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

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

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

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

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

One's note cards do not equal wisdom.

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

sola memoria et usu retinebant.

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

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

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

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

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

Pedagogical cultrues:

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

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

•. (n.d.). Even Mild COVID Infections Can Have Lasting Impacts Like ‘Chemo Brain,’ Study Finds. NBC New York. Retrieved 12 January 2022, from https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/even-mild-covid-infections-can-have-lasting-impacts-like-chemo-brain-study-finds/3489958/

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

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

https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021193157/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

Manfred Kuehn looks at Karl Kraus' criticism of the idea of a zettelkasten as a tool which can be misused.

Of course this begs the question of what one is using their index card catalog for? Are you using it as a rhetorical thinking and creation device or simply a second memory?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What impact might this have on Lynne Kelly's thesis about memory in early societies with an imbalance of power?

https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2021/11/birth-of-the-gods/

https://www.landesmuseum.ch/en/exhibitions/temporary/2021/humans.-carved-in-stone/humans.-carved-in-stone

Worth delving into more deeply for additional sources and archaeological evidence.

http://www.diveintomark.link/2006/digg-users-are-dumber-than-goldfish

Users of some aggregation sites collectively forget prior articles and news and resubmit them at intervals. This may give rise to the colloquialism "goldfish effect".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garrido-Vásquez, P., & Rock, T. (2021). Judgments of truth are independently modulated by affect and repetition. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/qajkb

Tibetan literature seems to exhibit strong signs of a prior oral tradition despite having the technology of literacy. Tibetan scholars have memorized huge amounts of literature, but when written down it can vary slightly from other versions.

Adamo, S., Michler, J., Zurbuchen, Y., Cervia, C., Taeschler, P., Raeber, M. E., Sain, S. B., Nilsson, J., Moor, A. E., & Boyman, O. (2021). Signature of long-lived memory CD8+ T cells in acute SARS-CoV-2 infection. Nature, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04280-x

Sloman, S. A. (2021). How Do We Believe? Topics in Cognitive Science, 0(2021), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12580

binary operation 的两个操作数可以是 memory location 吗？

unary 的操作数可以是什么？

local variables 通过会存在哪里，为什么？

memory reference 属于那种 register 类型？

Wagner, U., & Echterhoff, G. (2021). Socially induced false memories in the absence of misinformation. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f8eyr

Sounds somewhat akin to Hidalgo's thesis of the personbyte in ever growing groups.

This seems a lot like the same longevity questions that the Internet Archive and IndieWeb are working on or the @RJI's Dodging the Memory Hole conference for born digital news.

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/11/17/guest-post-seeking-feedback-on-a-model-digital-preservation-policy-a-project-of-the-nasig-digital-preservation-committee/

I've not seen it argued elsewhere (yet), but I would make a case that the majority of drolleries weren't so much comment on themes in text as that they were loci placed into the books at either intervals or in particular locations as part of the practice of the art of memory. They act as signposts to which the reader can more easily memorize portions of books by attaching the ideas on those pages to the dramatic and absurd images painted into them as suggested by Rhetorica ad Herennium (https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL403/1954/volume.xml).

Cross reference: The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates (University of Chicago, 1966).for the historical practice of memory in the West, though she doesn't mention drolleries at all.

cc: @remikalir

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.