into the methods of teaching, to purify the Latin of learned intercourse, and to further the study of the classics, especially the Greek. But he was more than a mere classicist of the Renaissance. He was keenly interested in history and topography, especially in that of his native country. It was he who first unearthed (in the convent of St Emmeran at Regensburg) the remarkable Latin poems of the nun Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, of which he published an edition (Nuremberg, 1501), the historical poem Ligurinus sive de rebus gestis Frederici primi imperatoris libri x. (Augsburg, 1507), and the celebrated map of the Roman empire known as the Tabula Peutingeriana (after Konrad Peutinger, to whom he left it). He projected a great work on Germany; but of this only the Germania generalis and an historical work in prose, De origine, situ, moribus et institutis Nurimbergae libettus, saw the light. As a writer of Latin verse Celtes far surpassed any of his predecessors. He composed odes, elegies, epigrams, dramatic pieces and an unfinished epic, the Theodoriceis. His epigrams, edited by Hartfelder, were published at Berlin in 1881. His editions of the classics are now, of course, out of date. He died at Vienna on the 4th of February 1508. For a full list of Celtes’s works see Engelbert Klüpfel, De vita et scriptis Conradi Celtis (2 vols., Freiburg, 1827); also Johann Aschbach, Die früheren Wanderjahre des Conrad Celtes (Vienna, 1869); Hartmann, Konrad Celtes in Nürnberg (Nuremberg, 1889).

      https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33295/33295-h/33295-h.htm#ar1

      THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA<br /> A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION<br /> ELEVENTH EDITION<br /> VOLUME V SLICE VI<br /> Celtes, Konrad to Ceramics

      Rudolphus Agricola was one of Konrad Celtes' teachers.

    1. Fiona McPherson has some good suggestions/tips in her book on Effective Notetaking. In general it revolves around using relevant icons for your illustrations and limiting your supporting text of the diagrams. (I.e. Have a good icon that explains the process and only 2-4 words paired with the icon).

      I haven't delved into McPherson's work yet, but it's in my pile. She's one of the few people who've written about both note taking and memory, so I'm intrigued. I take it you like her perspective? Does she delve into any science-backed methods or is she coming from a more experiential perspective?

  2. Jul 2022
    1. Is anyone practicing sketchnotes like patterns in their notes?

      I've noticed that u/khimtan has a more visual stye of note taking with respect to their cards, but is anyone else doing this sort of visualization-based type of note taking in the vein of sketchnotes or r/sketchnoting? I've read books by Mike Rohde and Emily Mills and tinkered around in the space, but haven't actively added it to my practice tacitly. For those who do, do you have any suggestions/tips? I suspect that even simple drollery-esque images on cards would help with the memory/recall aspects. This may go even further for those with more visual-based modes of thinking and memory.

      For those interested in more, as well as some intro videos, here are some of my digital notes: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=sketchnotes

      https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wc63sw/is_anyone_practicing_sketchnotes_like_patterns_in/

    1. But online information has a very weak link to memory.

      Why is memory for online pieces weaker for most?

      Is it the lack of sense of "physical" location for helping to store it? What about the seemingly ephemeral character of online data?

    1. For a highly elaborated and skilled processof “ making notes ”, besides its obvious use in recording observationswhich would otherwise be forgotten, is actually an instrument of dis¬covery.

      Beatrice Webb sees the primary uses of notes as a memory device and a discovery device.

    1. Importance of classification —The first impulse wrong—Thenote-book system not the best—Nor the ledger-systemNor the " system " of trusting the memory

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    1. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547390915689566211.html via https://twitter.com/nicolas_gatien/status/1547390946156969984

      Nicolas, I broadly agree with you that many of these factors of reading and writing for understanding and retention are at play and the research in memory and spaced repetition underlines a lot of this. However in practice, one needs to be revisiting and actively using their notes for some particular project to remember them better. The card search may help to create both visual and physical paths that assist in memory too.

      Reliance solely on a physical zettelkasten however may not be enough without active use over time, particularly for the majority of users. It's unlikely that all or even many may undertake this long term practice. Saying that this is either the "best", "optimum", or "only" way would be disingenuous to the diversity of learners and thinkers.

      Those who want to add additional strength to these effects might also use mnemonic methods from indigenous cultures that rely on primary orality. These could include color, images, doodles (drolleries anyone?), or other associative methods, many of which could be easily built into an (antinet) zettelkasten. Lynne Kelly's work in this area can be highly illuminating. For pure practical application and diversity of potential methods, I recommend her book Memory Craft https://amzn.to/3zdqqGp, but she's got much more academic and in depth work that is highly illustrative.

      With this background on orality and memory in mind we might all broadly view wood and stone circles (Stonehenge), menhir, standing stones, songlines, and other mnemonic devices in the archaeological and sociological records as zettelkasten which one keeps entirely in their memory rather than writing them down. We might also consider, based on this and the historical record concerning Druids and their association with trees that the trees served a zettelkasten-like function for those ancient societies. This continues to extend to lots of other cultural and societal practices throughout history. Knowledge from Duane Hamacher et al's book The First Astronomers and Karlie Noone and Krystal De Napoli's Astronomy: Sky Country will underline these theories and practices in modern indigenous settings.

    1. During the seventeenth century, this associative view vanished and was replaced by more literallydescriptive views simply of the thing as it exists in itself.

      The associative emblematic worldview prevalent prior to the seventeenth century began to disappear within Western culture as the rise of the early modern period and the beginning of the scientific revolution began to focus on more descriptive modes of thought and representation.


      Have any researchers done specific work on this shift from emblematic to the descriptive? What examples do they show which support this shift? Any particular heavy influences?

      This section cites:<br /> William B. Ashworth, Jr. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westfall, eds #books/wanttoread<br /> which could be a place to start.


      Note that this same shift from associative and emblematic to descriptive and pedantic coincides not only with the rise of the scientific revolution but also with the effects of rising information overload in a post-Gutenberg world as well as the education reforms of Ramus (late 1500s) et al. as well as the beginning of the move away from scholasticism.


      Is there any evidence to support claims that this worldview stemmed from pagan traditions and cultures and not solely the art of memory traditions from ancient Greece? Could it have been pagan traditions which held onto these and they were supplemented and reinforced by ecclesiastical forces which used the Greek traditions?


      Examples of emblematic worldview: - particular colors of flowers meant specific things (red = love, yellow = friendship, etc.) We still have these or remants - Saints had their associative animals and objects - anniversary gifts had associative meanings (paper, silver, gold, etc.) We still have remnants of these things, though most are associated with wealth (gold, silver, platinum anniversaries). When did this tradition actually start? - what were the associative meanings of rabbits, turtles, and other animals which appear frequently in manuscript marginalia? (We have the example of the bee (Latin: apes) which where frequently used this way as being associated with the idea of imitation.) - other broad categories?

    2. This perspective has been called an “emblematic worldview”; it is clearly visible in the iconography ofmedieval and Renaissance art, for example. Plants and animals are not merely specimens, as in modernscience; they represent a huge raft of associated things and ideas.

      Medieval culture had imbued its perspective of the natural world with a variety of emblematic associations. Plants and animals were not simply specimens or organisms in the world but were emblematic representations of ideas which were also associated with them.

      example: peacock / pride

      Did this perspective draw from some of the older possibly pagan forms of orality and mnemonics? Or were the potential associations simply natural ones which (re-?)grew either historically or as the result of the use of the art of memory from antiquity?

    1. Many of the workers reported that first thing in themorning, or after any interruption in their thought(like a ‘phone call), they have the “where was 1?”problem in a complex and ill-defined space of ideas.The layout of physical materials on their desk givesthem powerful and immediate contextual cues torecover a complex set of threads without difilcultyand delay, “this is my whole context, these are mypersonal piles”

      Following interruptions by colleagues or phone calls at work, people may frequently ask themselves "where was I?" more frequently than "what was I doing?" This colloquialism isn't surprising as our memories for visual items and location are much stronger than actions. Knowledge workers will look around at their environments for contextual clues for what they were doing and find them in piles of paper on their desks, tabs in their computer browser, or even documents (physical or virtual) on their desktops.

    2. portability, thedisplays are getting ever smaller. Unfortunately,small displays force you to classify your notesimmediately you receive or generate them. The studysuggests that knowledge workers may beuncomfortable with these devices as note-takersexcept for non-prima~ aspects of their work such asnoting a telephone number, a diary date or a shortmessage for a colleague. In these cases, users canclassify the note’s subsequent use before they start towrite it. In contrast, if knowledge workers are usingsuch a notebook to jot down an idea they have justheard, they will be forced to classi~ the inherently“unclassifiable” and it is unlikely to inform themlater as it will have disappeared for ever into thebowels of the device. Maybe this is why the A4 pador notebook is an old-favourite of knowledge workerswhose functionality will be hard to match.

      Kidd indicates that knowledge workers may prefer to take notes in physical notebooks because they're not forced to classify them immediately, but they can use their physical presence and location as a means of indicating that some sort of follow up is required. Comparing this to most digital notes which don't have this same sort of location, one is more worried that the computer filing them away will mean that they become lost almost instantaneously. Some notes like diary dates and phone numbers which may have very specific locations for noting them don't fall under these auspices, but other longer and more detailed notes certainly would.


      A digital zettelkasten or commonplace may help to alleviate this as individual ideas are linked and indexed in multiple ways which make them easier to both find, use and expand upon.

    3. Filing is certainlynot their goal.

      I'm reminded here of the old aphorism "Out of sight is out of mind."

      This harkens back to the idea of oral cultures using their environments as memory palaces to remember their culture, laws, and knowledge. Things being within sight mean that they were immediately brought to mind.


      For an office worker, filing an item is tantamount to literally putting both out of their sight as well as their mind.

      Compare this to the more advanced zettelkasten methods where knowledge workers file everything away out of their sight, but with the tacit idea that they'll be regularly revisiting their ideas on index cards to link other ideas to them to keep building upon them. While things may be temporarily out of mind, they're regularly recycled and linked to new ideas. Their re-emergence can cause them to be remembered, re-contextualized, and often feel like serendipity for linking to other ideas in one's collection.

    4. Mander, R., Salomon, G. and Wong, Y. A PileMetaphor for Supporting Casual Organisationof Information. Proceedings of Human Factorsin Computing Systems CHI’92, pp 627-634,1992.

      The quote from this paper references Mander 1992:

      It seems that knowledge workers use physical space, such as desks or floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use [12].

      leads me to believe that the original paper has information which supports office workers using their physical environments as thinking and memory spaces much as indigenous peoples have for their knowledge management systems using orality and memory.

    5. Many knowledge workers have extremely cluttereddesks and floors and yet are seriously disrupted bychanges made to this apparent “muddle” or byneeding to move offices regularly. This supportsearlier studies of otllce work [10, 11]. It seems thatthis apparent “muddle” plays a number of importantroles for them in their work:-

      For scholars of orality, the value of the messiness in many knowledge workers' work spaces is probably not surprising. It's likely that these workers are using their local environment as oral cultures have since time immemorial. They're creating physical songlines or memory palaces in their local environment to which they're spatially attaching memories of the work they're doing, performing, or need to perform. This allows them to offload some of their memory work, storage, and retention to items in their physical space.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s4xx_muNcs

      Don't recommend unless you have 100 hours to follow up on everything here that goes beyond the surface.

      Be aware that this is a gateway for what I'm sure is a relatively sophisticated sales funnel.


      Motivational and a great start, but I wonder how many followed up on these techniques and methods, internalized them and used them every day? I've not read his book, but I suspect it's got the usual mnemonic methods that go back millennia. And yet, these things are still not commonplace. People just don't seem to want to put in the work.

      As a result, they become a sales tool with a get rich quick (get smart quick) hook/scheme. Great for Kwik's pocketbook, but what about actual outcomes for the hundreds who attended or the 34.6k people who've watched this video so far?

      These methods need to be instilled in youth as it's rare for adults to bother.


      Acronyms for remembering things are alright, but not incredibly effective as most people will have issues remembering the acronym itself much less what the letters stand for.


      There seems to be an over-fondness for acronyms for people selling systems like this. (See also Tiago Forte as another example.)

    1. Or if I’m jogging, I associate each thing I want to remember with one of my limbs, then I go through them one at a time “left arm, left leg…” when I’m done running and I write them down.

      Example of someone in the wild using their body as a locus for attaching memories temporarily so that they can recall ideas for making note of later.

  3. Jun 2022
    1. If a guy got lucky at a restaurant, it got included.” Jauregui waxes poetic about The Address Book, calling it “sexual memory…told by spaces.”

      Something interesting here about a "gossipy collaboration" of an address book that crystallized a "sexual memory...told by spaces".

    1. That is why building a Second Brain is a journey of personalgrowth. As your information environment changes, the way yourmind operates starts to be transformed.

      This also happens with the techniques of orality, but from an entirely different perspective. Again, these methods are totally invisible even to an expert on productivity and personal knowledge management.

      Not even a mention here of the ancient Greeks bemoaning the invention of literacy as papering over valuable memory.

    2. Some digital notes apps allow you to displayonly the images saved in your notes, which is a powerful way ofactivating the more intuitive, visual parts of your brain.

      Visual cues one can make in their notes and user interfaces that help to focus or center on these can be useful reminders for what appears in particular notes, especially if visual search is a possibility.

      Is this the reason that Gyuri Lajos very frequently cuts and pastes images into his Hypothes.is notes?

      Which note taking applications leverage this sort of visual mnemonic device? Evernote did certainly, but other text heavy tools like Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam Research don't. Most feed readers do this well leveraging either featured photos, photos in posts, or photos in OGP.

    3. As powerful as search can be, studies5 have found that in manysituations people strongly prefer to navigate their file systemsmanually, scanning for the information they’re looking for. Manualnavigation gives people control over how they navigate, with foldersand file names providing small contextual clues about where to looknext.6

      The studies quoted here are in the mid 80s and early 90s before the rise of better and easier UI methods or more powerful search. I'd have to call this conclusion into question.

      There's also a big difference in what people know, what people prefer, and what knowledgeable people can do most quickly.

      Cross reference this with Dan Russell's research at Google that indicates that very few people know how to use ctrl-f to find or search for things in documents. - https://hyp.is/7a532uxjEeyYfTOctQHvTw/www.youtube.com/channel/UCh6KFtW4a4Ozr81GI1cxaBQ

      Relate it to the idea of associative (memory) trails (Memex), songlines, and method of loci in remembering where things are -- our brains are designed to navigate using memory

    4. First, you are much more likely to remember information you’vewritten down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”10researchers have found that when people actively generate a seriesof words, such as by speaking or writing, more parts of their brainare activated when compared to simply reading the same words.Writing things down is a way of “rehearsing” those ideas, likepracticing a dance routine or shooting hoops, which makes them farmore likely to stick.

      Zachary A. Rosner et al., “The Generation Effect: Activating Broad Neural Circuits During Memory Encoding,” Cortex 49, no. 7 (July–August 2013), 1901–1909, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2012.09.009. #wanttoread

      How does the "Generation Effect" tie into the Feynman technique for understanding, modality shifting for memory and understanding, and even a mild form of spaced repetition for memory?

    1. One of my frustrations with the “science of learning” is that to design experiments which have reasonable limits on the variables and can be quantitatively measured results in scenarios that seem divorced from the actual experience of learning.

      Is the sample size of learning experiments really large enough to account for the differences in potential neurodiversity?

      How well do these do for simple lectures which don't add mnemonic design of some sort? How to peel back the subtle differences in presentation, dynamism, design of material, in contrast to neurodiversities?

      What are the list of known differences? How well have they been studied across presenters and modalities?

      What about methods which require active modality shifts versus the simple watch and regurgitate model mentioned in watching videos. Do people do actively better if they're forced to take notes that cause modality shifts and sensemaking?

    1. It will be interesting to see where Eyler takes his scholarship post-COVID. I’ll be curious to learn how Eyler thinks of the intersection of learning science and teaching practices in an environment where face-to-face teaching is no longer the default.

      Face-to-face teaching and learning has been the majority default for nearly all of human existence. Obviously it was the case in oral cultures, and the tide has shifted a bit with the onset of literacy. However, with the advent of the Internet and the pressures of COVID-19, lots of learning has broken this mold.

      How can the affordances of literacy-only modalities be leveraged for online learning that doesn't include significant fact-to-face interaction? How might the zettelkasten method of understanding, sense-making, note taking, and idea generation be leveraged in this process?

    1. Think about the last time you were the only person in aroom who remembered a salient fact. What did that do for your credibility at thatprecise moment? Memory has that power.
    2. I also like the simplicity of a box. There’s a purpose here, and it has a lot to dowith efficiency. A writer with a good storage and retrieval system can write faster.He isn’t spending a lot of time looking things up, scouring his papers, and patrollingother rooms at home wondering where he left that perfect quote. It’s in the box.

      A card index can be a massive boon to a writer as a well-indexed one, in particular, will save massive amounts of time which might otherwise be spent searching for quotes or ideas that they know they know, but can't easily recreate.

    1. "The idea is that over long periods of time, traces of memory for visual objects are being built up slowly in the neocortex," Clerkin said. "When a word is spoken at a specific moment and the memory trace is also reactivated close in time to the name, this mechanism allows the infants to make a connection rapidly." The researchers said their work also has significant implications for machine learning researchers who are designing and building artificial intelligence to recognize object categories. That work, which focuses on how names teach categories, requires massive amounts of training for machine learning systems to even approach human object recognition. The implication of the infant pathway in this study suggests a new approach to machine learning, in which training is structured more like the natural environment, and object categories are learned first without labels, after which they are linked to labels.

      visual objects are encoded into memory over a long period of time until it becomes familiar. When a word is spoken when the memory trace associated with the visual object is reactivated, connection between word and visual object is made rapidly.

    1. "If you are held up at gunpoint, your brain secretes a bunch of the stress neurotransmitter norepinephrine, akin to an adrenaline rush," he said. "This changes the electrical discharge pattern in specific circuits in your emotional brain, centered in the amygdala, which in turn transitions the brain to a state of heightened arousal that facilitates memory formation, fear memory, since it's scary. This is the same process, we think, that goes awry in PTSD and makes it so you cannot forget traumatic experiences."

      fear hardwires memory of truamatic experiences into the brain.

    1. If Luhmann’s notebox system was not dynamic and fluid and not one of pure order, either, how can one think of Luhmann’s notebox system? In my experience using an Antinet Zettelkasten, I find it to be more organic in nature. Like nature, it has simple laws and fundamental rules by which it operates (like the laws of thermodynamics in physics); yet, it’s also subject to arbitrary decisions. We know this because in describing it, Luhmann uses the word arbitrary to describe its arbitrary internal branching. We can infer that arbitrary, means something that was decided by Luhmann outside of some external and strict criteria (i.e., strict schemes like the Dewey Decimal Classification). (12)12 This arbitrary, random structure contributes to one of its most distinctive aspects of the system–the aspect of surprises. Because of its unique structure, the Antinet is noted as “a surprise generator,” and a system that develops “a creativity of its own.” (13)

      There's some magical thinking involved here. While the system has some arbitrary internal branching, the surprises come from the system's perfect memory that the human user doesn't have. This makes it appear that the system creates its own creativity, but it is really the combinatorics of the perfect memory system with use over time.

      Link to: serendipity of systems based on auto-complete

    1. them birth, and it is galling to have to say, "Now, what wasthat bright idea I had about this?"

      Do not omit these last- they will not come back at will, even when you return to the item that gave

      When reading, it's important to sketch out your own novel ideas and thoughts as you go as they will be difficult or impossible to recover them.

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  4. May 2022
    1. Everything not saved will be lost.—Nintendo “Quit Screen” messag

      Clever use of this quote. How can you do anything but love it?

    2. Incubate Our Ideas Over Time

      The actual incubation here is highly dependent on re-visiting our notes for active use and reloading their contexts back into our minds as well as re-arranging them mentally or otherwise. The incubation doesn't happen within the system though the system can help save them for us. We still need to be able to search and interlink them.

    3. It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedomconsists. I am free because I remember.—Abhinavagupta, tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic
    4. It’s time for us to upgrade our Paleolithic memory

      I'm not a fan of digs at the idea of our "Paleolithic memory", particularly as there is some reasonable evidence that oral memory methods in the Paleolithic are probably vastly superior to those "modern" humans are using now.

      Cross reference: Kelly, Lynne. Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107444973.

    5. As the information tide receded, I started to gain a sense ofconfidence in my ability to find exactly what I needed when I neededit. I became the go-to person in the office for finding that one file, orunearthing that one fact, or remembering exactly what the client hadsaid three weeks earlier. You know the feeling of satisfaction whenyou are the only one in the room who remembers an importantdetail? That feeling became the prize in my personal pursuit tocapitalize on the value of what I knew.

      I had this same sense early on, but it involved a capacious memory rather than a reliance on written notes that I needed to consult.

    6. Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.—David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

      David Allen has apparently not acquainted himself with any of the arts of memory.

    1. the memory castle that jordan peter peterson described i think it has potentially a risk of inducing 00:58:28 confirmation bias

      Jordan Peterson apparently has described using a memory palace (castle?) he used with 12 spaces for writing his book (presumably 12 Rules for life?).

    2. it's like that's 00:44:13 called like maintenance rehearsal in uh in the science of human memory it's basically just re reintroducing yourself to to the concept how you kind of hammer it into your mind versus elaborative rehearsal is kind of what you're talking about and 00:44:26 what you do which is to uh elaborate on more dimensions that the the the knowledge you know uh that relates to in order to create like more of a a visual stamp on your mind

      Dig into research on maintenance rehearsal versus elaborative rehearsal.

    3. in human memory they call it external context um so we have 00:35:59 so the external context for instance is the the spatial cues and the other items that are kind of attached to the note right

      Theory: The external context of one's physical surroundings (pen, paper, textures, sounds, smells, etc.) combined with the internal context, the learner's psychological state, mood, etc., comprises a potentially closed system where each part props up the other for the best learning outcomes.

      Do neurodiversity effects help/hinder this process? What if people are missing one or more of these bits of contextualization? What does the literature look like in this space? Research?

    1. Every bit of new information fills in the blanks of a time that has long since passed out of living memory.

      Our written records have increased incalculably because our living memory doesn't serve us or our society or culture the way it previously did in pre-literate times. The erasure of cruelties and tyrrany is all to easy when we rely only on literacy, particularly when book banning and erasure can easily become the norm.

    1. structural imaging studies of a group of highly trained spatial learners (London taxi drivers) has demonstrated enlargement of specific hippocampal regions corresponding to spatial memory [30],

      Nice to see the taxi driver study pop up here.

      Maguire EA, Valentine ER, Wilding JM, Kapur N. Routes to remembering: The brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience. 2003;6(1):90–5. pmid:12483214 https://doi.org/10.1038/nn988

    1. A few weeks back I joined the Schoenberg Institute's ongoing series "Coffee with a Codex" which featured two manuscripts the Penn Libraries have relating to Rhetorica ad Herennium. One is MS Codex 1630, a 15th century copy of the text itself, and MS Codex 1629 which is a 14th century commentary on Rhetorica.

      As a few here are interested in some of the older memory texts and having access to older copies from the Renaissance is rare, I thought I'd share some of the resources from that session including photos, descriptions, and the videos themselves which have recently been posted online. For those who are interested in these spaces, I hope this is as much of a treat as I thought it was.

      A blog post with some details, links, and great photos: https://schoenberginstitute.org/2022/03/09/ms-codex-1630-ms-codex-1629-rhetoric/

      A short video introduction to the MS Codex 1630: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpFbbHgNQ4

      And here's the full 30 minute video of the walk through session of both manuscripts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6Qdgz93Ec&list=PL8e3GREu0zuC-jTFRF27a88SzTQ6fSISy&index=8

      Full digital copies of both books and bibliographic details for them can be found below: Ms. Codex 1630: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9958935643503681

      Ms. Codex 1629: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9958752123503681

    1. Finally, and as fundamentally as there is a numerical memory and a dia-lectical memory, there is a geometry of memory too. Almost every monas-tic mnemotechnical scheme—ladders, roses, buildings, maps—was based ongeometrical figures: squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, and complex refor-mations of these, including three-dimensional structures

      She doesn't mention it, but they're not only placing things in order for potential memory purposes, but they're also placing an order on their world as well.

      Ladders and steps were frequently used to create an order of beings as in the scala naturae or the Great Chain of Being.

      Some of this is also seen in Ramon Lull's Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Mind, 1305 (Ars Magna)

    1. Experienced practitioners [...] don't have to plod step by step through such a listing of concepts and questions. When they encounter a set of ideas or engage in debate, they can speed through the familiar relationships and spot at a glance the concepts that haven't been taken into account and the questions that haven't been asked. When they work out their own arguments or ideas, they can look at each point from a galaxy of different perspectives that might never come to mind without the help of the combinatorial system and the mental training it provides. Like the Lullian adepts of the Renaissance, they supplemented the natural capacities of their minds with the systematic practices of the combinatorial art. This, in turn, the art of memory seeks to do with the natural capacities of the human memory.  De Umbris Idearum, 'Working Bruno's Magic', p. 164
    1. Moving beyond its role merely as a storehouse, generative aspects of the memory arts were highlighted by scholars like Raymond Llull. He designed mnemonic charts for considering all angles of an issue so as to arrive at otherwise unthought-of possibilities [Kircher, 1669]. This medieval system, consisting of diagrams and accompanying letters for easier exposition, was revived by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher [FIGURES 5 and 6].

      Raymond Llull's combinatoric art of memory was revived by Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher.

      want to read:

      Kircher, Athanasius, Artis Magnae Sciendi (Amsterdam, 1669).

    1. In §§ 4–5, I examine the socio-evolutionary circumstances under which a closed combinatory, such as the one triggered by the Llullian art, was replaced by an open-ended combinatory, such as the one triggered by a card index based on removable entries. In early modernity, improvement in abstraction compelled scholars to abandon the idea that the order of knowledge should mirror the order of nature. This development also implied giving up the use of space as a type of externalization and as the main rule for checking consis-tency.

      F*ck! I've been scooped!

      Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this, though I notice that he doesn't cite Frances A. Yates, which would have certainly been the place for having come up with this historical background (at least that's where I found it.)


      The Llullian arts can be more easily practiced with ideas placed on moveable index cards than they might be with ideas stored in one's own memory. Thus the index card as a tool significantly decreases the overhead and provides an easier user interface for permuting one's ideas and combining them. This decrease in mental work appearing at a time of information overload also puts specific pressure on the older use of the art of memory to put it out of fashion.

    1. The minute we saw his frantic, hand-lettered presentation of the Field Notes credo — “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now” — we knew just what to do.

      https://fieldnotesbrand.com/apparel/remember-it-now-tee

      Field Notes, a manufacturer of notebooks, uses the credo "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now." This is an fun restatement of the idea behind the power of the Feynman technique.

      Link to Ahrens' version of this idea.

  5. Apr 2022
    1. https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/the-contestant-who-outsmarted-the-price-is-right/43337

      Circling back to this a few years later... I just watched the documentary Perfect Bid: The Contestant who Knew Too Much (2017) which follows the story of Theodore Slauson from the article. Apparently he had spent a significant amount of time watching/taping the show and documenting the prices.

      The documentary provides a single example of Slauson using a visual mnemonic for remembering the price of one item. The majority of his method seemed to be the fact that he put his pricing lists into a self-made spaced repetition system which he practiced with extensively. For some of his earliest visits to the show he mentions that a friend who travelled with him quizzed him on items on his price list on the way to the show. This, likely combined with an above average natural memory, allowed him to beat TPIR.

      Outside of the scant memory portion portrayed, it was a reasonably entertaining watch.

      https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6854248/

    2. I was doing some research on counting cards and memory and came across this story from 2010 in Esquire relating to several who were using (unnamed) memory methods to perform better on The Price is Right game show. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating example of applied memory methods in modern culture.

      The Contestant Who Outsmarted ‘The Price Is Right’

      I was doing some research on counting cards and memory and came across this story from 2010 in Esquire relating to several who were using (unnamed) memory methods to perform better on The Price is Right game show. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating example of applied memory methods in modern culture.

      https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7922/price-is-right-perfect-bid-0810/

      2019-10-26 20:00

    1. Excerpts from “The Price is Right” in “Perfect Bid” show this and other events happening exactly as Slauson remembers them. While he dismisses suggestions that he has a photographic memory, his ability to recall details — prices, prizes, contestant names and their bids — is impressively accurate. “Perfect Bid” director C.J. Wallis marvels at Slauson’s memory. “When we interviewed him, he sat down and, without any notes, remembered everything about probably a dozen different times he was in the studio audience,” he said.
    1. Theories of note-taking can tell us about how memory and writingwere understood, and practices of note-taking, about the tools that proved mostuseful in managing textual information in early modern Europe.

      Historical note taking practices can tell us many things aside from just the ways in which textual information was managed. They can also tell us about how people lived, how they thought, how they used memory and writing and how these things were understood culturally.

      We do however need to be careful in how we interpret these documents historically. We need to attempt to view them exegetically and not eisegetically. We also need to be careful to look at them from a "large world" perspective and not presume that small things had large and heavy influence on things to come in the future.

    2. One of his last works, the Aurifodina, “The Mine of All Arts and Sci-ences, or the Habit of Excerpting,” was printed in 1638 (in 2,000 copies) andin another fourteen editions down to 1695 and spawned abridgments in Latin(1658), German (1684), and English.

      Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

      Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

      For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

      Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

      One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

      This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

      How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

      Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

      It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

    1. The connections will still make it easier to remember and understand.

      Linking one's ideas together is a means of contextualizing them as well as situating them in a particular location with respect to your other knowledge. This creation of structure and place (loci) helps to quicken one's memory of not on the new item, but the items to which it is attached.

    1. If a compiler cannotdetermine whether or not two pointers may be aliased, it must assume that eithercase is possible, limiting the set of possible optimizations.

      pointer alias 的 optimization block 怎么理解?

    2. The case where two pointers may designate the same memory location isknown as memory aliasing.

      什么是 memory alias?

    3. Focus your attention on the inner loops, where the bulk of the computationsand memory accesses occur.. Try to maximize the spatial locality in your programs by reading data objectssequentially, with stride 1, in the order they are stored in memory.. Try to maximize the temporal locality in your programs by using a data objectas often as possible once it has been read from memory.

      为了写出有效率的程序,应该考虑哪些因素?

    4. The process that a cache goes through of determining whether a request is ahit or a miss and then extracting the requested word consists of three steps: (1) setselection, (2) line matching, and (3) word extraction.

      process 请求内存,有哪三个步骤?

    1. It is notinsignificant either that among the illustrations of the Roland Barthes par RolandBarthes there are a series of facsimile reproductions of the author’s handwriting,analogic reproductions of linguistic graphemes, pieces of writing silenced,abstracted from the universe of discourse by their photographic reproduction. Inparticular, as we have seen, the three index cards are reproduced not for the sakeof their content, not for their signified, but for a reality-effect value for which ourexpanding taste, says Barthes, encompasses the fashion of diaries, of testimonials,of historical documents, and, most of all, the massive development of photogra-

      phy. In that sense, the reproduction of these three slips ironically resonates, if on a different scale, with the world tour of the mask of Tutankhamen. It refers, if not to the magic silence of a relic, at least to the ghostly parergonal quality of what French language calls a reliquat.

      Hollier argues that Barthes' reproduced cards are not only completely divorced from their original context and use, but that they are reproduced for the sheen of reality and artistic fashion they convey to the reader. So much thought, value, and culture is lost in the worship of these items in this setting compared to their original context.

      This is closely linked to the same sort of context collapse highlighted by the photo of Chief William Berens seated beside the living stones of his elders in Tim Ingold's Why Anthropology Matters. There we only appreciate the sense of antiquity, curiosity, and exoticness of an elder of a culture that is not ours. These rocks, by very direct analogy, are the index cards of the zettelkasten of an oral culture.

      Black and white photo of a man in Western dress (pants, white shirt, and vest) sits on a rock with a forrest in the background. Beside him are several large round, but generally otherwise unremarkable rocks. Chief William Berens seated beside the living stones of his elders; a picture taken by A. Irving Hallowell in 1930, between Grand Rapids and Pikangikum, Ontario, Canada. (American Philosophical Society)

    1. the brain stores social information differently thanit stores information that is non-social. Social memories are encoded in a distinctregion of the brain. What’s more, we remember social information moreaccurately, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “social encodingadvantage.” If findings like this feel unexpected, that’s because our culturelargely excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect. Socialexchanges with others might be enjoyable or entertaining, this attitude holds, butthey’re no more than a diversion, what we do around the edges of school orwork. Serious thinking, real thinking, is done on one’s own, sequestered fromothers.

      "Social encoding advantage" is what psychologists refer to as the phenomenon of people remembering social information more accurately than other types.

      Reference to read: “social encoding advantage”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 284.

      It's likely that the social acts of learning and information exchange in oral societies had an additional stickiness over and beyond the additional mnemonic methods they would have used as a base.

      The Western cultural tradition doesn't value the social coding advantage because it "excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect" (Paul, 2021). Instead it provides advantage and status to the individual thinking on their own. We greatly prefer the idea of the "lone genius" toiling on their own, when this is hardly ever the case. Our availability bias often leads us to believe it is the case because we can pull out so many famous examples, though in almost all cases these geniuses were riding on the shoulders of giants.

      Reference to read: remember social information more accurately: Jason P. Mitchell, C. Neil Macrae, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (May 2004): 4912–17

      Reference to read: the brain stores social information: Jason P. Mitchell et al., “Thinking About Others: The Neural Substrates of Social Cognition,” in Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People, ed. Karen T. Litfin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 63–82.

    2. In these sessions, students didn’t listen to a description ofcomputer science concepts, or engage in a discussion about the work performedby computer scientists; they actually did the work themselves, under the tutors’close supervision.

      The process seen in cognitive apprenticeships seems more akin to the sorts of knowledge transfer done in primary oral indigenous cultures by passing down stories and performing (song, dance, art, etc.) knowledge.

      It shouldn't be surprising that cognitive apprenticeships work well given their general use by oral cultures over millennia.

      link to: Writing out answers will show gaps in knowledge Performing actions will show gaps in knowledge

    1. Roberts, B. (2006) ‘Cinema as Mnemotechnics’, Angelaki, 11 (1):55-63.

      this looks interesting and based on quotes in this paper in the final pages might be interesting or useful with respect to pulling apart memory and orality

    2. The recorded memories madepossible by various technological prostheses or memory supportsStiegler refers to as ‘tertiary memory’.

      What relation does Stiegler's 'tertiary memory' have with respect to the 'third archive' if we mix these two together?

    3. it is valuable to turnto the work of Bernard Stiegler, and specifically to his idea of‘tertiary memory’. Stiegler develops this concept of tertiary memorythrough a reading of Husserl, and proposes it as a supplement (andcorrective) to Husserl’s understanding of primary and secondaryretention.

      These two should be interesting to read on memory and how they delineate its various layers.

      See: Stiegler, B. (2009) Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Trans. S. Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    4. Krapp argues that, despite its ‘respectablelineage’, the card index generally ‘figures only as an anonymous,furtive factor in text generation, acknowledged – all the way into thetwentieth century – merely as a memory crutch’ (361).2 A keyreason for this is due to the fact that the ‘enlightened scholar isexpected to produce innovative thought’ (361); knowledgeproduction, and any prostheses involved in it, ‘became and remaineda private matter’ (361).

      'Memory crutch' implies a physical human failing that needs assistance rather than a phrase like aide-mémoire that doesn't draw that same attention.

    1. same with our with the with the dendrites we will always tell you the story tell the story to the juvenile who's coming through the novices who's coming through the ceremony will tell them so as they 00:47:47 get to a certain age or a certain time or a certain experience in the ceremony we will then pass that knowledge onto him and we'll take it to him so these hieroglyphs and 00:47:58 petroglyphs and the etchings on the rocks and the paintings on there on the cave walls that's our library that is our library

      The dendroglyphs (markings on trees) or the petroglyphs (markings on stone in the stony territories) are the libraries of the indigenous peoples who always relate their stories from the markings back up to the sky.

      via Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson


      Can this be linked to the practices of the Druids who may have had similar methods? How about linking the petroglyphs in the Celtic (English) countryside?

    2. and of course the white fellas learned very quickly because they learned from the romans the british learned from iran and the first thing you attack other people from religious beliefs 00:46:28 that's the first thing you've done back in those days we didn't have towers communication so you didn't target your communication towers but you communicate you you attacked the way people transmitted 00:46:41 their knowledge

      The white fellas learned very quickly from the Romans that the first thing you attack is other people's religious beliefs, which are the modern day equivalent of communication towers. That's how oral societies communicate their knowledge and culture.

      via Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson

    1. Redistribution can easily become a bottleneck due to the bandwidthof cross-device links usually being magnitudes smaller than that of the on-device memory bus.

      redistribution arrays 可能会遇到什么问题?

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. Second, don’t manually delete the resource out from underneath the std::unique_ptr.

      有什么误用 std::unique_ptr 的情况?

    1. By default, C++ will provide a copy constructor and copy assignment operator if one is not explicitly provided. These compiler-provided functions do shallow copies, which may cause problems for classes that allocate dynamic memory. So classes that deal with dynamic memory should override these functions to do deep copies.

      c++ 默认提供什么样的 copy constructor,这会导致什么问题?

    1. One of the most effective ways of enhancing memories is to provide them with a link to your personal life.

      Personalizing ideas using existing memories is a method of brining new knowledge into one's own personal context and making them easier to remember.

      link this to: - the pedagogical idea of context shifting as a means of learning - cards about reframing ideas into one's own words when taking notes

      There is a solid group of cards around these areas of learning.


      Random thought: Personal learning networks put one into a regular milieu of people who are talking and thinking about topics of interest to the learner. Regular discussions with these people helps one's associative memory by tying the ideas into this context of people with relation to the same topic. Humans are exceedingly good at knowing and responding to social relationships and within a personal learning network, these ties help to create context on an interpersonal level, but also provide scaffolding for the ideas and learning that one hopes to do. These features will tend to reinforce each other over time.

      On the flip side of the coin there is anecdotal evidence of friends taking courses together because of their personal relationships rather than their interest in the particular topics.

    2. Referring to other memories can place your item in a better context, simplify wording, and reduce interference.

      Referring to other memories when studying can help to place things in context and reduce potential interference of memories.

    3. The reason for this has been discussed earlier in the context of the minimum information principle: you should always try to make sure your brain works in the exactly same way at each repetition.

      There is research that one's first guess or intuition is often correct. In a similar mode, one's first associative thought will likely be the strongest and easiest to remember. It's also more likely that the thought path will occur again and thereby make that association easier to remember in the future.

      What does this research indicate? Has anyone tested for this effect? Does it have a name? the TK effect? (And if it doesn't the TK Effect is actually quite an apt one.)


      This doesn't seem to be the same definition of the minimum information principle as before.

    4. However, the great advantage of enumerations over sets is that they are ordered and they force the brain to list them always in the same order. An ordered list of countries contains more information than the set of countries that can be listed in any order. Paradoxically, despite containing more information, enumerations are easier to remember.

      Enumerations are sets with a particular order. The fact that they have an order, in which each item might be associated with the next, makes them easier to remember.

      The greater information in an enumeration provides additional structure which makes the items easier to remember.

    5. Highly recommended by:

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Soren Bjornstad </span> in Rules for Designing Precise Anki Cards - Control-Alt-Backspace (<time class='dt-published'>03/21/2022 05:21:46</time>)</cite></small>

    1. A word of warning before you go import-crazy, though: cards you create yourself are invariably better than cards you import, even if the person who shared them is a spaced-repetition expert (which they usually are not). The act of making the cards helps you learn them, plus you won’t be creating any cards that you don’t care about, and you can use personal references on them. Further, importing large quantities of cards often tempts you to try to memorize information you don’t fully understand, which can waste immense amounts of time. That probably sounds like such a dumb idea you would never do it, but it’s so common I guarantee you’ve done it at some point in your life – it’s surprisingly difficult to notice it’s happening.

      The best space repetition decks are ones the learner has created for themselves. Creating the cards yourself will act as a first layer of repetition, but it will help you fashion them in your own words and in a way that best dovetails how the information fits into your scaffold of existing information. By creating your own cards, you're more likely to do so for information you're most interested in . Importing cards from others defeats these benefits and increases the likelihood that you'll create a mound of material that is both uninteresting as well as material one doesn't have pre-existing scaffolding for.

  6. Mar 2022
    1. René Descartes designed a deck of playing cards that also functioned as flash cards to learn geometry and mechanics. (King of Clubs from The use of the geometrical playing-cards, as also A discourse of the mechanick powers. By Monsi. Des-Cartes. Translated from his own manuscript copy. Printed and sold by J. Moxon at the Atlas in Warwick Lane, London. Via the Beinecke Library, from which you can download the entire deck.)

      My immediate thought is that this deck of cards was meant as a memory palace. I'm curious what training in rhetoric/memory methods Descartes must have had?

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkjf0hCKOCE

      The sky is a textbook. The sky is a lawbook. The sky is a science book. —Duane Hamacher, (1:24)

      Hamacher uses the Western description "method of loci" rather than an Indigenous word or translated word.


      The words "myth", "legend", "magic", "ritual", and "religion" in both colloquial English and even anthropology are highly loaded terms.

      Words like "narrative" and "story" are better used instead for describing portions of the Indigenous cultures which we have long ignored and written off for their seeming simplicity.

    1. The idea that ‘everything onEarth is reflected in the sky’ and of ‘reading the stars’ to understandyour environment are two of the most common and widespreadthemes in Indigenous astronomy.

      Hidden in the phrase that "everything on Earth is reflected in the sky" or the idea of "reading the stars to understand one's environment" is the idea of associative memory. If you know one thing, you necessarily know another. Don't let this subtle idea of the words 'reflect' or 'read' hide what is going on.

    2. The stars also give meaning to our existence. The sky is a canvasof sparkling dots that we connect to form familiar patterns, to whichwe assign narratives about their formation and meaning. Across thesky, ancestors, heroic figures, animals, landscapes and fantasticbeasts tell stories of the human experience. They speak of braveryand deceit, war and peace, sex and violence, punishment andreward. It is fascinating to find striking similarities in stories about thestars across vastly different cultures, with even more similarities in theways they are utilised.

      Are these graphic and memorable stories strikingly similar because of the underlying packages of orality and memory used in these cultures?

      This is one of my primary motivations for reading this text.

    3. Indigenous sciences are highly interconnected, while Westernscience tends to be divided into different categories by discipline, witheach diverging into ever smaller focus areas.

      Indigenous sciences are highly interconnected while Western sciences tend to be highly sub-divided into ever smaller specializations.


      Are Indigenous sciences naturally interconnected or do they form that way because of the associative memory underlying the cultural orality by which they are formed and transmitted? (I would suspect so, but don't yet have the experience to say definitively. Evidence for this should be collected.)

    4. Wanta JampijinpaPatrick, a Warlpiri Elder, teaches that north corresponds to ‘Law’,south to ‘ceremony’, west to ‘language’ and east to ‘skin’. ‘Country’lies at the intersection of these directions, at the centre of thecompass: Westerners conceptualise it as ‘here’.

      In Warlpiri, the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west associatively correspond with the ideas of "Law", "ceremony", "skin", and "language" respectively. The idea of "Country" lies at the center of these directions in a space that Westerners would describe as "here".

      This directional set up underlines the value of each of the related concepts and provides pride of place to "Country" and one's being "in Country".


      Compare these with the Japanese pattern of こ (ko), そ (so), あ (a), ど (do) which describe a location with respect to the speaker.


      Western readers should notice here, that the author centers the name and position of the origin of this knowledge at the start of the sentence. While it is associated with him, it is also certainly associated with all his preceding ancestors and Elders who passed this information down.

      One might suspect that this practice isn't as common with base-level cultural knowledge, but that it becomes more important at succeeding levels of intimate area-based restricted knowledge. Placing the origin of the knowledge here at a more basic level of knowledge may help to instruct Western readers slowly and more surely understand how this foreign culture works.

      How closely does this practice generally look like the Western idea of citing one's sources which only evolved slowly over history and became more common with the flood of information in the 1500s?

    5. when the nose of theshark touches the horizon at sunset, it is supposed to signify thatsharks are breeding and are considered dangerous as they swimclose to shore.

      The Big Dipper, part of Ursa Major, appears upside down in the southern Hemisphere and is associated with the shape of a shark in the Torres Strait. When its "nose" touches the horizon at sunset, it's associated with breeding of nearby sharks who swim in shallow waters.

      Notice the variety of associations of time (both of year, sunset, and breeding) with an animal (in both the water and in the sky) along with a specific location (Torres Strait).

    1. Too many people who try to predict the future of education and education technology have not bothered to learn the alphabet — the grammar of schooling, to borrow a phrase from education historian Larry Cuban. That grammar includes the beliefs and practices and memory of schooling — our collective memory, not just our own personal experiences of school. That collective memory — that's history.

      Collective memory is our history.

      Something interesting here tying collective memory to education. Dig into this and expand on it.

    2. "Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair," the theologian Walter Brueggeman wrote.

    1. Topic A topic was once a spot not a subjecttopic. to ̆p’ı ̆k. n. 1. The subject of a speech, essay, thesis, or discourse. 2. A subject of discussion or con-versation. 3. A subdivision of a theme, thesis, or outline.*With no teleprompter, index cards, or even sheets of paper at their disposal, ancient Greek and Roman orators often had to rely on their memories for holding a great deal of information. Given the limi-tations of memory, the points they chose to make had to be clustered in some meaningful way. A popular and quite reliable method for remembering information was known as loci (see Chapter 9), where loci was Latin for “place.” It involved picking a house you knew well, imagining it in your mind’s eye, and then associating the facts you wanted to recall with specifi c places inside of that house. Using this method, a skillful orator could mentally fi ll up numerous houses with the ideas he needed to recall and then simply “visit” them whenever he spoke about a particular subject. The clusters of informa-tion that speakers used routinely came to be known as commonplaces, loci communes in Latin and koinos topos in Greek. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle referred to them simply as topos, meaning “places.” And that’s how we came to use topic to refer to subject or grouping of information.**

      Even in the western tradition, the earliest methods of mnemonics tied ideas to locations, from whence we get the ideas of loci communes (in Latin) and thence commonplaces and commonplace books. The idea of loci communes was koinos topos in Greek from whence we have derived the word 'topic'.

      Was this a carryover from other local oral traditions or a new innovation? Given the prevalence of very similar Indigenous methods around the world, it was assuredly not an innovation. Perhaps it was a rediscovery after the loss of some of these traditions locally in societies that were less reliant on orality and moving towards more reliance on literacy for their memories.

    1. Human minds are made of memories, and today those memories have competition. Biological memory capacities are being supplanted, or at least supplemented, by digital ones, as we rely on recording—phone cameras, digital video, speech-to-text—to capture information we’ll need in the future and then rely on those stored recordings to know what happened in the past. Search engines have taken over not only traditional reference materials but also the knowledge base that used to be encoded in our own brains. Google remembers, so we don’t have to. And when we don’t have to, we no longer can. Or can we? Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology offers concise, nontechnical explanations of major principles of memory and attention—concepts that all teachers should know and that can inform how technology is used in their classes. Teachers will come away with a new appreciation of the importance of memory for learning, useful ideas for handling and discussing technology with their students, and an understanding of how memory is changing in our technology-saturated world.

      How much history is covered here?

      Will mnemotechniques be covered here? Spaced repetition? Note taking methods in the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions?

    1. A Smart pointer is a composition class that is designed to manage dynamically allocated memory and ensure that memory gets deleted when the smart pointer object goes out of scope.

      smart pointer 是什么?有什么好处?

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_circle

      Some timber circle sites to look into: - Secotan in North Carolina circa 1585 - Poverty Point - Hopewell timber circles (Moorehead Circle and Stubbs Earthworks) in Ohio - Cahokia

    2. An early example of a timber circle witnessed by Europeans was recorded by watercolor artist John White in July 1585 when he visited the Algonquian village of Secotan in North Carolina. White was the artist-illustrator and mapmaker for the Roanoke Colony expedition sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to begin the first attempts at British colonization of the Americas.[2] White's works represent the sole-surviving visual record of the native inhabitants of the Americas as encountered by England's first colonizers on the Atlantic seaboard.[3] White's watercolor and the writings of the chronicler who accompanied him, Thomas Harriot, describes a great religious festival, possibly the Green Corn ceremony, with participants holding a ceremonial dance at a timber circle. The posts of the circle were carved with faces. Harriot noted that many of the participants had come from surrounding villages and that "every man attyred in the most strange fashion they can devise havinge certayne marks on the backs to declare of what place they bee." and that "Three of the fayrest Virgins" danced around a central post at the center of the timber circle.[4]

      Artist, illustrator and mapmaker John White painted a watercolor in July 1585 of a group of Native Americans in the Secotan village in North America. Both he and chronicler Thomas Harriot described a gathering of Indigenous peoples gathered in the Algonquian village as part of Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke Colony expedition. They describe a festival with participants holding a dance at a timber circle, the posts of which were carved with with faces.

      Harriot wrote that participants had come from surrounding villages and that "every man attyred in the most strange fashion they can devise havinge certayne marks on the backs to declare of what place they bee."

      Secotans dancing in a timber circle in North Carolina, watercolor painted by John White in 1585


      This evidence would generally support some of Lynne Kelly's thesis in Knowledge and Power. A group of neighboring peoples gathering, possibly for the Green Corn Ceremony, ostensibly to strengthen social ties and potentially to strengthen and trade knowledge.

      Would we also see others of her list of markers in the area?

      Read references: - Daniels, Dennis F. "John White". NCpedia. Retrieved 2017-12-19. - Tucker, Abigal (December 2008). "Sketching the Earliest Views of the New World". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2017-12-19. - "A Selection of John White's Watercolors : A festive dance". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 2017-12-19.

    1. Restrictive placement policies of this kind lead to a type of miss known asa conflict miss, in which the cache is large enough to hold the referenced dataobjects, but because they map to the same cache block, the cache keeps missing.

      如何理解 conflict miss?

    2. When the size of the working set exceedsthe size of the cache, the cache will experience what are known as capacity misses.

      什么是 capacity miss?

    3. The decision about which block to replace is governed by the cache’s replacementpolicy.

      当 cache misses 发生的时候,需要做什么事情,有哪些方式?

    4. a program needs a particular data object d from level k + 1, it first looksfor d in one of the blocks currently stored at level k. If d happens to be cachedat level k, then we have what is called a cache hit.

      什么是 cache hits?什么是 cache misses?

    5. It is important to realize that while the block size is fixedbetween any particular pair of adjacent levels in the hierarchy, other pairs of levelscan have different block sizes.

      在 memory hierarchy 之间的 block size 有什么特点?

    6. The central idea of a memory hierarchy is that for each k, the faster and smallerstorage device at level k serves as a cache for the larger and slower storage device

      memory hierarchy 的中心想法是什么?该如何理解?

    7. Their alignment rule is based on the principle that any primitiveobject of K bytes must have an address that is a multiple of K.

      data alignment 的原则是什么?

    8. The memory system must periodically refresh every bit of memory byreading it out and then rewriting it.

      DRAM 不稳定,在计算机中如何防止其变化?

    1. But crucially, he believes the pool at the center of the complex may have also served as a surface to observe and map the stars. The water surface would have mirrored the sky, as water does – none other than Leonardo da Vinci pointed out the attributes of inert standing water when studying the night sky. For one thing, the stars were adored by the Phoenicians, whether as gods or deceased ancestors; and the position of the constellations was of keen interest to the sailors among them for navigation purposes, Nigro points out.

      Lorenzo Nigro indicates that the "kothon" of Motya in southern Sicily was a pool of Baal whose surface may have been used to observe and map the stars. He also indicates that the Phoenicians adored the stars potentially as gods or deceased ancestors. This is an example of a potentially false assumption often seen in archaeology of Western practitioners misconstruing Indigenous practices based on modern ideas of religion and culture.

      I might posit that this sort of practice is more akin to that of the science of Indigenous peoples who used oral and mnemonic methods in combination with remembering their histories and ancestors.

      Cross reference this with coming reading in The First Astronomers (to come) which may treat this in more depth.


      Leonardo da Vinci documented the attributes of standing water for studying the night sky.

      Where was this and what did it actually entail?

    1. Washington State mathteacher Brendan Jeffreys turned to gesture as a way of easing the mental loadcarried by his students, many of whom come from low-income households,speak English as a second language, or both. “Academic language—vocabularyterms like ‘congruent’ and ‘equivalent’ and ‘quotient’—is not something mystudents hear in their homes, by and large,” says Jeffreys, who works for theAuburn School District in Auburn, a small city south of Seattle. “I could see thatmy kids were stumbling over those words even as they were trying to keep trackof the numbers and perform the mathematical operations.” So Jeffreys devised aset of simple hand gestures to accompany, or even temporarily replace, theunfamiliar terms that taxed his students’ ability to carry out mental math.

      Mathematics can often be more difficult compared to other subjects as students learning new concepts are forced not only to understand entirely new concepts, but simultaneously are required to know new vocabulary to describe those concepts. Utilizing gestures to help lighten the cognitive load of the new vocabulary to allow students to focus on the concepts and operations can be invaluable.

    2. Evaluations of the platform show that users who follow the avatar inmaking a gesture achieve more lasting learning than those who simply hear theword. Gesturing students also learn more than those who observe the gesture butdon’t enact it themselves.

      Manuela Macedonia's research indicates that online learners who enact specific gestures as they learn words learn better and have longer retention versus simply hearing words. Students who mimic these gestures also learn better than those who only see the gestures and don't use them themselves.

      How might this sort of teacher/avatar gesturing be integrated into online methods? How would students be encouraged to follow along?

      Could these be integrated into different background settings as well to take advantage of visual memory?

      Anecdotally, I remember some Welsh phrases from having watched Aran Jones interact with his cat outside on video or his lip syncing in the empty spaces requiring student responses. Watching the teachers lips while learning can be highly helpful as well.

    3. In a study published in 2020, for example, Macedonia and a group of sixcoauthors compared study participants who had paired new foreign-languagewords with gestures to those who had paired the learning of new words withimages of those words. The researchers found evidence that the motor cortex—the area of the brain that controls bodily movement—was activated in thegesturing group when they reencountered the vocabulary words they hadlearned; in the picture-viewing group, the motor cortex remained dormant. The“sensorimotor enrichment” generated by gesturing, Macedonia and hercoauthors suggest, helps to make the associated word more memorable

      Manuela Macedonia and co-authors found that pairing new foreign words with gestures created activity in the motor cortex which helped to improve the associative memory for the words and the movements. Using images of the words did not create the same motor cortex involvement.

      It's not clear which method of association is better, at least as written in The Extended Mind. Was one better than the other? Were they tested separately, together, and in a control group without either? Surely one would suspect that using both methods together would be most beneficial.

    4. the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory during foreign-language encoding.

      Manuela Macedonia wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory for language acquisition.

    5. Back then, Macedonia foundherself increasingly frustrated with the conventional format of foreign-languagecourses: a lot of sitting, listening, and writing. That’s not how anyone learnstheir native language, she notes. Young children encounter new words in a richsensorimotor context: as they hear the word “apple,” they see and touch theshiny red fruit; they may even bring it to their mouth, tasting its sweet flesh andsmelling its crisp scent. All of these many hooks for memory are missing fromthe second-language classroom.

      Most foreign language leaners spend all their time in classrooms or at home sitting down, listening, reading, and writing. This is antithetical to how children acquire language in more natural settings where they're able to move around, interact, taste, touch, smell, etc. as they learn new words in their language. These additional sensory mnemonic techniques add an incredible amount of information and associative hooks to help them remember new words and grammatical structures.

    6. Kerry Ann Dickson, an associate professor of anatomy and cell biology atVictoria University in Australia, makes use of all three of these hooks when sheteaches. Instead of memorizing dry lists of body parts and systems, her studentspractice pretending to cry (the gesture that corresponds to the lacrimal gland/tearproduction), placing their hands behind their ears (cochlea/hearing), and swayingtheir bodies (vestibular system/balance). They feign the act of chewing(mandibular muscles/mastication), as well as spitting (salivary glands/salivaproduction). They act as if they were inserting a contact lens, as if they werepicking their nose, and as if they were engaging in “tongue-kissing” (motionsthat represent the mucous membranes of the eye, nose, and mouth, respectively).Dickson reports that students’ test scores in anatomy are 42 percent higher whenthey are taught with gestures than when taught the terms on their own.

      Example of the use of visual, auditory, and proprioceptive methods used in the pedagogy of anatomy.

    7. proprioceptive cue may be the mostpowerful of the three: research shows that making gestures enhances our abilityto think even when our gesturing hands are hidden from our view.

      Annie Murphy Paul indicates that proprioceptive associations may be more powerful than auditory or visual ones as she notes that "research shows that making gestures enhances our ability to think even when our gesturing hands are hidden from our view."

      This is something that could be researched and analyzed.

      My personal experience is that visual >> auditory >> smell >> proprioception. Smell with respect to memory is incredibly difficult to exercise as are auditory method. Visual and proprioceptive methods are easier to actively practice though.

    8. Designed gestures offer another benefit as well: they are especially effectiveat reinforcing our memory.

      Intentional gestures can be used as mnemonic devices as the movement can be associated with things we wish to remember.

    9. In a study carried out by Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues at theUniversity of Chicago, a group of adults was recruited to watch video recordingsof children solving conservation problems, like the water-pouring task weencountered earlier. They were then offered some basic information aboutgesture: that gestures often convey important information not found in speech,and that they could attend not only to what people say with their words but alsoto what they “say” with their hands. It was suggested that they could payparticular attention to the shape of a hand gesture, to the motion of a handgesture, and to the placement of a hand gesture. After receiving these simpleinstructions, study subjects watched the videos once more. Before the briefgesture training, the observing adults identified only around 30 to 40 percent ofinstances when children displayed emerging knowledge in their gestures; afterreceiving the training, their hit rate shot up to about 70 percent.

      Concentrating on the shape, motion, and placement of hand gestures dramatically help a learner to more concretely understand material and understanding in others.

      Link this to the use of movement in dance with respect to memory in Lynne Kelly's work.

    10. In one study, subjects who had watched a videotapedspeech were 33 percent more likely to recall a point from the talk if it wasaccompanied by a gesture. This effect, detected immediately after the subjectsviewed the recording, grew even more pronounced with the passage of time:thirty minutes after watching the speech, subjects were more than 50 percentmore likely to remember the gesture-accompanied points.

      People are more likely to remember points from talks that are accompanied by gestures. This effect apparently increases with time.

      What does the effect of time have on increased lengths? Does it continue to increase and then decrease at some point? Anecdotally I often recall quotes and instances from movies based on movements that I make.

      What effects, if any, are seen in studies of mirror-neurons and those with impairment of them? What memory effects might be seen with those on the autism spectrum who don't have strong mirror-neuron responses? If this is impaired, what might account for their improved memories for some types of material? Which types of material do they have improved memories for?

      Is the same true of drawing points from a speech using the ideas of sketchnotes? Is drawing an extension of gestural improvement of memory?

    11. Research shows that moving our hands advances our understanding ofabstract or complex concepts, reduces our cognitive load, and improves ourmemory.

      movement and gesture as a mnemonic device

    12. Research demonstrates that gesture can enhance our memory by reinforcing thespoken word with visual and motor cues.

      Research shows that gesture can impact our memories by helping to associate speech with visual cues.

      References for this?

      Link this to the idea that our visual memories are much stronger than our verbal ones.

    1. Psychologists call this mechanism activeinhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007

      Active inhibition is the filter that prevents our minds from being constantly flooded with memories and allows us to focus. It acts as a barrier between our long term memories and our immediate present.

      Is the filter behind active inhibition really active or is it passive? What is the actual physiological mechanism?

    2. Although hewas very good at remembering facts, Shereshevsky was almostincapable of getting the gist of something, the concepts behind theparticulars and distinguishing the relevant facts from minor details.

      Solomon Shereshevsky faced an extreme version of the sort of information overload many of can relate to, however in his case, because his memory was so good, he found it difficult to get the gist of something because the minor details drowned out the broader ideas.

    3. Transferring ideas into the external memory also allows us toforget them.

      While placing our ideas into external memory devices like notebooks or zettelkasten may allow us to forget them, mnemotechniques allow us to perform a similar task, but provides us hooks upon which they might be hung by means of association with other ideas. These hooks and association can be reactivated at later times when the ideas may be needed.

      The zettelkasten allows us to do multiple things. It encourages us to clarify our ideas by writing them down, we extend them by linking them to other contexts, we actively write towards a multitude of interesting goals, by writing, we can forget the original ideas which we can later serendipitously re-link to new concepts.

    1. Like computers, the human brain also builds up garbage that needs to be recycled, because memory space is finite, not infinite.

      Example of a writer thinking that the human memory is more finite than is probably the case.

  7. Feb 2022
    1. To create trails  When we are studying a text we need to take the time to understand more than just the storyline. During your second reading, any comments made during the first reading (marginal comments or summaries) will quickly give you the gist of your first reading, so that you can take advantage of your second.

      While multiple readings of a text in antiquity may have been rarer, due to the cheap proliferation of books, one can more easily "blaze a trail" through their reading to make it easier or quicker to rebuild context on subsequent readings.


      Look at history of reading to see which books would have been more likely re-read, particularly outside of one's primary "area" of expertise.

      Link to the trails mentioned by Vannevar Bush in As We May Think.

    1. The techniques we have outlined—randomization, stack protection, and lim-iting which portions of memory can hold executable code—are three of the mostcommon mechanisms used to minimize the vulnerability of programs to bufferoverflow attacks

      有什么技术可以保护程序免收攻击?

    2. The array elements areordered in memory in row-major order, meaning all elements of row 0, whichcan be written A[0], followed by all elements of row 1 (A[1]), and so on.

      array 在 memory 中的排列顺序是怎么样的?

    3. The final example shows that one cancompute the difference of two pointers within the same data structure, with theresult being data having type long and value equal to the difference of the twoaddresses divided by the size of the data type.

      如何计算两个 pointers 的差?

    4. At times, however, local data mustbe stored in memory. Common cases of this include these:.There are not enough registers to hold all of the local data..The address operator ‘&’ is applied to a local variable, and hence we must beable to generate an address for it..Some of the local variables are arrays or structures and hence must be accessedby array or structure references.

      什么时候 local data 必须要被存放在 memory 里面?

    1. Amy Rae Fox@thoughtafoxYES I underline and highlight when I read and YES I know xyz studies demonstrate highlighting is not an 'effective learning technique' ... but not all learning is about remembering #toolsforthought9:41 PM · Feb 1, 2022·Twitter Web App

      YES I underline and highlight when I read and YES I know xyz studies demonstrate highlighting is not an 'effective learning technique' ... but not all learning is about remembering #toolsforthought

      — Amy Rae Fox (@thoughtafox) February 2, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      An interesting perspective. Worth comparing the ideas of learning and remembering and what relationship they have to each other.

    1. Trying to find research on sketchnoting during presentations. Research directly comparing sketchnoting and more traditional notetaking does not seem to exist. References to dual coding theory do not count. Why is this popular?
    1. “Good manners can replace intellect by providing a set of memorized responses to almost every situation in life,” he wrote. “Memorized responses eliminate the need for thought. Thought is not a very worthwhile pastime anyway. Thinking allows the brain, an inert and mushy organ, to exert unfair domination over more sturdy and active body parts.”
    1. Even thoughelaboration works verifiably well for deep understanding, it might notbe the best choice if you just want to learn isolated encyclopaedicfacts (Rivard 1994).

      For deep understanding the elaboration method may be the best tool, but may not be the best choice for learning isolated encyclopedic facts.


      By learning isolated facts do they really mean memorizing here? In which case, perhaps using mnemotechniques is the best way to create synthetic associative links by which to tie one's knowledge into their other mental frameworks of knowledge. If thought about this way one is really elaborating their knowledge in a synthetic manner instead of more naturally. Either way, you're doing some form of elaborating as a means of assuming the knowledge. Both forms are work, though slightly different.

    2. Even without any feedback, we will be better off ifwe try to remember something ourselves (Jang et al. 2012).
    3. If we put effort into the attempt of retrievinginformation, we are much more likely to remember it in the long run,even if we fail to retrieve it without help in the end (Roediger andKarpicke 2006)
    4. When we try to answer a question before we know how to, we willlater remember the answer better, even if our attempt failed (Arnoldand McDermott 2013)
    5. “Manipulations such as variation, spacing, introducing contextualinterference, and using tests, rather than presentations, as learningevents, all share the property that they appear during the learningprocess to impede learning, but they then often enhance learning asmeasured by post-training tests of retention and transfer. Conversely,manipulations such as keeping conditions constant and predictable andmassing trials on a given task often appear to enhance the rate oflearning during instruction or training, but then typically fail to supportlong-term retention and transfer” (Bjork, 2011, 8).

      This is a surprising effect for teaching and learning, and if true, how can it be best leveraged. Worth reading up on and testing this effect.

      Indeed humans do seem built for categorizing and creating taxonomies and hierarchies, and perhaps allowing this talent to do some of the work may be the best way to learn not only in the short term, but over longer term evolutionary periods?

    6. Learning requires effort, because we have to think to understandand we need to actively retrieve old knowledge to convince ourbrains to connect it with new ideas as cues. To understand howgroundbreaking this idea is, it helps to remember how much effortteachers still put into the attempt to make learning easier for theirstudents by prearranging information, sorting it into modules,categories and themes. By doing that, they achieve the opposite ofwhat they intend to do. They make it harder for the student to learnbecause they set everything up for reviewing, taking away theopportunity to build meaningful connections and to make sense ofsomething by translating it into one’s own language. It is like fastfood: It is neither nutritious nor very enjoyable, it is just convenient

      Some of the effort that teachers put into their educational resources in an attempt to make learning faster and more efficient is actually taking away the actual learning opportunities of the students to sort, arrange, and make meaningful connections between the knowledge and to their own prior knowledge bases.

      In mathematics, rather than showing a handful of methods for solving a problem, the teacher might help students to explore those problem solving spaces first and then assist them into creating these algorithms. I can't help but think about Inventional Geometry by William George Spencer that is structured this way. The teacher has created a broader super-structure of problems, but leaves it largely to the student to do the majority of the work.

    7. Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory –until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted bythoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. Butthanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’tactually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinkingabout them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way thatconvinces us that it will be taken care of.

      The Zeigarnik effect is the idea that open or pending tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory until they are done or our brain is otherwise convinced that they're "finished". This is why note taking can be valuable. By writing down small things, we can free up our short-term or working memories to focus or work on other potentially more important tasks. It is named for Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik.

      The Zeigarnik effect is some of the value behind David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system. Writing down to do lists tricks our mind into freeing up space from things we need to take care of. If they're really important, we've got a list and can then take care of them. Meanwhile our working memories are freed up for other tasks.

    8. This is why it is so much easier to remember things we understandthan things we don’t. It is not that we have to choose to focus eitheron learning or understanding. It is always about understanding – andif it is only for the sake of learning. Things we understand areconnected, either through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic,mental models or explanations. And deliberately building these kindsof meaningful connections is what the slip-box is all about.Every step is accompanied by questions like: How does this fact fitinto my idea of ...? How can this phenomenon be explained by thattheory? Are these two ideas contradictory or do they complementeach other? Isn’t this argument similar to that one? Haven’t I heardthis before? And above all: What does x mean for y? Thesequestions not only increase our understanding, but facilitate learningas well. Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, itis difficult not to remember it when we think about what it isconnected with.

      Our natural associative memories make learning easier when we can associate a new piece of knowledge into our previously existing framework of knowledge and understanding.

      Associative questions can help us to assume new knowledge. Try some of the following:

      How does this new fact X fit into my conception of Y?

      How can new phenomenon be explained by theory Z?

      Is this new idea contradictory with this prior theory or do they complement and reinforce each other?

      Is this new argument similar to that one? Is one subsumed into or abstracted by the other?

      This sounds familiar, haven't I heard this before?

      What does x mean for y?

    9. Our brains work not that differently in terms of interconnectedness.Psychologists used to think of the brain as a limited storage spacethat slowly fills up and makes it more difficult to learn late in life. Butwe know today that the more connected information we alreadyhave, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock tothat information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeedlimited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept

      isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed.

      Our natural memories are limited in their capacities, but it becomes easier to remember facts when they've got an association to other things in our minds. The building of mental models makes it easier to acquire and remember new information. The down side is that it may make it harder to dramatically change those mental models and re-associate knowledge to them without additional amounts of work.


      The mental work involved here may be one of the reasons for some cognitive biases and the reason why people are more apt to stay stuck in their mental ruts. An example would be not changing their minds about ideas of racism and inequality, both because it's easier to keep their pre-existing ideas and biases than to do the necessary work to change their minds. Similar things come into play with respect to tribalism and political party identifications as well.

      This could be an interesting area to explore more deeply. Connect with George Lakoff.

    10. As proper note-taking is rarely taught or discussed, it is no wonderthat almost every guide on writing recommends to start withbrainstorming. If you haven’t written along the way, the brain isindeed the only place to turn to. On its own, it is not such a greatchoice: it is neither objective nor reliable – two quite importantaspects in academic or nonfiction writing.

      Brainstorming can be a miserable way to start a creative process. Without a pre-existing source of ideas (one's own notes) it can be the only place to start, but it suffers from being unreliable and having no objectivity. It is tremendously difficult to plumb the depths of one's memory for great ideas, questions, or interesting places to start an endeavor, but if you've been collecting these for ages, it becomes much easier to span a space and see tangential spaces.

    11. We need a reliable and simple external structure tothink in that compensates for the limitations of our brains

      Let's be honest that there are certainly methods for doing all of this within our brains and not needing to rely on external structures. This being said, using writing, literacy, and external structures does allow us to process things faster than before.


      Can we calculate what the level of greater efficiency allows for doing this? What is the overall throughput difference in being able to forget and write? Not rely on communication with others? What does a back of the envelope calculation for this look like?

    1. It is essential that by far the greater part of what is said or done in the world should be so ephemeral as to take itself away quickly; it should keep good for twenty-four hours, or even twice as long, but it should not be good enough a week hence to prevent people from going on to something else.

      Melancholy Elephants.

    1. a recitation of their names will be accompanied by a traditional libation, or pouring out of water, in accordance with West African traditions for honoring the deceased. "The ritual of libation holds the belief that saying people's names keeps them alive. It makes them free. It carries their personhood beyond their physical time on this earth," says event organizer Jasmine Blanks Jones, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship who is also part of Inheritance Baltimore, an interdisciplinary program for humanities education, research, and community engagement in Baltimore.

      The West African tradition of libation, or pour out of water, honors the deceased and holds the belief that saying people's names aloud keeps them alive.

  8. Jan 2022
    1. We might stumble across the above unanswered HQ&A note. Giving us a starting point can use it as a springboard to make the research and writing process faster. That's all part of achieving more with less by using yesterday's momentum.

      Remembering and being able to more quickly recall prior contexts allows our thinking to build momentum.

    1. education has been moving farther and farther away from memorization-based learning. The standardized tests I give are modeled off of the AP History exams’ Document Based Questions, which prioritize analysis and communication skills over rote memorization.

      Education has been moving farther away from memorization-based learning and instead prioritizing analysis and communication skills.

    1. A short, interesting essay with some useful quotes. Sadly much of it is derivative of many other sources I've read and studied, so this is a rather unenlightening little work for me. This piece and the popularity of the book from which it derives may have helped to popularize some of the ideas of memory going into the late 80s and early 90s however.

      There are some interesting tidbits of the use of memory with respect to psychoanalysis into the 1900s with figures like Freud and Jung, but one would need to go deeper than the brief suggestions in the final paragraphs here.

    2. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
    3. When Simonides offered to teach the Athenian statesman Themistocles the art of Memory, Cicero reports that he refused. "Teach me not the art of remem- bering," he said, "but the art of forgetting, for I remember things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things I wish to forget."
    4. And pundits quipped, "Nothing is more common than a fool with a strong memory."
    5. In 1580 Montaigne declared that "a good memory is generally joined to a weak judgment."
    6. The effect was beautifully suggested by Victor Hugo in a familiar passage in Notre-Dame de Paris (183 1) when the scholar holding his first printed book turns away from his manuscripts, looks a t the cathedral, and says "This will kill that" (Ceci tuera cela). Print also destroyed "the invisible cathedrals of memory." For the printed book made it less nec- essary to shape ideas and things into vivid images and then store them in Memory-places.

      In Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) Victor Hugo depicts a scholar holding his first printed book. He turns away from his manuscripts to look at the cathedral and says "This will kill that" (Ceci tuera cela). Similarly the printed book made it far less necessary to store one's knowledge into cathedrals of memory.

    7. they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

      This is why active reading and studying are important. One can take notes and simply regurgitate them and seem wise, but having truly consumed and made a text one's own is the key.


      This is somewhat similar to the criticism of the zettelkasten as seen in https://hyp.is/cqT1mG0sEeyMMRNCE79Ozw/takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

      One's note cards do not equal wisdom.

    8. For centuries the standard work on Latin grammar was the 12th- century Doctrinale, by Alexander of Villedieu, in 2,000 lines of doggerel. Versified rules were easier to remember, though their crudity appalled Aldus Manutius when he reprinted this work in 1501.

      Alexander de Villedieu's Latin grammer Doctrinale from the 12th century was the standard work on the subject. Its 2,000 lines of doggerel were used as a mnemonic device because they were easier to remember. Famed publisher Aldus Manutius was appalled at their crude nature when he reprinted the book in 1501.

    9. The English common law was "immemorial" custom which ran to a "time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." "In the profound ignorance of letters which formerly overspread the whole west- em world," Sir William Blackstone noted in 1765, "letters were intirely traditional, for this plain reason, that the nations among which they pre- vailed had but little idea of writing. Thus the British as well as the Gallic druids committed all their laws as well as learning to memory; and it is said of the primitive Saxons here, as well as their brethren on the conti- nent, that leges

      sola memoria et usu retinebant.

    10. "Memory," agreed Cicero, "is the treasury and guardian of all things."
    11. "Memory," said Aeschylus, "is the mother of all wis- dom."
    12. Only recently has "memory training" become a butt of ridicule and a refuge of charlatans.

      Daniel Boorstin indicated in 1984 that "'memory training' had become the butt of ridicule and a refuge of charlatans", a concept which had begun by the 1880s with people selling memory tricks and training to the point that the journal Science published an article by George S. Fellows exposing an expensive program by Antoine Loisette, which had been advertised in the New York Times with quotes by Mark Twain. #

      The trend probably hit its peak when huckster and convicted fraudster Kevin Trudeau marketed audiocassette tapes of his "Mega Memory" course on late night infomercials until he was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission in the late 1990's.

      That history had begun to shift with the rise of memory sports and competitions into the early 2000s and popularized by Tyler Foer's book Moonwalking with Einstein.

    13. The Goddess of Memory (Mnemosyne) was a Titan, daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth), and mother of all the nine Muses

      The Greeks gave Mnemosyne, a Titan and the goddess of memory a significant location within their culture as the daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth) and the mother of all the nine Muses.

    14. The Lost Arts of Memory by Daniel J. Boorstin The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1984 104-113

    1. culture that taught to learn by rote and a culture that taught to forget instead

      Pedagogical cultrues:

      • cultures taught orally
      • cultures taught to remember
      • cultures taught to learn by rote
      • cultures taught to forget

      Is there a (linear) progression? How do they differ? How are they they same? Is there a 1-1 process that allows them to be equivalence classes?

    1. Fernandez-Castaneda, A., Lu, P., Geraghty, A. C., Song, E., Lee, M.-H., Wood, J., Yalcin, B., Taylor, K. R., Dutton, S., Acosta-Alvarez, L., Ni, L., Contreras-Esquivel, D., Gehlhausen, J. R., Klein, J., Lucas, C., Mao, T., Silva, J., Pena-Hernandez, M., Tabachnikova, A., … Monje, M. (2022). Mild respiratory SARS-CoV-2 infection can cause multi-lineage cellular dysregulation and myelin loss in the brain (p. 2022.01.07.475453). https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.07.475453

    1. I go through my old posts every day. I know that much – most? – of them are not for the ages. But some of them are good. Some, I think, are great. They define who I am. They're my outboard brain.

      Cory Doctorow calls his blog and its archives his "outboard brain".

  9. takingnotenow.blogspot.com takingnotenow.blogspot.com
    1. What we Remember by Manfred Kuehn https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/

      archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021192005/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/

      Dutch psychologist Wilem Wagenaar conducted memory related experiments on recollecting what, where, who, and when for the most interesting experiences of his days. It turned out that the "What?" was most useful followed by where? and who?, but that "when?" was "useless in every instance".

      p.116 of Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life's Scarcest Commodity, Marlowe & Company, 2007, New York.

      Despite this, timestamps might serve other functions within a note taking system. The might include conceiving of ideas, temporal order of ideas presented, etc.

  10. Dec 2021
    1. Physical mark-making also quickens the memory, which is one reason that handwritten notes are so much easier to recall than their typed equivalents.

      Where is the research to back this up? I'm sure it exists.

    1. As a result of extensive work with this technique a kind of secondary memory will arise, an alter ego with who we can constantly communicate.

      I want to look at the original German for this sentence, particularly with respect to the translation of the phrase "secondary memory". Is the translation semantic or literal? Might the original German have been a more literal "second brain"?

      Compare this to the one or two other examples of this sort of translation from the German.

    1. Something has been lost. He just had arather idiosyncratic (and ultimately, false) notion of what it was. Howdo we characterize it, then? And how lost is it really? What does itimply about possibilities for social change today?

      I might posit that we've lost our cultural memories of those times.

    2. 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?

    1. When the user stores his thoughts in his own filing cabinet, these thoughts are no longer his own but those of his filing cabinet. In turn, the machine that gathers and reproduces excerpts is, and remains, a ‘black box’. It is not simply another Ego for enacting a user’s soliloquy but a true Alter Ego with whom the user communicates. Additionally, when the machine is started, the user does not simply refresh his memory; the filing cabinet actually speaks. To achieve this practical outcome, the card index must be provided with a ‘life of its own’ (Eigenleben) which should be as independent of the life of its educator as possible.30 In this sense, the card index functions as a ‘secondary memory’ in Stübel’s terms. This result raises some questions which justify the present article. Is there a socio-structural reason why such an improbability became possible? Is there a trend, in early and late modern society, toward an externalization and technologizing of social memory? And what insight can we gain into intellectual history?

      I'm not completely sure I can agree with this. Perhaps I'm missing part of his point?

      There is a quirky relationship here to the idea of a personbyte, the complete amount of information and knowledge a person can have. Even misty memories that a person can remember or be reminded of are part of this knowledge. Perfect recall isn't necessary as some things can potentially be reconstituted with some thought towards recreation of an idea.

      Compare this with the idea of epic poetry and song of the Yugoslavian guslars. Some may be more artful than others, but at what point are they telling a new story?

    2. In a short academic dissertation on the art of excerpts, Andreas Stübel described the card index as a ‘secondary and subsidiary memory’ (‘memoria secundaria and subsidiaria’), summing up in just three words the dilemma scholars had been struggling with for two centuries with respect to the use of commonplace books.28 As far as I know, Stübel was the first among contem-poraries to speak of secondary memory.

      28 Andreas M. Stübel, Exercitatio academica de excerptis adornandis (Leipzig, 1684), 33

      Andreas M. Stübel, in Exercitatio academica de excerptis adornandis (Leipzig, 1684), becomes the first to of many to speak about the idea of "secondary memory".

      I like this idea better than Tiago Forte's marketing term "second brain."

    3. And the well-known jurist Jacques Cujas stated that ‘hee is a Learned Man non qui multa legit sed qui can fitly turne to Authors et use them according to his occasions. Non qui multa memoria teneat sed qui optima in libris optimis posset inve-nire’ (he is a learned man not the one who reads a number of books but the one who can fitly turn to authors and use them according to his occasion. [He is a learned man] not the one who keeps in mind a number of things but the one who can find the best passages in the best books).21

      21 Hartlib Papers 29/2/49A, Ephemerides 1634, Part 5 (italics added).

    4. Johannes Sturm, for example, admitted that it was not important after all to remember; it was far more important to know how to retrieve what in the meantime had been forgotten.20

      20 Johannes Sturm[ius], Linguae Latinae resolvendae ratio (Strasburg, 1581), 51: ‘Scire enim ubi possis invenire, quae memoriae non mandas, satis est’ (italics added).

    5. In fact, the methodical use of notebooks changed the relationship between natural memory and artificial memory, although contemporaries did not immediately realize it. Historical research supports the idea that what was once perceived as a memory aid was now used as secondary memory.18

      During the 16th century there was a transition in educational centers from using the natural and artificial memories to the methodical use of notebooks and commonplace books as a secondary memory saved by means of writing.

      This allows people in some sense to "forget" what they've read and learned and be surprised by it again later. They allow themselves to create liminal memories which may be refreshed and brought to the center later. Perhaps there is also some benefit in this liminal memory for allowing ideas to steep on the periphery before using them. Perhaps combinatorial creativity happens unconsciously?

      Cross reference: learning research by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski.

    6. Drexel, for instance, held those teach-ers ridiculous who taught students to build up houses and rooms by means of imagination and stock them with images of memorable subjects (imagines agentes).16 According to the German Jesuit, the effort was not only huge but students wasted their time because images escape from these artificial places

      much as prisoners escape from jails without guards.17 16 Drexel, Aurifodina, 258 17 Drexel, Aurifodina, 3–4.

      Jeremias Drexel (1581 – 1638) recommended against the method of loci during the explosion of information in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.


      Add Drexel to the list of reformers against the ars memoria in the early 1600s.)


      While dealing with the information overload, educators may have inadvertently thrown out the baby with the bath water. While information still tends to increase and have increased complexity, some areas also show compression and concatenation and new theories subsume old information into their models. This means that one might know and understand Einstein which means that memorizing Newton's work is no longer needed at some point. Where should one draw the line of memorization for subsuming the knowledge of their culture? Aren't both old and new methods for memory usable? Keep the ars memoria while also using written methods.

    7. an inquiry into filing systems is an inquiry into how society manages its own memory.11
    8. Simultaneously, there was a revival of the old art of excerpting and the use of commonplace books. Yet, the latter were perceived no longer as memory aids but as true secondary memo-ries. Scholars, in turn, became increasingly aware that to address the informa-tion overload produced by printing, the best solution was to train a card index instead of their own individual consciousness.

      Another reason for the downfall of older Western memory traditions is the increased emphasis and focus on the use of commonplaces and commonplace books in the late 1400s onward.

      Cross reference the popularity of manuals by Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon.

    9. Over these two centuries, an in-creasing impatience for the ancient art of memory based on the use of imagi-nation could be detected in the academic milieu.

      Following the invention of moveable type, the information overload created in the two centuries between 1550 and 1750, placed a major burden and impatience, particularly on academic scholars, on the use of the ancient arts of memory based on the use of imagination. In addition to the education reforms by those like Peter Ramus, this may have been a major motivating factor for forgetting this prior tradition of knowledge acquisition and management.

      What is one to do when there's seemingly "too much to memorize"?

    1. 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.

  11. Nov 2021
    1. 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.

    1. 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