A reproduction of Carroll’snotes on his number alphabet will be found in Warren Weaver’s arti-cle “Lewis Carroll: Mathematician,” inScientific Americanfor April1956.)

In Germany the great Gottfried Wil-helm von Leibniz was sufficiently intrigued by the notion to incor-porate it into his scheme for a universal language;

Although the art of mnemonics goes back to ancient Greece (theterm comes fromMnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory), it wasnot until 1634 that a Frenchman named Pierre Hrigone published inParis hisCursus Mathematici,which contained an ingenious systemfor memorizing numbers.

I know of no similar aids in English to recalle, the other commontranscendental number. However, if you memorizeeto five deci-mal places (2.71828), you automatically know it to nine, becausethe last four digits obligingly repeat themselves (2.718281828). InFranceeis memorized to 10 places by the traditional memory aid:Tu aideras rappeler ta quantit beaucoup de docteurs amis.Perhapssome reader can construct an amusing English sentence that willcarryeto at least 20 decimals.

My "Memoria Technica" is a modification of Gray's;

To help himself to remember dates, he devised a system of mnemonics, which he circulated among his friends. As it has never been published, and as some of my readers may find it useful, I reproduce it here. My "Memoria Technica" is a modification of Gray's; but, whereas he used both consonants and vowels to represent digits, and had to content himself with a syllable of gibberish to represent the date or whatever other number was required, I use only consonants, and fill in with vowels ad libitum, and thus can always manage to make a real word of whatever has to be represented.

I've broken down each base medium with some of its benefits, tips, and opportunities to make your content more accessible.

No matter how engaging, funny, well-produced the video is, I will not be able to retain it unless I cannot read along.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. - A large number of the works referred to in the text contain historical material. Among histories of the subject, see C. F. von Aretin, Systesnatische Anleitung zur Theorie and Praxis der Mnemonik (Sulzberg, 1810); A. E. Middleton, Memory Systems, Old and New (espec. 3rd rev. ed., New York, 1888), with bibliography of works from 1325 to 1888 by G. S. Fellows and account of the Loisette litigation; F. W. Colegrove, Memory (1901), with bibliography, pp. 353-3 6 1. (J. M. M.)

In 1648 Stanislaus Mink von Wenussheim or Winckelmann made known what he called the "most fertile secret" in mnemonics - namely, the use of consonants for figures, so as to express numbers by words (vowels being added as required); and the philosopher Leibnitz adopted an alphabet very similar to that of Winckelmann in connexion with his scheme for a form of writing common to all languages. Winckelmann's method, which in fact is adopted with slight changes by the majority of subsequent "original" systems, was modified and supplemented in regard to many details by Richard Grey (1694-1771), who published a Memoria technica in 1730.

About the end of the 15th century Petrus de Ravenna (b. 1448) awakened such astonishment in Italy by his mnemonic feats that he was believed by many to be a necromancer. His Phoenix artis memoriae (Venice, 1491, 4 vols.) went through as many as nine editions, the seventh appearing at Cologne in 1608. An impression equally great was produced about the end of the 16th century by Lambert Schenkel (Gazophylacium, 1610), who taught mnemonics in France, Italy, and Germany, and, although he was denounced as a sorcerer by the university of Louvain, published in 1593 his tractate De memoria at Douai with the sanction of that celebrated theological faculty. The most complete account of his system is given in two works by his pupil Martin Sommer, published at Venice in 1619. In 1618 John Willis (d. 1628?) published Mnemonica; sive ars reminiscendi (Eng. version by Leonard Sowersby, 1661; extracts in Feinaigle's New Art of Memory, 3rd ed., 1813), containing a clear statement of the principles of topical or local mnemonics. Giordano Bruno, in connexion with his exposition of the ars generalis of Lull, included a memoria technica in his treatise De umbris idearum. Other writers of this period are the Florentine Publicius (1482); Johann Romberch (1533); Hieronimo Morafiot, Ars memoriae (1602); B. Porta, Ars reminiscendi (1602).

Among the voluminous writings of Roger Bacon is a tractate De arte memorativa.

Memory is commonly classified by psychologists according as it is exercised (a) mechanically, by attention and repetition; (b) judiciously, by careful selection and co-ordination; and (c) ingeniously, by means of artifices, i.e. mnemotechny, mnemonics. It must, however, be observed that no mnemonic is of any value which does not possess the qualities of (a) and (b). A mnemonic is essentially a device which uses attention and repetition, and careful selection is equally necessary. A more accurate description of mnemonics is "mediate" or "indirect" memory.

Furst’s ‘Memory and Concentration Studies’ was founded in 1929.

<img alt="" class="fj et ep iu w" src="https://via.hypothes.is/im_/https://miro.medium.com/max/7116/1*VE2_0XWErGKsDxXk5ItdMw.png" width="3558" height="1992" srcset="https://via.hypothes.is/https://miro.medium.com/max/552/1*VE2_0XWErGKsDxXk5ItdMw.png 276w, https://via.hypothes.is/https://miro.medium.com/max/1104/1*VE2_0XWErGKsDxXk5ItdMw.png 552w, https://via.hypothes.is/https://miro.medium.com/max/1280/1*VE2_0XWErGKsDxXk5ItdMw.png 640w, https://via.hypothes.is/https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*VE2_0XWErGKsDxXk5ItdMw.png 700w" sizes="700px" role="presentation"/>A screengrab from Microsoft’s Productivity Future Vision film, via Nick Foster’s Future Mundane

nucleus accumbens

Now, where the emotional memory is stored in response to these survival-enhancing positive memories is not yet entirely clear.

If eye movement were consciously controlled, the dreamer’s eyes could become a vehicle for getting a message to the waking world.

The idea of a purely linear text is a myth; readers stitch together meanings in much more complex ways than we have traditionally imagined; the true text is more of a network than a single, fixed document.

The great minds of the period — Milton, Bacon, Locke — were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

According to the historian Robert Darnton, this led to a very particular structuring of knowledge: commonplace users "broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebook." It was a mixture of fragmented order and disorder that anticipated a particular form of scientific investigation and organisation of information.

The English physician and philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was all too aware of the grip of amnesia and the shortness of memory. In his seminal Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he wrote of his rival Blaise Pascal, who he named as the “prodigy of parts”, who “forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought.” Locke, in reaction, attempted to simulate Pascal’s "hyperthymesia", not in the mind, but upon the page: through the construction of a system of "commonplacing", as a form of what Swift called “supplemental memory”.

In "A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet" from 1721, Jonathan Swift remarked that a commonplace book is something that “a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that great wits have short memories”.

"The people who are better at drawing really seem to have more developed structures in regions of the brain that control for fine motor performance and what we call procedural memory," she explained.

To acknowledge the traditional territory is to recognize its longer history, reaching beyond colonization and the establishment of European colonies, as well as its significance for the Indigenous peoples who lived and continue to live upon this territory, and whose practices and spiritualities were tied to the land and continue to develop in relationship to the land and its other inhabitants today.

cellular data recorders offer the capacity to measure biologically relevant signals15,16,17,18,19 in places that are otherwise difficult to access, such as inside the body20,21, and over time22

We could have called a.clone() rather than Rc::clone(&a), but Rust’s convention is to use Rc::clone in this case. The implementation of Rc::clone doesn’t make a deep copy of all the data like most types’ implementations of clone do. The call to Rc::clone only increments the reference count, which doesn’t take much time. Deep copies of data can take a lot of time. By using Rc::clone for reference counting, we can visually distinguish between the deep-copy kinds of clones and the kinds of clones that increase the reference count. When looking for performance problems in the code, we only need to consider the deep-copy clones and can disregard calls to Rc::clone

You can use code specified in a Drop trait implementation in many ways to make cleanup convenient and safe: for instance, you could use it to create your own memory allocator! With the Drop trait and Rust’s ownership system, you don’t have to remember to clean up because Rust does it automatically.

It’s no coincidence that we walk when we need to think: evidence shows that movement enhances thinking and learning, and both are activated in the same centre of motor control in the brain. In the influential subfield of cognitive science concerned with ‘embodied’ cognition, one prominent claim is that actions themselves are constitutive of cognitive processes. That is, activities such as playing a musical instrument, writing, speaking or dancing don’t start in the brain and then emanate out to the body as actions; rather, they entail the mind and body working in concert as a creative, integrated whole, unfolding and influencing each other in turn. It’s therefore a significant problem that many of us are trapped in work and study environments that don’t allow us to activate these intuitive cognitive muscles, and indeed often even encourage us to avoid them.

My high school English teacher used to say, “Image evokes emotion.” Convey a powerful enough image or idea (and make it vague enough) and people will project onto it what they will. This is the heart of many a savvy PR strategy

She teaches them how to memorize their riders’ faces and names.

The use of focused mentalimaging to arouse the emotions from torpor and spiritual lethargy is a traditional featureof monastic spirituality.

The bulk of the work is devoted to the steps on the ladders of spiritual progress.The striking images, biblical verses, key words, numbers, and colors that occur in thislongest section of the work (paras. 16–23) demonstrate Hugh’s interest in fixing in themind of his readers the stages of spiritual progress, the sequence of emotions and in-sights the sinner must complete in order to attain his goal of closeness to God.

I would do the following. identify by name all the trees that I want to memorize, say 257. Divide them into card pack size like groups. Create suites for those packs such as: trunks, twigs, leaf design, leaf shape, geometry design, tree shape, colors, season best observed, flowers, fruits or even a special ID tests suit (such as smell this part, or cut the leaf to see if it milk). 4)I would try to find which characteristic of a tree would help me the most to identify it and then put that tree in the appropriate suit, creating a nice and visual card of the tree and its best ID characteristic. I’d find some kind of logical order to the suits with 10 trees per suits. (eg. trunk as the first characteristic, then twigs and then leafs) Then I would learn to play with the 4 packs of cards that I have created as if they were a regular pack of cards.

If you give any question to a student that has a clear, definitive answer, you are tempting them to cheat.

Jan Zoń - A New Revolutionary Cards Method

In 1965, he published the highly influential work Theories of Primitive Religion, arguing against the existing theories of what at the time were called "primitive" religious practices. Arguing along the lines of his theoretical work of the 1950s, he claimed that anthropologists rarely succeeded in entering the minds of the people they studied, and so ascribed to them motivations which more closely matched themselves and their own culture, not the one they were studying. He also argued that believers and non-believers approached the study of religion in vastly different ways, with non-believers being quicker to come up with biological, sociological, or psychological theories to explain religion as an illusion, and believers being more likely to come up with theories explaining religion as a method of conceptualizing and relating to reality.

Rather than the night before a quiz or exam, it may be more important to sleep well for the duration of the time when the topics tested were taught. The implications of these findings are that, at least in the context of an academic assessment, the role of sleep is crucial during the time the content itself is learned, and simply getting good sleep the night before may not be as helpful.

Luhmann’s slip-box grew to become an equal thinking partner in his work. He described his system as his secondary memory (zweitgedächtnis), alter ego, or reading memory (lesegedächtnis).

In mnemotechnic,brevitasrefers to the creating ofsuch ‘‘rich’’ if necessarily ‘‘brief ’’ units. Because there is in principle no limiton the number ofdivisionesa person may have in memory, readers could beencouraged to make ‘‘brief and compendious’’ summaries of materials theyhad learned.

Therefore it is a great valuefor fixing a memory-image that when we read books, we strive to impress onour memory through the power of forming our mental images not only thenumber and order of verses or ideas, but at the same time the color, shape,position, and placement of the letters, where we have seen this or that writ-ten, in what part, in what location (at the top, the middle, or the bottom)we saw it positioned, in what color we observed the trace of the letter or theornamented surface of the parchment

Having learned the Psalms [as a whole], I then devise the same sort ofscheme for each separate psalm, starting with the beginning words of theverses just as I did for the whole Psalter starting with the first words of thepsalms, and I can thereafter easily retain in my heart the whole series one verseat a time; first by dividing and marking off the book by [whole] psalms andthen each psalm by verses, I have reduced a large amount of material to suchconciseness and brevity

Now indeed endeavor to imprintin this fashion in your memory the matters which are written out below, ac-cording to the method and diagram for learning by heart demonstrated toyou earlier, so that by experience you can know the truth of my words, whenyou perceive how valuable it is to devote study and labor not just to havingheard the lectures on the Scriptures or to discussion, but to memory-work.

Thus, as an art, memory was most importantly associated in the MiddleAges with composition, not simply with retention.

Re-collection is not passive, but rather an activity involvinghuman will and thought; it is often defined as a form of reasoning. One mayconveniently think of this activity in spatial terms, as if memories have beenstored in a variety of places and must be called together in a common placewhere we can become aware of them, where we can ‘‘see’’ them again andknow them in the present.

As understood by the early scho-lastic philosophers, Aristotle taught also thatevery memory is composed of twoaspects: a ‘‘likeness’’ or ‘‘image,’’ which is visual in nature (simulacrum), and anemotional resonance or coloring (intentio), which serves to ‘‘hook’’ a particu-lar memory into one (or perhaps more) of a person’s existing networks of ex-perience.Memory works by association.

memory-making was regarded as active; it was even a craft with techniquesand tools, all designed tomakean ethical, useful product.

Luhmann also described his system as his secondary memory (Zweitgedächtnis), alter ego, or his reading memory or (Lesegedächtnis).

Our brain can only hold to so much information at a time.

Your machine is a library not a publication device. You have copies of documents is there that you control directly, that you can annotate, change, add links to, summarize, and this is because the memex is a tool to think with, not a tool to publish with.

Our experience is that many of today’s technology leaders genuinely venerate Engelbart, Kay, and their colleagues. Many even feel that computers have huge potential as tools for improving human thinking. But they don’t see how to build good businesses around developing new tools for thought. And without such business opportunities, work languishes.

designed so the user must always engage deeply with the meaning of the question, not its superficial appearance

What if the best tools for thought have already been discovered? In other words, perhaps the 1960s and 1970s were an unrepeatable golden age, and all we can expect in the future is gradual incremental improvement, and perhaps the occasional major breakthrough, at a decreasing frequency?

In 1971, the psychologist Allan Paivio proposed the dual-coding theory, namely, the assertion that verbal and non-verbal information are stored separately in long-term memory. Paivio and others investigated the picture superiority effect, demonstrating that pictures and words together are often recalled substantially better than words alone.

The text is beautiful, but reading it is a much more remote and cerebral experience, conveying a much less visceral emotional understanding.

A second caution relates to elaborative encoding. The mnemonic techniques are, as you have likely realized, an example of elaborative encoding in action, connecting the things we want to memorize (say, our shopping list) to something which already has meaning for us (say, our memory palace). By contrast, when an expert learns new information in their field, they don’t make up artificial connections to their memory palace. Instead, they find meaningful connections to what they already know.

Is it possible to create a medium which blends the best qualities of both video and text?

One of us has previously assertedMichael Nielsen, Augmenting Long-Term Memory (2018). that in spaced-repetition memory systems, users need to make their own cards. The reasoning is informal: users often report dissatisfaction and poor results when working with cards made by others. The reason seems to be that making the cards is itself an important act of understanding, and helps with committing material to memory. When users work with cards made by others, they lose those benefits.

Historically, a lot of work on tools for thought has either ignored emotion, or treated it as no more than a secondary concern.

These are preliminary results, and need more investigation.

I want creativity!

How to best help users when they forget the answer to a question? Suppose a user can’t remember the answer to the question: “Who was the second President of the United States?” Perhaps they think it’s Thomas Jefferson, and are surprised to learn it’s John Adams. In a typical spaced-repetition memory system this would be dealt with by decreasing the time interval until the question is reviewed again. But it may be more effective to follow up with questions designed to help the user understand some of the surrounding context. E.g.: “Who was George Washington’s Vice President?” (A: “John Adams”). Indeed, there could be a whole series of followup questions, all designed to help better encode the answer to the initial question in memory.

Indeed, it seems fair to say that any person who could invent Hindu-Arabic numerals, starting from the Roman numerals, would be both one of the great mathematical geniuses who ever lived, and one of the great design geniuses who ever lived. They’d have to be extraordinarily capable in both domains, capable of an insight-through-making loop which used the evolving system of numerals to improve not just their own mathematical ideas, but to have original, world-class insights into mathematics; and also to use those mathematical insights to improve their evolving system of numerals.

Similar lists of 100 words had been in circulation well before Celtis, however, those were not alphabetically designed.

In the Ars memorandi noua secretissima, published in 1500 or 1501,20 Jodocus Weczdorff de Triptis (Weimar) inserted an alphabetical list of words, similar to that of Celtis, but he simply suggested that it could be used as a memory house without any scope for our private associations. Moreover, the alphabetic table of Celtis was included in the famous Margarita philosophica nova of Gregor Reisch, which was probably the most popular handbook of the artes scholars in the fi rst two decades of the 16th century.

The closest analogue to this nude couple can be found in the work of Jacobus Publicius: a similar woodcut appears in the 1485 edition of his Oratoriae artis epitoma for the fi rst time (fi gure 6).42 However, Publicius does not explain the meaning of that image at all, a phenomenon that is restricted to this one picture in his book. The lack of explanation for these enigmatic images raised the value of the lectures of the professor and at the same time kept the secrecy of the ars.

“The Art of Memory in Late Medieval East Central Europe (Bohemia, Hungary, Poland): An Anthology,” co-written by Lucie Doležalová, Rafał Wójcik and myself.

Similar antropomorphic imagines were designed by Johannes Romberch von Host in his Con-gestorium artifi ciosae memoriae,published for the fi rst time in 1520. He associated the declention of nouns to body parts: if we want remember the word “smith” in the nominative case, we should mark him with a blister on his head, in the accusative with a blister on the chest, in the vocative on the belly, etc.; the singular forms are supposed to be dressed up, while the plurals are nude.

Although Celtis rejected the use of such fi gurative let-ters and he promoted his own alphabetic-associative system instead, still, Cusanus copied both methods in his treatise. However, he only copies the words of the mne-monic alphabet of Celtis but not the associative method itself. The fi rst fi ve elements of Celtis (in the work of Cusanus: abbas, eques, illuminator, organista, usurarius) are not associative topoi anymore, but only the scheme of a ready-made mental book (liber mentalis).

The criticism of Celtis turns against the entire tradition of 15th century art of memory, but particularly against the teachings of Jacobus Publicius,11 whose Oratoriae artis epito-mata he had excerpted both in his summary of the Ciceronian rhetoric and the treatise on letter writing.

The only exception is the letter A, which appears in the list – unlike the other vowels – and contains fi ve words beginning with the fi ve vowels: a – abbas (abbot), e – eques (knight), i – institor (tax-collector), o – offi cialis (ecclesiastical judge), and u – usurarius (usurer).

Cusanus, being a teacher in mathematics, imagines a more abstract, almost geometri-cal, scheme for the memory houses in which he combined the method of Publicius with the alphabet of Celtis: the images should be contained in three types of houses.

Celtis advises his readers to memorise things with the aid of the alphabet, because by “keeping the natural order” of the letters (servata earundem naturali ordine), the elements or members of our material can be easily retained by memory. According to the ideas presented by Celtis, under each letter of the alphabet one should memorise fi ve words that begin with the same letter, and these could be the images that belong to the locus, i.e. to the letter itself.

As Celtis said, “it helps the memory a great deal, if someone knows the things of the world,”37 and Valentinus followed this advice when he refi lled the table of Celtis with meanings of his own.

Stabbing one-self with a sword is a typical ‘surprise’ element in 15-16th century mnemotechnics. One can fi nd the same motif in the anonymous fi gurative Gospel (ca. 1470, Figu-rae Evangeliorum), e.g. in the second image of the Gospel of Marc (fi gure 4),40 or in the Logica memorativa of Thomas Murner (1509, fi gure 5).

Konrad Celtis, Epitoma in utramque Ciceronis rhetoricam cum arte memoratiua noua, et modo epi-stolandi utilissimo (Ingolstadt: [s.n.], 1492), 14r-v. EK Inc. 444.

One of the most interesting new treatises is contained in the Epitoma in utramque Cic-eronis rhetoricam of Cornad Celtis, the ‘German archhumanist’

Based on all available forms, the hypothetical proto-Celtic word may be reconstructed as *dru-wid-s (pl. *druwides) meaning "oak-knower".

Given technological advances and a trend to promote digital annotation by students in school, empirical findings are mixed regarding the evidence-based benefits of handwritten annotation for learning.

I don’t think the right answer is to use something like the Mnemonic medium to memorize a cookbook’s contents. I think a likelier model is: each time you see a recipe, there’s some chance it’ll trigger an actionable “ooh, I want to make this!”, dependent on seasonality, weather, what else you’ve been cooking recently, etc. A more effective cookbook might simply resurface recipes intermittently over time, creating more opportunities for a good match: e.g. a weekly email with 5-10 cooking ideas, perhaps with some accompanying narrative. Ideally, the cookbook would surface seasonally-appropriate recipes. Seasonality would make the experience of “reading” a cookbook extend over the course of a year—a Timeful text.

While calling memory “the store-house of our ideas,” John Locke recognized its limitations. On the one hand, it was an incredible source of knowledge. On the other hand, it was weak and fragile. He knew that over time, memory faded and became harder to retrieve, which made it less valuable.

Commonplace books, during the Renaissance, were used to enhance the memory. Yeo writes, This reflected the ancient Greek and Roman heritage. In his Topica, Aristotle formulated a doctrine of ‘places’ (topoi or loci) that incorporated his ten categories. A link was soon drawn between this doctrine of ‘places’ (which were, for Aristotle, ‘seats of arguments’, not quotations from authors) and the art of memory. Cicero built on this in De Oratore, explaining that ‘it is chiefly order that gives distinctness to memory’; and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria became an influential formulation. This stress on order and sequence was the crux of what came to be known as ‘topical memory’, cultivated by mnemonic techniques (‘memoria technica’) involving the association of ideas with visual images. These ideas, forms of argument, or literary tropes were ‘placed’ in the memory, conceived in spatial terms as a building, a beehive, or a set of pigeon holes. This imagined space was then searched for the images and ideas it contained…. In the ancient world, the practical application of this art was training in oratory; yet Cicero stressed that the good orator needed knowledge, not just rhetorical skill, so that memory had to be trained to store and retrieve illustrations and arguments of various kinds. Although Erasmus distrusted the mnemonic arts, like all the leading Renaissance humanists, he advocated the keeping of commonplace books as an aid to memory.

“In his influential De Copia (1512),” writes Professor Richard Yeo, “Erasmus advised that an abundant stock of quotations and maxims from classical texts be entered under various loci (places) to assist free-flowing oratory.” Arranged under ‘Heads’ and recorded as ‘common-places’ (loci communes), these commonplace books could be consulted for speeches and written compositions designed for various situations — in the law court, at ceremonial occasions, or in the dedication of a book to a patron. Typical headings included the classical topics of honour, virtue, beauty, friendship, and Christian ones such as God, Creation, faith, hope, or the names of the virtues and vices.

Looking up “ars memoria” on Wikipedia, I found a suggestion that for some people in the Middle Ages, looking at certain images was considered a means of gaining all knowledge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_memory). It quotes Yates, Art of Memory: The practitioner of the Ars Notoria gazed at figures or diagrams curiously marked and called 'notae' whilst reciting magical prayers. He hoped to gain in this way knowledge, or memory, of all the arts and sciences, a different 'nota' being provided for each discipline. The Ars Notoria is perhaps a descendant of the classical art of memory, or of that difficult branch of it which used the shorthand notae. It was regarded as a particularly black kind of magic and was severely condemned by Thomas Aquinas.

Later in the thread just cited, John Meador quoted another text, 1594, attesting to something more astounding: ...two especial uses, I have often exercised this art for the better help of my own memory, and the same as yet has never failed me. Although I have heard some of Master Dickson, his schollers, that have prooved such cunning Cardplayers hereby, that they could tell the course of all the Cards and what every gamester had in his hand. So ready we are to turn an honest and commendable invention into craft and cousenage." -Hugh Platt: The Jewell House of Art and Nature 1594 This art, or at least its claims, goes somewhat beyond remembering what cards have been played: they actually can use it to know what the other players have in their hand, before playing the cards. Platt considers this a kind of cheating (usually "cozenage", from "cozen", first use 1573, probably from the Italian cozzone, horse trader, per http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cozen).

In his play Il Candelaio he mentions the tarot: an innkeeper asks a scoundrel in his establishment if he likes to play tarot; the scoundrel replies ”A questo maldetto gioco non posso vincere, per che ho una pessima memoria”. (“At this cursed game I cannot win, because I have a terrible memory”)

In 1887, Twain crossed paths with Professor Loisette a ‘memory doctor’ who made a living peddling a system of memory techniques bearing his name. Inductees into the “Loisette system” were sworn to secrecy, and charged the modern equivalent of five hundred dollars to learn the “natural laws of memory” which the doctor claimed to have discovered. Twain enrolled in a several-week-long course and at first was deeply impressed, even going so far as to publish a testimonial in favour of the Loisette system.

In 1885, he patented “Mark Twain’s Memory Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates.”

Writing on Gustave Moreau, Proust detects a universe of analogies, paintings that document an “intoxication of mind” in which reality is a “mysterious country” of unlike objects “resembl[ing] one another.” Describing Rembrandt, he finds an exacting individualism visible in a manipulation of light “that bathes [Rembrandt’s] portraits and his pictures [in] the very light of his thought […] a personal light in which we view things when we are thinking for ourselves.” Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was probably Proust’s favorite painter. He sees in Chardin a vision “combining things and people in those rooms which are more than a thing and perhaps more than a person, rooms which are the scene of their joint lives, the law of affinities and contrarieties […] the shrine of their past.”

Further, as stated, by merely glancing at the pictorially indicated recipe of the present invention the cook can ascertain at a glance the required ingredients, can ascertain whether such ingredients are on hand, and, if not, the needed articles will be more easily remembered in purchasing the days supply of groceries, etc.

Fourteenth-century recipe collections that have survived to today, such as Viandier pour appareiller toutes manières de viandes, Libre de sent sovi, Daz bûch von gûter spîse, and Forme of Cury, were written by professional cooks to use as an aide-mémoire for themselves or other professional cooks.

Once again, Atiyah writes very clearlyand sensibly on this matter (while acknowledging his debt to earlier great mathematicianssuch as Poincar ́e and Weyl). He makes the point (see for example [A2]) that so muchmathematics is produced that it is not possible for all of it to be remembered. The processesof abstraction and generalization are therefore very important as a means of making senseof the huge mass of raw data (that is, proofs of individual theorems) and enabling at leastsome of it to be passed on. The results that will last are the ones that can be organizedcoherently and explained economically to future generations of mathematicians. Of course,some results will be remembered because they solve very famous problems, but even these,if they do not fit into an organizing framework, are unlikely to be studied in detail by morethan a handful of mathematicians.

In any case Quintilian makes it clear that non-alphabetic signs can be employed as memory images, and even goes on to mention how 'shorthand' signs (notae) can be used to signify things that would otherwise be impossible to capture in the form of a definite image (he gives "conjunctions" as an example).[36]

The Art of Signs (Latin Ars Notoria) is also very likely a development of the graphical mnemonic. Yates mentions Apollonius of Tyana and his reputation for memory, as well as the association between trained memory, astrology and divination.[37] She goes on to suggest It may have been out of this atmosphere that there was formed a tradition which, going underground for centuries and suffering transformations in the process, appeared in the Middle Ages as the Ars Notoria, a magical art of memory attributed to Apollonius or sometimes to Solomon. The practitioner of the Ars Notoria gazed at figures or diagrams curiously marked and called 'notae' whilst reciting magical prayers. He hoped to gain in this way knowledge, or memory, of all the arts and sciences, a different 'nota' being provided for each discipline. The Ars Notoria is perhaps a descendant of the classical art of memory, or of that difficult branch of it which used the shorthand notae. It was regarded as a particularly black kind of magic and was severely condemned by Thomas Aquinas.[38]

“The margins are full of images of disembodied body parts, plants, animals, even portraits of cross-eyed kings, which relate to the main body of text and act as a mnemonic for the reader,” Greene says. “Even though you open the manuscript knowing it is a medical text designed for practical use, nothing quite prepares you for seeing a disembodied leg, posterior, or penis pointing at salient parts of the text!”

we tend to believe things more if they rhyme.

The stories added meaning that couldn’t be matched by facts and figures about the items for sale. Meaning can be very difficult to pull off in design, but sto-ries create cognitive fluency around meaning. Our minds love narratives because they love patterns; stories are like really well-packaged patterns. Beginning, middle, and end. Connect-ing that pattern to an object or action in your design can be achieved, in part, by making sure your design accommodates story—whether in the metaphorical sense of how the page is structured (i.e., the page has a clear beginning, middle, and end) or the more literal sense of actually making sure the design leaves room for text that tells a story.

Why, though, do we not romanticize our preservation? The same matter of chance, of the fleeting nature of fate exists on the other side of the coin. What would have happened if we were better rested, if our energy was better preserved, if we managed our time and said what we really mean? Rarely do we approach whether we get eight hours of sleep with the same guilt as we do whether or not we attended a party, even when, according to sleep expert Matthew Walker, sleep deprivation prevents the brain from remembering information, creating new memories, and sustaining emotional well-being.

a roughly 240-page medieval codex written in an indecipherable language, brimming with bizarre drawings of esoteric plants, naked women, and astrological symbols. Known as the Voynich manuscript, it defies classification, much less comprehension.

All we know for certain, through forensic testing, is that the manuscript likely dates to the 15th century, when books were handmade and rare.

Child considered that folk ballads came from a more democratic time in the past when society was not so rigidly segregated into classes, and the "true voice" of the people could therefore be heard. He conceived "the people" as comprising all the classes of society, rich, middle, and poor, and not only those engaged in manual labor as Marxists sometimes use the word.

Celtic Tree Alphabet

The Isle of Man has five inscriptions. One of these is the famous inscription at Port St. Mary (503) which reads DOVAIDONA MAQI DROATA ᚛ᚇᚑᚃᚐᚔᚇᚑᚅᚐ ᚋᚐᚊᚔ ᚇᚏᚑᚐᚈᚐ᚜ or 'Dovaidona son of the Druid'.

"These people chose to erect these great stones very precisely within the landscape and in relation to the astronomy they knew. They invested a tremendous amount of effort and work to do so. It tells us about their strong connection with their environment, and how important it must have been to them, for their culture and for their culture's survival."

Finally, I decided to build it around all my favorite stories that touched on calculus, stories that get passed around in the faculty lounge, or the things that the professor mentions off-hand during a lecture. I realized that all those little bits of folklore tapped into something that really excited me about calculus. They have a time-tested quality to them where they've been told and retold, like an old folk song that has been sharpened over time.

Of other significance, this passage is recognized as the first example of cosmological mapping in the history of Greece.[4]

It was later determined that humans impose meaning even on nonsense syllables to make them more meaningful. The nonsense syllable PED (which is the first three letters of the word "pedal") turns out to be less nonsensical than a syllable such as KOJ; the syllables are said to differ in association value.[5] It appears that Ebbinghaus recognized this, and only referred to the strings of syllables as "nonsense" in that the syllables might be less likely to have a specific meaning and he should make no attempt to make associations with them for easier retrieval.

Ebbinghaus had also documented the serial position effect, which describes how the position of an item affects recall. The two main concepts in the serial position effect are recency and primacy. The recency effect describes the increased recall of the most recent information because it is still in the short-term memory. The primacy effect causes better memory of the first items in a list due to increased rehearsal and commitment to long-term memory.

son of Memory

“an idea wrenched out of time.” In other words, a memory.

Declutter your mind. Add structure as you go.

It is worth asking why ebooks and e-readers like the Kindle treaded water after swimming a couple of laps. I’m not sure I can fully diagnose what happened (I would love to hear your thoughts), but I think there are many elements, all of which interact as part of the book production and consumption ecosystem.

Christman said that he first came up with the idea to look at the effects of eye movements on memory after learning that leftward eye movements activate the right brain hemisphere and that rightward movements activate the left hemisphere. He thought that horizontal eye movements might, therefore, improve memory by helping the hemispheres interact.

Sioned Davies is Chair of Welsh at Cardiff University. Her special interest is the interplay between orality and literacy, together with the performance aspects of medieval Welsh narrative.

their name gives no mnemonic boost whatsoever. Whatever faint associations it might once have held fade away, especially when the discover was neither famous nor narrow, and the reader is several generations removed.

While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources,content, and consequences of collective memory

While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources,content, and consequences of collective memory

“I do remember! I slept soundly.”

enabling precise control over agronomically-relevant outputs such as flowering time, stress response, or the biosynthesis of added value metabolites.

3) Tell your students to study different subjects in different rooms in their house and use the cues in their surroundings (furniture, windows, colors, shapes, etc) to help them access that memory later. They could use the same rooms they imagined in their memory palace: study the modals in the living room and vocabulary in the kitchen;