local variables 通过会存在哪里，为什么？

memory reference 属于那种 register 类型？

http://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?p=5024

This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

How did my participants talk about absented place? There is a connection between land custodianship and the overall gentrification of the city. (Perhaps this is a stretch, bu certainly something to consider).

深度网络训练中的显存开销主要是哪些？

ZeRO-DP 的原理是什么？

How can these modern translations and related translations be compared and contrasted to the original passage of the stories in their original bardic traditions?

Cross reference the orality work of Milman Parry, et al.

Related to the idea of putting oneself into another ideas' shoes discussed a bit in Annie Murphy Paul's book The Extended Mind.

So the big secret then is, how did he know that this note here exists? How could he remember that this existing note was relevant to the new one he was writing? A mystery we haven't solved yet.

I'm surprised to see/hear this!

How did Niklas Luhmann cross link his notes? Apparently researchers don't quite know, but I'd suggest that in working with them diligently over time, he'd have a reasonable internal idea from memory in addition to working with his indices and his outline cards.

The cards in some sense form a physical path through which he regularly traverses, so he's making a physical memory palace (or songline) out of index cards.

Even early in the history of note taking treatises Jeremias Drexel acknowledges the idea that good note taking, and particularly excerpting, takes work.

Modern students seem to have now lost both the ars memoria as well as the note taking arts which helped supplant it. We really need to be able to regain both of these traditions, but it will obviously take commitment to do the work.

Jeremias Drexel is certainly a writer who complains about the work of the ars memoria, particularly for long term memory and supplants it with writing/note taking.

On Erasmus’s preference for “study, order and care” over places and images, see Erasmus,De ratione studii(1512), quoted in Yates,The Art of Memory,p. 127

What other pedagogues were hostile to memory?

This is another point in the decline of memory traditions from the 1500s onward.

What effect did cheaper books and paper have on this decline?

Keep in mind that Erasmus had written a treatise on commonplacing which was also a point in the history of note taking though Blair doesn't acknowledge his contributions in her list here. Also Agricola and Melanchthon

Ann Blair indicates that stenography was only developed for German in 1834.

Is there a reference for this? When was it developed for other languages? How does this fit in with the timeline for memory and the major system?

However from examples in oral cultures we know that there are other mnemonic traditions which allow the preservation of knowledge.

cross-reference: Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power

pyrus scroll and the sheet of parchment.

Which others is she missing from a mnemonics perspective? I'm impressed that she indicates the khipu, but there are certainly other indigenous methods from oral cultures.

Notes allow us to forget, but they're also a foothold for future memorization.

What is the source of Montaigne calling notes "paper memory"?

The style is dramatically different, but this easily could appear in pieces on zettelkasten today.

A surprising number of references to connecting ideas and knowledge...

Generally good advice, but some people in modern times take this too far. Perhaps we ought to memorize more that could be useful in our everyday lives.

This whole section looks the most interesting and promising to me: reading, memory, and notes!

I'll likely read these first and at best skim the rest depending on content.

There's a new book out that touches extending the mind beyond the body that gives an overview of the past decade or so of psychology and neuroscience in the areas of thinking and memory.

https://amzn.to/3CqeO1X

I've seen several references to it in my reading over the past few months, but this review in particular put it over the edge for me to read: https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/. Here are my notes on it for those interested in quick highlights.

Those interested in the overlap of psychology and memory will likely appreciate some of the researched mind hacks which are mentioned. I have a feeling those interested in education and pedagogy will also appreciate it. Some of the reviews and discussions remind me of @LynneKelly's work with students in Australia though I suspect that Paul is writing here from a very western-centric point of view. In particular I'm curious about the sections on thinking with movement/gesture, walking, and using one's surroundings/natural spaces/built spaces which I suspect will have some familiar overlaps with songlines and memory palaces.

The Bruniquel cave, in southwest France, is believed to be a Neanderthal dwelling 100,000 years before humans in Europe. Stalagmites in the cave may have been arranged as walls, and possibly as a fireplace. Charred bone found in the walls date to 175,000 years ago.

This cave is apparently fairly deep. Cross reference this with deep cave fires and asphyxiation research.

• Article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/25/neanderthals-built-mysterious-cave-structures-175000-years-ago
• Related journal article: http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature18291

Is it possible that such a place was used as a memory palace? Being secluded away and the play of fire inside would certainly fit some of Lynne Kelly's criteria from Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies. More evidence would be needed however.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>LynneKelly </span> in "Ancient Australian Aboriginal Memory Tool Superior to ‘Memory Palace’ Learning" - Neuroscience, Psychology, and Health - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>10/19/2021 09:26:03</time>)</cite></small>

I don’t think the methods were worked out as much as evolved with the human brain. I suspect those who started using mnemonics survived and bred better than those who didn’t.

I have been pointed to this discovery of a Neanderthal cave many times, with archaeologists suggesting to me that it points to Neanderthal use of a memory palace. It would need more evidence to be convincing, but that would go back a very long time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210323175407/https://www.pmemory.com/

This memory courses' website seems to have gone down sometime in the past six months or so. Fortunately I'd gotten a copy of most (?) of their system before it went down. I'm adding it to my list of systems to take a look at.

It generally went by PMemory and in some cases by Ruslan M Phenomenal Memory (GMS). See also: https://brainlearns.com/courses/ruslan-m-phenomenal-memory-gms/

I've had this same suspicion for a while. Might be interesting to try to collect some evidence to support it.

Interesting article to read and build evidence as Kelly suggests.

These may be worth looking into.

Lynne Kelly's excellent book Memory Craft (Pegasus, 2020) has 6 pages of Appendix A which lists 31 memory methods along with examples, what they might be used for, and references to where they're described in the book. It's one of the most comprehensive lists I've seen to date and in particular covers a variety of methods used by indigenous cultures which aren't discussed in many other (Western focused) texts.

I just bookmarked this article published today in Current Biology for later reading and annotation. While the article isn't specifically focused on memory, the fact that it touches on visual structures, emotion, music, and movement (dance) which are core to some peoples' memory toolkits, I thought that many here would find it to be of interest.

One of the authors provided the following tl;dr synopsis:

"Across the world, people express emotion through music and dance. But why do music and dance go together?

We tested a deceptively simple hypothesis: Music and movement are represented the same way in the brain."

• Article: Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception01283-5) (Current Biology, 2021)
• Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/254961v4

For those who haven't integrated song or dance into their practices, searching around for the idea of songlines will give you some background on their possible uses.

cc: @LynneKelly

Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)01283-5

This portends some interesting results with relation to mnemonics and particularly songlines and indigenous peoples' practices which integrate song, movement, and emotion.

Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/254961v4

Across the world, people express emotion through music and dance. But why do music and dance go together? <br><br>We tested a deceptively simple hypothesis: Music and movement are represented the same way in the brain.

— Beau Sievers (@beausievers) October 12, 2021

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Beau Sievers </span> in "New work published today in Current Biology Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception With @ThaliaWheatley @k_v_n_l @parkinsoncm @sergeyfogelson (thread after coffee!) https://t.co/AURqH9kNLb https://t.co/ro4o4oEwk5" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>10/12/2021 09:26:10</time>)</cite></small>

Mateus, J., Dan, J. M., Zhang, Z., Rydyznski Moderbacher, C., Lammers, M., Goodwin, B., Sette, A., Crotty, S., & Weiskopf, D. (n.d.). Low-dose mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccine generates durable memory enhanced by cross-reactive T cells. Science, 0(0), eabj9853. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj9853

Www.cogsciWA.com. (n.d.). Www.CogsciWA.Com. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://www.cogsciwa.com/

Blomberg, B., Mohn, K. G.-I., Brokstad, K. A., Zhou, F., Linchausen, D. W., Hansen, B.-A., Lartey, S., Onyango, T. B., Kuwelker, K., Sævik, M., Bartsch, H., Tøndel, C., Kittang, B. R., Cox, R. J., & Langeland, N. (2021). Long COVID in a prospective cohort of home-isolated patients. Nature Medicine, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01433-3

Divergent trajectories of antiviral memory after SARS-Cov-2 infection. (2021, June 15). https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-612205/v1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=578JJeLN9Kw

Short and basic... nothing new to me, but clever intro.

I love the phrase mind garden here. It almost feels to me like a portmanteau concept that ties together the ideas of mind (or memory) palace and digital garden.

Pluviano, S., Watt, C., & Della Sala, S. (2017). Misinformation lingers in memory: Failure of three pro-vaccination strategies. PLoS ONE, 12(7), e0181640. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181640

Some interesting finds Josh.

Related to some of the bullet journal (aka BuJo) and journaling space you will eventually come across the idea of "morning pages" which is a technique where you spend a block of time (usually in the morning, but ideally just before you want to do your creative thinking work) where you write for a set amount of time or number of pages. The goal of this method (and to some extent bullet journaling) is to clear the cruft and extraneous details out of your head to be able to better prioritize and focus on your creative work. There's a relatively large group of people doing this as a technique, so even knowing the phrase can help one to find the literature.

Tangentially related to this and memory (via our old friend rhetoric), I've been doing some significant research into the commonplace book tradition and general note taking with an eye towards knowledge acquisition, creation, and spaced repetition systems. This has led into research into the areas of the zettelkasten, digital note taking, digital gardens and the like. All fascinating areas which overlap memory via rhetoric. I suspect that many mnemonists in the Renaissance used commonplace books as physical written memory palaces, though I've yet to find anything in my research that directly links them other than the relationship they have in the long tradition of rhetoric in Western culture. Since you mention music and writing lyrics, I recently noted that Eminem has a commonplace technique which he calls "stacking ammo" by which he compiles ideas for his lyrics. His method is certainly less structured than a traditional commonplace book, but the overall form traces back to our friends Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.

If you delve into some of the Bullet Journal and journaling literature you'll find a subculture of people (YouTube has hundreds of people with entire channels dedicated to the topic) who write into their daily/weekly planners and decorate them with stickers, washi tape, photos, calligraphy, drawings, etc. I've called some of this "productivity porn" before, but if you search commonplace book on Instagram or Pinterest you'll find examples of people whose journals and notes are becoming physical memory palaces where the visuals are likely helping them remember portions of their lives or what they're writing. The stickers and images to some extent are serving the purpose of drolleries seen in Medieval manuscripts as mnemonic devices.

And finally, tangentially related to all of this is another interesting sub-genre of memory and note taking called sketchnotes which combines active listening, writing, and drawing into a mnemonic related note taking activity. I'm actually a bit surprised to find so little on the technique here on the forum. Searching for sketchnotes on social media will provide lots of examples and there are many "What are sketchnotes" short videos on YouTube that will give you an idea of what's going on. Many of these talk about a memory component, but not being mired into the sub-topic of rhetoric, they're usually not using the same framings we would (here on the forum), though the effects one might expect are the same.

Some related richer resources for these areas, to help people from going down the rabbit hole within the performative social media spaces:

• How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking–for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens
  • This touches on note taking within a zettelkasten framing, but is also applicable to the commonplace book tradition
• Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde
  • This is one of the bibles in the space and gives a solid overview of what, why, how, etc.
• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewsGmhAjjjI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa84hA3OsHU

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Josh Cohen</span> in Aphantasia Video: Living without Mental Imagery (Wired) - Neuroscience, Psychology, and Health - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>09/19/2021 21:25:12</time>)</cite></small>

Mnemonist and prolific memory researcher/writer Lynne Kelly also describes herself as having aphantasia and indicates that it isn't a problem for her either. She's described some of her experiences here: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?page_id=4236

Intriguing reference of a book as a memory palace here.

The verso/recto and top/middle/bottom is a piece of digital books that I do miss from the physical versions as it serves as a mnemonic journey for me to be able to remember what was where.

I wonder if Ian Bogost uses the method of loci?

Can we, like Shepherds, tell a merry Tale? Stephen Duck, The Thresher's Tale (poem)

There's a link here to shepherds and a bardic tradition. In some sense, shepherds have lots of time to kill during the day and thus potentially tell stories. But they're also moving around their environment which also makes it easier for them to have used songline-like methods for attaching their memories to their environment.

How far back might this tradition go in our literate culture?

I also wonder at the influence of time on oral traditions as the result of this. Lynne Kelly describes calendrical devices in a variety of indigenous settings in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies for potential use in annual spaced repetition. What about the spaced repetition within daily cycles of regular work as described in this paper with respect to shepherds, fishing communities, and crofting?

The daily cycle of life may have been a part of the spaced repetition for memory.

How might we show this?

A quick example that comes to mind is the French children's song Alouette, Gentille Alouette which details how one kills, cleans, and dresses a chicken for cooking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA

Learning styles have been debunked.

Learning styles: V.A.R.K. model originated by Neil Flemiing stands for:

• visual
• auditory
• reading/writing
• kinesthetic

References:

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119. — https://ve42.co/Pashler2008

Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The scientific status of learning styles theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271. — https://ve42.co/Willingham

Massa, L. J., & Mayer, R. E. (2006). Testing the ATI hypothesis: Should multimedia instruction accommodate verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style?. Learning and Individual Differences, 16(4), 321-335. — https://ve42.co/Massa2006

Riener, C., & Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change: The magazine of higher learning, 42(5), 32-35.— https://ve42.co/Riener2010

Husmann, P. R., & O'Loughlin, V. D. (2019). Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy students’ study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning styles. Anatomical sciences education, 12(1), 6-19. — https://ve42.co/Husmann2019

Snider, V. E., & Roehl, R. (2007). Teachers’ beliefs about pedagogy and related issues. Psychology in the Schools, 44, 873–886. doi:10.1002/pits.20272 — https://ve42.co/Snider2007

Fleming, N., & Baume, D. (2006). Learning Styles Again: VARKing up the right tree!. Educational developments, 7(4), 4. — https://ve42.co/Fleming2006

Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: Effects on comprehension. Journal of educational psychology, 107(1), 64. — https://ve42.co/Rogowskyetal

Coffield, Frank; Moseley, David; Hall, Elaine; Ecclestone, Kathryn (2004). — https://ve42.co/Coffield2004

Furey, W. (2020). THE STUBBORN MYTH OF LEARNING STYLES. Education Next, 20(3), 8-13. — https://ve42.co/Furey2020

Dunn, R., Beaudry, J. S., & Klavas, A. (2002). Survey of research on learning styles. California Journal of Science Education II (2). — https://ve42.co/Dunn2002

Transactive memory is how a group encodes, stores, and shares knowledge. Members of a group may be aware of the portions of knowledge that others possess which can make them more efficient.

How can we link this to Cesar Hidalgo's ideas about the personbyte, etc.?

How would this idea have potentially helped oral cultures?

She uses the example of a trauma resuscitation team helping to shorten hospital stays, but certainly there are many examples in the corporate world where corporate knowledge is helpful in decreasing time scales for particular outcomes.

Worth delving into this area of research for memory related effects.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Suzanne Conklin Akbari</span> in Growing a Research Network: Approaches to Global Book History | Penn Libraries (<time class='dt-published'>09/12/2021 21:11:23</time>)</cite></small>

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-005-interview-with-chris-aldrich/

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Thinking_About_Tools_For_Thought_Ep_005.mp3

This didn't turn out too badly for a half an hour. As ever I dislike listening to my own voice.

https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/

A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.

I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.

Research shows that high-resolution monitors make thinking easier. This also seems true of classrooms which use large posters and maps as teaching aids at lower grades.

Why don't we use these methods as we grow older?

When used in mnemonic traditions, one can use vast spaces to create memory palaces that become thinking vistas within the brain. How can we better leverage these effects while still maintaining the effectiveness of focused journeys?

I'm reminded of Lynne Kelly's use of Indigenous Australian memory techniques which do both of these things at the same time: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?p=4794

This likely underlies some of the thoughts I've had about dance and movement and which are touched on by indigenous cultures as documented in Lynne Kelly's work.

We're also dramatically missing thousands of years of indigenous experience as well.

Psychologist Jerome Bruno suggests we're 22x more likely to remember facts when told through story.

General plan for his approach

• immersion
• learn
• activate

Michael Mina on Twitter: “With all the news of vaccines & immunity, did you know measles infections destroy immunity and cause ‘Immune Amnesia’, increasing risk of all other infections Our research in ‘15 & ‘19 discovered this & the abbreviated story is written up nicely here: 1/ https://t.co/t5DKoQljxM” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved September 7, 2021, from https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1435037668027641861

Reference for this?

Reference for this?

Seek out the silliest, craziest, wildest ideas as metaphors. The most bizarre ideas capture attention and are unforgettable.

Where have we heard this before?

Wu, K. J. (2021, September 3). What We Actually Know About Waning Immunity. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/waning-immunity-not-crisis-right-now/619965/

https://fs.blog/2021/07/mathematicians-lament/

What if we taught art and music the way we do mathematics? All theory and drudgery without any excitement or exploration?

What textbooks out there take math from the perspective of exploration?

• Inventional geometry does

Certainly Gauss, Euler, and other "greats" explored mathematics this way? Why shouldn't we?

This same problem of teaching math is also one we ignore when it comes to things like note taking, commonplacing, and even memory, but even there we don't even delve into the theory at all.

How can we better reframe mathematics education?

I can see creating an analogy that equates math with art and music. Perhaps something like Arthur Eddington's quote:

Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories–

distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody.

I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three. —Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (1882-1944), a British astronomer, physicist, and mathematician in The Nature of the Physical World, 1927

This is an incredibly important part of the process for absorbing, creating links, and remembering one's notes. A sad pity that it's a single sentence in its own paragraph.

This should have been underlined.

Connections ARE retention. They are memory.

https://marksstorm.medium.com/working-notes-of-a-practising-neo-generalist-16-on-montaigne-and-how-to-remember-the-books-ff6d9f88d40b

Stefan Zweig on the benefit of Montaigne's lack of a good memory.

I wonder if we can find a direct link to the manicule and the use of the hand as a mnemonic device?

Far beyond this, they're most likely used as mnemonic devices to associate the important information with a more memorable image for storing in one's memory palace.

I'd start with the basics of 0-9 of the Major System and then introduce the method of loci. Once they've got those two basics down reasonably I'd expand their Major system up to 99 at a minimum.

The tougher part then is expanding your pedagogy to build these tools into the curriculum so that you're actively using them with your content.

You might appreciate the experience from Lynne Kelly here: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?p=4794. Her excellent book Memory Craft also has some interesting examples and stories for children including the use of what she calls rapscallions for use in multiplication tables, languages, and other educational applications. Her book also has a wealth of other methods and potential applications depending on the subjects you're teaching.

I'd love to hear your experiences as you progress with your class.

This brings up the idea of how much architects did or didn't build and structure their spaces with the ideas of memoria within rhetoric?

Lots of references to add or read here.

https://collect.readwriterespond.com/how-to-remember-more-of-what-you-read/

Some useful looking links here. Thanks Aaron.

I've been digging deeper and deeper into some of the topics and sub-topics.

The biggest problem I've seen thus far is a lot of wanna-be experts and influencers (especially within the Roam Research space) touching on the very surface of problem. I've seen more interesting and serious people within the Obsidian community sharing their personal practices and finding pieces of that useful.

The second issue may be that different things work somewhat differently for different people, none of whom are using the same tools or even general systems. Not all of them have the same end goals either. Part of the key is finding something useful that works for you or modifying something slowly over time to get it to work for you.

At the end of the day your website holds the true answer: read, write, respond (along with the implied "repeat" at the end).

One of the best and most thorough prescriptions I've seen is Sönke Ahrens' book which he's written after several years of using and researching a few particular systems.

I've been finding some useful tidbits from my own experience and research into the history of note taking and commonplace book traditions. The memory portion intrigues me a lot as well as I've done quite a lot of research into historical methods of mnemonics and memory traditions. Naturally the ancient Greeks had most of this all down within the topic of rhetoric, but culturally we seem to have unbundled and lost a lot of our own traditions with changes in our educational system over time.

I seem to recall reading anecdotes of aboriginal peoples who knew areas and water holes in places they'd never visited in their lives. I'm wondering how they may have encoded these in songlines for places they'd never been to and physically seen.

It would seem that it's better to use a physical space when you have access to it, but I don't think I have as much issue adding things to pre-existing palaces/songlines as Kelly describes here. I wonder how this works out for others?

Lynne Kelly is correct here that we need better delineations of the words we're using here.

To some of us, we're taking historical methods and expanding them into larger super sets based on our personal experiences. I've read enough of Kelly's work and her personal experiences on her website (and that of many others) that I better understand the shorthand she uses when she describes pieces.

Even in the literature throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance we see this same sort of picking and choosing of methods in descriptions of various texts. Some will choose to focus on one or two keys, which seemed to work for them, but they'd leave out the others which means that subsequent generations would miss out on the lost bits and pieces.

Having a larger superset of methods to choose from as well as encouraging further explorations is certainly desired.

How To Do Sketchnoting (Even If You "Can't Draw"!)

a lesson with Emily Mills of the Sketchnote Academy

video

Types of Sketchnotes

• Lecture based
• Experience based

Skills for sketchnotes

• Listening
  • looking for ideas, high level
• Writing
• Drawing

Pairing images and words together to be dynamic and memorable.

One doesn't need to be the greatest artist to do sketchnotes.

memorable >> masterpiece recognizable >> realistic big ideas >> nitty gritty

Basic drawing

Seven building blocks for drawing

• dot
• straight line
• crooked line
• curvy line
• circle
• triangle
• square

Rules

• The fewer elements, the easier
• Rearrange rotate, reorient shapes

People

• standard stick person
• A person
• oval person
• star person

Containers and connectors

Boxes are boring, so add frames or more interesting Use containers to separate information that is different from the rest or to highlight.

• boxes
• frames
• nails/thumbtacks
• star "pow" outline
• box with a shadow

Tell people where to read next

• Create a really clear header
• help people with connectors (dotted lines, arrows, numbering)

Start out small first as it's more intimidating to use bigger formats

Tools

• Sketchone marker (thin point ink, pigment or permanent and not water-based, otherwise bleedover in coloring)
• Tombow dual brush markers for color
  • two grey tones, one lighter and one darker
  • small handful of colors (red, blue, yellow, green)

How to Sketchnote

• Step 1: Header
• Step 2: Layout (top to bottom/left to right is usually more intuitive) Pre-plan this. Think about connectors.
• Step 3: Consistency
  • headers, characters, size of writing,
• Step 4: Refine
  • check spelling
  • whiteout for mess ups (gellyroll white gel pen)
  • ensure connectors are obvious
• Step 5: Guiding shapes (to help flow of information on page)
  • stippling
  • cloud outlines
  • lines in the negative space (also creates contrast)
• Step 6: Coloring in
  • greys first, dark then light
  • highlighting connectors
  • shadows on boxes, ribbons, connectors
  • color should be more of a highlight than a background filler (it's not a coloring book)

Higher contrast notes are better

Resources

• 👉🏻 Find Emily (and her awesome resources!) at https://www.emilyamills.com
• 👉🏻 The Sketchnote Academy free course: https://www.sketchnoteacademy.com
• 👉🏻 The Art of Visual Note taking by Emily Mills

People remember interrupted or unfinished tasks better than completed tasks.

Examples: I've had friends remember where we left off on conversations months/years later and we picked right back up.

I wonder what things effect these memories/abilities? Context? Importance? Other?

Liu, Q., & Chai, L. (2021). Opinion Dynamics Models with Memory in Coopetitive Social Networks: Analysis, Application and Simulation. ArXiv:2108.03234 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03234

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomnema

Hypomnema (Greek. ὑπόμνημα, plural ὑπομνήματα, hypomnemata), also spelled hupomnema, is a Greek word with several translations into English including a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, an anecdotal record, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.

Compare and contrast the idea of this with the concept of the commonplace book. There's also a tie in with the idea of memory, particularly for meditation.

There's also the idea here of keeping a note of something to be fixed or remedied and which needs follow up or reflection.

Interesting datum along the timeline of commonplacebooks and memory. Worth logging and following.

Note the difference in the ideas of ordering information versus being able to recall it. How does this step in the evolution figure for the concept of the zettelkasten?

What was the relationship, if any, between Johann Sturm, a Protestant pedagogue, and Petrus Ramus? Any link here in the offloading of memory into the commonplace book as a means of sidelining the ars memoria?

I too keep a commonplace book. First it was (and in part still is) on my personal website. Lately I've been using Hypothes.is to annotate digital documents and books, the data of which is piped into the clever tool (one of many) Obsidian.md, a (currently) private repository which helps me to crosslink my thoughts and further flesh them out.

I've recently found that Sönke Ahrens book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers is a good encapsulation of my ideas/methods in general, so I frequently recommend that to friends and students interested in the process.

In addition to my commonplace book, I also practice a wealth of mnemonic techniques including the method of loci/songlines and the phonetic system which helps me remember larger portions of the things I've read and more easily memorized. I've recently been teaching some of these methods to a small cohort of students.

syndication link: https://drkimburns.com/why-i-keep-a-commonplace-book/?unapproved=4&moderation-hash=d3f1c550516a44ba4dca4b06455f9265#comment-4

In the Western tradition, these memory traditions date back to ancient Greece and Rome and were broadly used until the late 1500s. Frances A. Yates outlines much of their use in The Art of Memory (Routledge, 1966). She also indicates that some of their decline in use stems from Protestant educational reformers like Peter Ramus who preferred outline and structural related methods. Some religious reformers didn't appreciate the visual mnemonic methods as they often encouraged gross, bloody, non-religious, and sexualized imagery.

Those interested in some of the more modern accounts of memory practice (as well as methods used by indigenous and oral cultures around the world) may profit from Lynne Kelly's recent text Memory Craft (Allen & Unwin, 2019).

Lots of note taking in the West was (and still is) done via commonplace book, an art that is reasonably well covered in Earle Havens' Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2001).

Aizpurua, A., Migueles, M., & Aranberri, A. (2021). Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 666977. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.666977

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jill Rosen </span> in Team finds brain mechanism that automatically links objects in our minds | Hub (<time class='dt-published'>07/24/2021 18:07:51</time>)</cite></small>

https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/09/how-the-mind-links-objects/

A study that quantifies association within the brain and indicates the region where it occurs.

Facebook AI. (2021, July 16). We’ve built and open-sourced BlenderBot 2.0, the first #chatbot that can store and access long-term memory, search the internet for timely information, and converse intelligently on nearly any topic. It’s a significant advancement in conversational AI. https://t.co/H17Dk6m1Vx https://t.co/0BC5oQMEck [Tweet]. @facebookai. https://twitter.com/facebookai/status/1416029884179271684

Early writing systems used thousands of symbols and were thus incredibly complex and required heavy memorization. This may have been easier with earlier mnemonic systems in oral (pre-literate societies), but would have still required work.

The innovation of a smaller alphabetic set would have dramatically decreased the cognitive load of massive memorization and made it easier for people to become literate at scale.

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/nerds-of-a-feather/26749

I was at the bookstore yesterday and ran into two new useful resources that looked interesting in this space.

Specific to birdsong, there was

200 Bird Songs from Around the World by Les Beletsky (Becker & Mayer, 2020, ISBN: ‎ 978-0760368831)

Read about and listen to birds from six continents. A beautiful painting illustrates each selection along with concise details about the bird's behavior, environment, and vocalizations. On the built-in digital audio player, hear each bird as it sings or calls in nature with audio of the birds provided by the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

This could be useful in using the book itself as a memory palace in addition to the fact that the bird calls are built directly into the book for immediate playback while reading/memorizing. There are a few other related books with built in sound in this series as well.

The other broader idea was that of

"A bird a day"

I saw the book A Bird A Day by Dominic Couzens (Batsford, 2021, ISBN: 978-1849945868) to help guide one towards learning about (or in our context maybe memorizing) a bird a day. It had names, photos, and other useful information which one might use to structure a palace to work at in small chunks. I know there are also many other related calendars which might also help one do something like this to build up a daily practice of memorizing data into a palace/journey/songline.

The broader "Thing-a-day" calendar category might also be useful for other topics one might want to memorize as well as to have a structure set up for encouraging spaced repetition.

@Josh I'd picked up a copy of this recently and have started into it. The opening is a quick overview of some general history, background, and general techniques.

The subtitle is solidly accurate of the majority of the book: "A Critical Anthology". The bulk of the book are either translations or excerpts of pieces of memory treatises in English throughout the Renaissance. They also include some history of the texts, their writers, and some analysis of the pieces.

Some of us have been digging up old editions of books and struggling with reading and creating context. These authors have done yeoman's work on a lot of this and collected some of the more interesting historical works on the memory arts and added lots of context, at least for works in English (and focused on England) during the Renaissance. It's a great text for those interested in the history as well as more readable versions of some of the (often incomprehensible) middle/late English. They also have some analysis often conflicting with statements made by Frances Yates about some of the more subtle points which her broad history didn't cover in detail.

Given it's anthology nature, its a nice volume to pick up and read self-contained portions of at leisure based on one's interest. It isn't however comprehensive, so, for example, they've got "translated portions" of part of Peter of Ravenna's The Phoenix, but not all of it, though they do outline the parts which they skip over. (Cross reference https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/peter-of-ravenna/27737.) Other segments are only a page or so long and may contain tangential passages or even poems about the art to better situate it for scholars/students looking at it historically.

I've corresponded a bit with Bill Engel, one of the authors who has been wonderfully helpful. He said he's got another related book Memory and Morality in Renaissance England (Cambridge) coming out later this summer as well as a few other related books and articles thereafter. Some are mentioned on his site: https://www.williamengel.org/.

I picked up a copy of it in April and have made it through the introduction and first chapter. He’s a professor writing from the perspective of a rhetorician and is generally extending some of the academic research started by Frances Yates. I’ll write more as I have time, but I’m in the midst of a few dozen books at the moment. I wish I could focus on this and one or two others.

I’ll note that for those interested, it’s likely based on a shorter journal article that the same author wrote in 2017 with a similar title: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07350198.2017.1281691 A little digging around should uncover a free copy of it. If you’re desperate, I have a digital copy he emailed me a while back.

Not exactly a real scientific trial, but...

Note also that the other part was his having taken notes and actively engaged with the material as he heard it. The notes also formed the basis of his ability to do the spaced repetition.

Mnemonic methods could be used in place of the note taking for the properly trained. Visual memory just goes to expand on it.

This is an awfully fluff article that's probably too prescriptive. I wonder how many people it influences to try it out? How successful will they be without a more specific prescription?

This story of find and replace has chilling future potential. What if a dictatorial government doesn't like your content. It can be all to easy to remove the digital versions and replace them whole hog for "approved" ones.

Where does democracy live in such a world? Consider similar instances when the Trump administration forced the disappearance of government websites and data.

A major archiving issue in the digital era is that libraries are no longer the long term storage repositories they have otherwise been for the past two thousand years.

What effects will this have on the future? Particularly once the financial interests of the owning companies no longer exists?

This notion of using spatial memory to encode other concepts - or even the P-A-O sytem where a 2 digit number encodes a person performing an action is an interesting idea for someone like me who forgets quite a bit.

You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way. —Niklas Luhmann

(Source of the original??)

This is interesting, but is also ignorant of oral traditions which had means of addressing it.

This links together the ideas of memory, commonplace books, and mortality.

This also underlines the idea that commonplaces could be very specific to their creators.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Art Kavanagh </span> in note (<time class='dt-published'>06/16/2021 06:24:59</time>)</cite></small>

the idea of an "[[associative trail]]" here brings to mind both the ars memorativa and the method of loci as well as--even more specifically--the idea of songlines.

Bush's version is the same thing simply renamed.

<small><cite class='h-cite ht'>↬ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jeremy Dean</span> in Via: ‘What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’ - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>06/09/2021 14:50:00</time>)</cite></small>

I feel like Western culture has lost so much of our memory traditions that this trite story, which I've seen often repeated, doesn't have the weight it should.

Why can't we simultaneously have the old system AND the new? Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale touch on this in their coinage of the third archive in Songlines.

Seth Long takes a closer look at the number of memory treatises from 1550-1650 to come up with a more concrete reason for the disappearance of mnemonic imagery (and the method of loci) in English rhetoric and pedagogic traditions. Some writers have attributed it to the rise of more writing and publishing. Long extends Frances Yates' idea of its decline to the rise of Ramism by presenting some general data about the number and quality of memory treatises published during the time period in question. Comparison of this data with European continental publications helps to draw some more concrete conclusions.

In particular, he highlights an example of a Ramist sympathizer re-writing a previous treatise and specifically removing the rhetorical imagery from the piece.

It would be interesting to note other authors who found value in both Ramus and Bruno.

Sources of data for this paper. I'd definitely love to get a copy of this Excel file. Might be worth expanding to other languages, countries, and timeperiods as well.

I would question this statement, as annotated separately in this article. I have a feeling that the mnemonic tradition into the 1800's was more heavily influenced by the rise of the idea of the major system and not so much by the memory palace or the method of loci. This definitely seems to be the case in the United States based on my readings.

And for renaissance scholars, this quote may be the reason that drolleries are so widespread in illuminated manuscripts.

Are these methods still heavily used on the continent (aka Europe)? Surely these methods waned there as well at some point as I don't think they're still heavily used in modern times.

Construction is definitely work. The question about how much it may be should be addressed on a continuum of knowing or understanding particular concepts as well.

Creating palaces for raw data de-novo, as in a memory championship, takes a lot of practice for speed and the lack of relationships. However in a learning setting, it may be better to read, grasp, and understand material and then create a palace to contain the simple raw facts which might then also bring back other bits of the knowledge and understanding.

This might be a useful idea to explore further, gather some data, and experiment with.

What relation does Henry Herdson's The Art of Memory Made Plaine (1651, 1654) have to the potential development of the major system. The description here sounds like it's relatively similar. Who/What were his precursors, and who may have been influenced by his version of this system which sounds very similar.

Add these to our list.

How similar or dissimilar is this over description in Mnemonica by John Willis to the palace built using Noah's Ark by Hugh of St. Victor?

John Willis's Mnemonica (Latin 1618, English 1621, 1654, and 1661) covers memory, but he was apparently more interested in shorthand writing and also wrote Art of Stenographie.

I'll have to read this for a view into the overlap of memory and shorthand with respect to the development of the major system. Did this influence others in the chain of history? It definitely fits into the right timeline.

I definitely use reason as a memory technique this way.

This makes me wonder what the relation of this mode of "limited" thinking (represented by Ramism) has with Max Weber's ideas of Protestant work ethic? If we're not being creative like we may have been in the past, does it help us to focus on the mundane drudgery of our work at hand?

Too often, this seems to me to be a missing piece that few talk about now. Those posting to the Art of Memory forum are usually talking about the need to memorize for memorization's sake. Rarely are they talking about or noticing the second or third level order changes as the result of an improved memory.

I can agree with this.

Long places the influence of iconoclasm in the destruction of the method of loci at the time period of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries around 1536-1541.

I've often heard mnemonists talk about the effects of writing as being part of its downfall in western traditions. Are their guesses simply that, or had they read works like these?

I've generally gleaned most of the gist of this from Yates directly myself.

I've dipped into some of Carruthers' work, but not the others yet, though based on our present situation of memory, I can see that this is likely the case.

I want to pull up the other researchers he mentions here to read their material as well.

Polar is an integrated reading environment to build your knowledge base. Actively read, annotate, connect thoughts, create flashcards, and track progress.

To more easily memory text verbatim, practice methods for reclling the information rather than simply repeating it.

With some continued clever searching today along with some help from an expert in Elizabethan English, I've found an online version of Robert Copland's (poor) translation from the French, some notes, and a few resources for assisting in reading it for those who need the help.

The text:

• The art of memory, that otherwyse is called the Phenix A boke very behouefull and profytable to all professours of scyences. Grammaryens, rethoryciens dialectyke, legystes, phylosophres [and] theologiens. Petrus, Ravennas, ca. 1448-1508 or 9., Copland, Robert, fl. 1540-1547. [Imprynted at London: In Fletestrete at the sygne of the George by Wyllyam Myddylton, [ca. 1545]]

This is a free text transcription and will be easier to read than the original black-letter Elizabethan English version.

For those without the background in Elizabethan English, here are a few tips/hints:

• Short 3 page article/crash course on Middle English
• You can learn to read Middle English

For the more obscure/non-obvious words:

• Middle English Dictionary (online) from University of Michigan
• Project Gutenberg Middle English Dictionary

Finally, keep in mind that the letter "y" can often be a printer's substitution for the English thorn character) Þ, so you'll often see the abbreviations yͤ for "the" and yͭ as an abbreviation for "that".