- Jan 2022
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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.
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If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
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When Simonides offered to teach the Athenian statesman Themistocles the art of Memory, Cicero reports that he refused. "Teach me not the art of remem- bering," he said, "but the art of forgetting, for I remember things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things I wish to forget."
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And pundits quipped, "Nothing is more common than a fool with a strong memory."
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In 1580 Montaigne declared that "a good memory is generally joined to a weak judgment."
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The effect was beautifully suggested by Victor Hugo in a familiar passage in Notre-Dame de Paris (183 1) when the scholar holding his first printed book turns away from his manuscripts, looks a t the cathedral, and says "This will kill that" (Ceci tuera cela). Print also destroyed "the invisible cathedrals of memory." For the printed book made it less nec- essary to shape ideas and things into vivid images and then store them in Memory-places.
In Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) Victor Hugo depicts a scholar holding his first printed book. He turns away from his manuscripts to look at the cathedral and says "This will kill that" (Ceci tuera cela). Similarly the printed book made it far less necessary to store one's knowledge into cathedrals of memory.
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they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
This is why active reading and studying are important. One can take notes and simply regurgitate them and seem wise, but having truly consumed and made a text one's own is the key.
This is somewhat similar to the criticism of the zettelkasten as seen in https://hyp.is/cqT1mG0sEeyMMRNCE79Ozw/takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html
One's note cards do not equal wisdom.
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For centuries the standard work on Latin grammar was the 12th- century Doctrinale, by Alexander of Villedieu, in 2,000 lines of doggerel. Versified rules were easier to remember, though their crudity appalled Aldus Manutius when he reprinted this work in 1501.
Alexander de Villedieu's Latin grammer Doctrinale from the 12th century was the standard work on the subject. Its 2,000 lines of doggerel were used as a mnemonic device because they were easier to remember. Famed publisher Aldus Manutius was appalled at their crude nature when he reprinted the book in 1501.
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The English common law was "immemorial" custom which ran to a "time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." "In the profound ignorance of letters which formerly overspread the whole west- em world," Sir William Blackstone noted in 1765, "letters were intirely traditional, for this plain reason, that the nations among which they pre- vailed had but little idea of writing. Thus the British as well as the Gallic druids committed all their laws as well as learning to memory; and it is said of the primitive Saxons here, as well as their brethren on the conti- nent, that leges
sola memoria et usu retinebant.
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"Memory," agreed Cicero, "is the treasury and guardian of all things."
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"Memory," said Aeschylus, "is the mother of all wis- dom."
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Only recently has "memory training" become a butt of ridicule and a refuge of charlatans.
Daniel Boorstin indicated in 1984 that "'memory training' had become the butt of ridicule and a refuge of charlatans", a concept which had begun by the 1880s with people selling memory tricks and training to the point that the journal Science published an article by George S. Fellows exposing an expensive program by Antoine Loisette, which had been advertised in the New York Times with quotes by Mark Twain. #
The trend probably hit its peak when huckster and convicted fraudster Kevin Trudeau marketed audiocassette tapes of his "Mega Memory" course on late night infomercials until he was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission in the late 1990's.
That history had begun to shift with the rise of memory sports and competitions into the early 2000s and popularized by Tyler Foer's book Moonwalking with Einstein.
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The Goddess of Memory (Mnemosyne) was a Titan, daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth), and mother of all the nine Muses
The Greeks gave Mnemosyne, a Titan and the goddess of memory a significant location within their culture as the daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth) and the mother of all the nine Muses.
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The Lost Arts of Memory by Daniel J. Boorstin The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1984 104-113
Tags
- Mark Twain
- read
- forgetting
- method of loci
- books
- references
- Mnemosyne
- mnemonic devices
- 1580
- Themistocles
- psychoanalysis
- Daniel Boorstin
- doggerel
- poetry
- information overload
- 1765
- memory
- Michel de Montaigne
- fools
- wisdom
- Aeschylus
- Carl Jung
- Victor Hugo
- Aldus Manutius
- criticism
- Kevin Trudeau
- Cicero
- judgement
- Alexander of Villedieu
- memory palaces
- Alphonse Loisette
- memory training
- cathedrals
- hucksters
- William James
- English common law
- muses
- zettelkasten
- Sigmund Freud
- Simonides of Ceos
- Latin grammar
- William Blackstone
- druids
- aphorisms
- quotes
- printing
- psychology
- art of memory
- Greek culture
- George S. Fellows
Annotators
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culture that taught to learn by rote and a culture that taught to forget instead
Pedagogical cultrues:
- cultures taught orally
- cultures taught to remember
- cultures taught to learn by rote
- cultures taught to forget
Is there a (linear) progression? How do they differ? How are they they same? Is there a 1-1 process that allows them to be equivalence classes?
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www.nbcnewyork.com www.nbcnewyork.com
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•. (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/
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www.biorxiv.org www.biorxiv.org
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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
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pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
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I go through my old posts every day. I know that much – most? – of them are not for the ages. But some of them are good. Some, I think, are great. They define who I am. They're my outboard brain.
Cory Doctorow calls his blog and its archives his "outboard brain".
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takingnotenow.blogspot.com takingnotenow.blogspot.com
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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?
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takingnotenow.blogspot.com takingnotenow.blogspot.com
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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.
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- Dec 2021
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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Physical mark-making also quickens the memory, which is one reason that handwritten notes are so much easier to recall than their typed equivalents.
Where is the research to back this up? I'm sure it exists.
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luhmann.surge.sh luhmann.surge.sh
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As a result of extensive work with this technique a kind of secondary memory will arise, an alter ego with who we can constantly communicate.
I want to look at the original German for this sentence, particularly with respect to the translation of the phrase "secondary memory". Is the translation semantic or literal? Might the original German have been a more literal "second brain"?
Compare this to the one or two other examples of this sort of translation from the German.
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learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com
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Something has been lost. He just had arather idiosyncratic (and ultimately, false) notion of what it was. Howdo we characterize it, then? And how lost is it really? What does itimply about possibilities for social change today?
I might posit that we've lost our cultural memories of those times.
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Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception ofprivate property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towardsinequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities wererelatively free of ranks and hierarchies
What impact might this have on Lynne Kelly's thesis about memory in early societies with an imbalance of power?
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blog.nationalmuseum.ch blog.nationalmuseum.ch
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www.landesmuseum.ch www.landesmuseum.ch
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Worth delving into more deeply for additional sources and archaeological evidence.
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www.diveintomark.link www.diveintomark.link
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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".
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When the user stores his thoughts in his own filing cabinet, these thoughts are no longer his own but those of his filing cabinet. In turn, the machine that gathers and reproduces excerpts is, and remains, a ‘black box’. It is not simply another Ego for enacting a user’s soliloquy but a true Alter Ego with whom the user communicates. Additionally, when the machine is started, the user does not simply refresh his memory; the filing cabinet actually speaks. To achieve this practical outcome, the card index must be provided with a ‘life of its own’ (Eigenleben) which should be as independent of the life of its educator as possible.30 In this sense, the card index functions as a ‘secondary memory’ in Stübel’s terms. This result raises some questions which justify the present article. Is there a socio-structural reason why such an improbability became possible? Is there a trend, in early and late modern society, toward an externalization and technologizing of social memory? And what insight can we gain into intellectual history?
I'm not completely sure I can agree with this. Perhaps I'm missing part of his point?
There is a quirky relationship here to the idea of a personbyte, the complete amount of information and knowledge a person can have. Even misty memories that a person can remember or be reminded of are part of this knowledge. Perfect recall isn't necessary as some things can potentially be reconstituted with some thought towards recreation of an idea.
Compare this with the idea of epic poetry and song of the Yugoslavian guslars. Some may be more artful than others, but at what point are they telling a new story?
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In a short academic dissertation on the art of excerpts, Andreas Stübel described the card index as a ‘secondary and subsidiary memory’ (‘memoria secundaria and subsidiaria’), summing up in just three words the dilemma scholars had been struggling with for two centuries with respect to the use of commonplace books.28 As far as I know, Stübel was the first among contem-poraries to speak of secondary memory.
28 Andreas M. Stübel, Exercitatio academica de excerptis adornandis (Leipzig, 1684), 33
Andreas M. Stübel, in Exercitatio academica de excerptis adornandis (Leipzig, 1684), becomes the first to of many to speak about the idea of "secondary memory".
I like this idea better than Tiago Forte's marketing term "second brain."
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And the well-known jurist Jacques Cujas stated that ‘hee is a Learned Man non qui multa legit sed qui can fitly turne to Authors et use them according to his occasions. Non qui multa memoria teneat sed qui optima in libris optimis posset inve-nire’ (he is a learned man not the one who reads a number of books but the one who can fitly turn to authors and use them according to his occasion. [He is a learned man] not the one who keeps in mind a number of things but the one who can find the best passages in the best books).21
21 Hartlib Papers 29/2/49A, Ephemerides 1634, Part 5 (italics added).
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Johannes Sturm, for example, admitted that it was not important after all to remember; it was far more important to know how to retrieve what in the meantime had been forgotten.20
20 Johannes Sturm[ius], Linguae Latinae resolvendae ratio (Strasburg, 1581), 51: ‘Scire enim ubi possis invenire, quae memoriae non mandas, satis est’ (italics added).
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In fact, the methodical use of notebooks changed the relationship between natural memory and artificial memory, although contemporaries did not immediately realize it. Historical research supports the idea that what was once perceived as a memory aid was now used as secondary memory.18
During the 16th century there was a transition in educational centers from using the natural and artificial memories to the methodical use of notebooks and commonplace books as a secondary memory saved by means of writing.
This allows people in some sense to "forget" what they've read and learned and be surprised by it again later. They allow themselves to create liminal memories which may be refreshed and brought to the center later. Perhaps there is also some benefit in this liminal memory for allowing ideas to steep on the periphery before using them. Perhaps combinatorial creativity happens unconsciously?
Cross reference: learning research by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski.
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Drexel, for instance, held those teach-ers ridiculous who taught students to build up houses and rooms by means of imagination and stock them with images of memorable subjects (imagines agentes).16 According to the German Jesuit, the effort was not only huge but students wasted their time because images escape from these artificial places
much as prisoners escape from jails without guards.17 16 Drexel, Aurifodina, 258 17 Drexel, Aurifodina, 3–4.
Jeremias Drexel (1581 – 1638) recommended against the method of loci during the explosion of information in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Add Drexel to the list of reformers against the ars memoria in the early 1600s.)
While dealing with the information overload, educators may have inadvertently thrown out the baby with the bath water. While information still tends to increase and have increased complexity, some areas also show compression and concatenation and new theories subsume old information into their models. This means that one might know and understand Einstein which means that memorizing Newton's work is no longer needed at some point. Where should one draw the line of memorization for subsuming the knowledge of their culture? Aren't both old and new methods for memory usable? Keep the ars memoria while also using written methods.
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an inquiry into filing systems is an inquiry into how society manages its own memory.11
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Simultaneously, there was a revival of the old art of excerpting and the use of commonplace books. Yet, the latter were perceived no longer as memory aids but as true secondary memo-ries. Scholars, in turn, became increasingly aware that to address the informa-tion overload produced by printing, the best solution was to train a card index instead of their own individual consciousness.
Another reason for the downfall of older Western memory traditions is the increased emphasis and focus on the use of commonplaces and commonplace books in the late 1400s onward.
Cross reference the popularity of manuals by Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon.
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Over these two centuries, an in-creasing impatience for the ancient art of memory based on the use of imagi-nation could be detected in the academic milieu.
Following the invention of moveable type, the information overload created in the two centuries between 1550 and 1750, placed a major burden and impatience, particularly on academic scholars, on the use of the ancient arts of memory based on the use of imagination. In addition to the education reforms by those like Peter Ramus, this may have been a major motivating factor for forgetting this prior tradition of knowledge acquisition and management.
What is one to do when there's seemingly "too much to memorize"?
Tags
- Erasmus
- second brain
- forgetting
- guslars
- Jeremias Drexel
- method of loci
- filing systems
- orality
- personal knowledge management
- Terry Sejnowski
- personbyte
- information overload
- memory
- sociology
- moveable type
- secondary memory
- flâneur
- commonplace books
- information management
- Melanchthon
- Andreas M. Stübel
- Agricola
- cognitive neuroscience
- Barbara Oakley
- memory versus retrieval
- liminal memories
- Petrus Ramus
- communication
- note taking
- collective memory
- zettelkasten
- combinatorial creativity
- learned people
- Jacques Cujas
- ra
- decline of memory
- quotes
- learning
- education reform
- art of memory
- surprise
- filing cabinets
Annotators
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Garrido-Vásquez, P., & Rock, T. (2021). Judgments of truth are independently modulated by affect and repetition. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/qajkb
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blogs.orient.ox.ac.uk blogs.orient.ox.ac.uk
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Texts can be substantially modified by other hands in subsequent re-publications, even while still retaining their original authorial (or revelatory) attribution. At other times, modification can be generated silently and less deliberately via the subtly transformative medium of memorisation: we must recall that Tibetan scholars carry huge tracts of literature around in their minds, which they can access instantly without recourse to a written book, but sometimes it comes out in a form ever so slightly different from other or previous iterations. I think one can even say that the Buddhist tradition often understands authorial attributions as a conventional shorthand indicating the accepted presiding spiritual authority in a given literary instance, rather than as the sole or exclusive literary agency that created it.
Tibetan literature seems to exhibit strong signs of a prior oral tradition despite having the technology of literacy. Tibetan scholars have memorized huge amounts of literature, but when written down it can vary slightly from other versions.
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www.nature.com www.nature.com
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Adamo, S., Michler, J., Zurbuchen, Y., Cervia, C., Taeschler, P., Raeber, M. E., Sain, S. B., Nilsson, J., Moor, A. E., & Boyman, O. (2021). Signature of long-lived memory CD8+ T cells in acute SARS-CoV-2 infection. Nature, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04280-x
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onlinelibrary.wiley.com onlinelibrary.wiley.com
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Sloman, S. A. (2021). How Do We Believe? Topics in Cognitive Science, 0(2021), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12580
Tags
- unfamiliar circumstance
- predictability
- causal reasoning
- generalizability
- representational language
- sophisticated associative model
- information processing
- pattern recognition
- cognitive science
- human thought
- memory
- representational scheme
- is:article
- dual system of thinking
- lang:en
- knowledge
Annotators
URL
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- Nov 2021
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www.cs.sfu.ca www.cs.sfu.ca
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As with themov instructions, the two operands cannot both be memory locations.
binary operation 的两个操作数可以是 memory location 吗？
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This operand can be either a register ora memory location.
unary 的操作数可以是什么？
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local variables such as x are often kept in registers rather thanstored in memory locations. Register access is much faster than memory access.
local variables 通过会存在哪里，为什么？
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One important feature is that memoryreferences in x86-64 are always given with quad word registers, such as %rax, evenif the operand is a byte, single word, or double word.
memory reference 属于那种 register 类型？
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Wagner, U., & Echterhoff, G. (2021). Socially induced false memories in the absence of misinformation. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f8eyr
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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But it should be observed that it is experience in mass, the experience of institutions, the experience of a generation, and not individual experience, which is of value.
Sounds somewhat akin to Hidalgo's thesis of the personbyte in ever growing groups.
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scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org
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This seems a lot like the same longevity questions that the Internet Archive and IndieWeb are working on or the @RJI's Dodging the Memory Hole conference for born digital news.
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www.edutopia.org www.edutopia.org
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As the book recounts, annotation is a centuries-old practice. For example, decorative images called drolleries were added in the margins of medieval texts as visual comments on themes in the text.
I've not seen it argued elsewhere (yet), but I would make a case that the majority of drolleries weren't so much comment on themes in text as that they were loci placed into the books at either intervals or in particular locations as part of the practice of the art of memory. They act as signposts to which the reader can more easily memorize portions of books by attaching the ideas on those pages to the dramatic and absurd images painted into them as suggested by Rhetorica ad Herennium (https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL403/1954/volume.xml).
Cross reference: The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates (University of Chicago, 1966).for the historical practice of memory in the West, though she doesn't mention drolleries at all.
cc: @remikalir
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www.lynnekelly.com.au www.lynnekelly.com.au
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site.pennpress.org site.pennpress.org
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Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.
This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).
Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond
This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.
This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?
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www-degruyter-com.proxy.library.carleton.ca www-degruyter-com.proxy.library.carleton.ca
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Whether or not they viewed gentrification as positive or negative, residents used memory as a vehicle to stake claim to the area or to resist changes.
How did my participants talk about absented place? There is a connection between land custodianship and the overall gentrification of the city. (Perhaps this is a stretch, bu certainly something to consider).
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lilianweng.github.io lilianweng.github.io
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two major memory consumption of large model training: The majority is occupied by model states, including optimizer states (e.g. Adam momentums and variances), gradients and parameters. Mixed-precision training demands a lot of memory since the optimizer needs to keep a copy of FP32 parameters and other optimizer states, besides the FP16 version. The remaining is consumed by activations, temporary buffers and unusable fragmented memory (named residual states in the paper).
深度网络训练中的显存开销主要是哪些？
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It partitions optimizer state, gradients and parameters across multiple data parallel processes via a dynamic communication schedule to minimize the communication volume.
ZeRO-DP 的原理是什么？
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www.lib.uchicago.edu www.lib.uchicago.edu
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How can these modern translations and related translations be compared and contrasted to the original passage of the stories in their original bardic traditions?
Cross reference the orality work of Milman Parry, et al.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Basically you take an idea, convert that idea into a character then whenever you want to think about that idea you imagine yourself as that character and then explain that idea to yourself through that character. For example: We first take an idea (lets use automation) Then we turn it into a character (lets see automation as a mass of cogwheels and pistons moving around randomly) Then you imagine yourself as that character and see the world through that characters eyes (in this case we would be disgusted by humanity because of how slow and inefficient it is) Now when we are asked a question about automation or when we want to think about automation we can imagine ourselves becoming that character and we can speak through them to answer that question
Related to the idea of putting oneself into another ideas' shoes discussed a bit in Annie Murphy Paul's book The Extended Mind.
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docs.google.com docs.google.com
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So the big secret then is, how did he know that this note here exists? How could he remember that this existing note was relevant to the new one he was writing? A mystery we haven't solved yet.
I'm surprised to see/hear this!
How did Niklas Luhmann cross link his notes? Apparently researchers don't quite know, but I'd suggest that in working with them diligently over time, he'd have a reasonable internal idea from memory in addition to working with his indices and his outline cards.
The cards in some sense form a physical path through which he regularly traverses, so he's making a physical memory palace (or songline) out of index cards.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Excerpting requires effort and thus combats natural laziness; inhis regimen there is no reading without taking notes, which would be idleand vain, and no time wasted because every free moment can be put to usereading over one’s notes (seeA,p. 84).
Even early in the history of note taking treatises Jeremias Drexel acknowledges the idea that good note taking, and particularly excerpting, takes work.
Modern students seem to have now lost both the ars memoria as well as the note taking arts which helped supplant it. We really need to be able to regain both of these traditions, but it will obviously take commitment to do the work.
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Drexel emphasizesthe difficulty of image-based arts of memory and how short-lived are theirresults: “Great labor places so many images of things in this treasury ofmemory; but no amount of labor has managed to preserve them there forlong without excerpts” (A, p. 3). Instead, for Drexel excerpting is the onlysure way to retain material for the long term. Drexel insists too that, farfrom detracting from memory, note taking is the best aid to memory.
Jeremias Drexel is certainly a writer who complains about the work of the ars memoria, particularly for long term memory and supplants it with writing/note taking.
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pedagogues in the humanist tradition, from Erasmus to Drexel,were routinely hostile to the arts of memory.
On Erasmus’s preference for “study, order and care” over places and images, see Erasmus,De ratione studii(1512), quoted in Yates,The Art of Memory,p. 127
What other pedagogues were hostile to memory?
This is another point in the decline of memory traditions from the 1500s onward.
What effect did cheaper books and paper have on this decline?
Keep in mind that Erasmus had written a treatise on commonplacing which was also a point in the history of note taking though Blair doesn't acknowledge his contributions in her list here. Also Agricola and Melanchthon
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ste-nography was only developed for German in 1834); st
Ann Blair indicates that stenography was only developed for German in 1834.
Is there a reference for this? When was it developed for other languages? How does this fit in with the timeline for memory and the major system?
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One seventeenth-century teacher concluded thatnote taking must have been practiced even by the followers of thepriscasapientiafamous for their reliance on memory and their contempt of writ-ing: “How else would their writings survive to us?
However from examples in oral cultures we know that there are other mnemonic traditions which allow the preservation of knowledge.
cross-reference: Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power
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́herange of storage media operative in different historical contexts includesthe marked stone tokenW the clay tabletW the knotted cord or quipuW the paX
pyrus scroll and the sheet of parchment.
Which others is she missing from a mnemonics perspective? I'm impressed that she indicates the khipu, but there are certainly other indigenous methods from oral cultures.
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- Oct 2021
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Notes, which are a sort of external memory, a “paper memory” Montaigne called them, must bear a very small proportion to reading; but they can cover more ground than memory, they can supply for it, and so take the strain off it and help our work in a measure that is hard to assign.
Notes allow us to forget, but they're also a foothold for future memorization.
What is the source of Montaigne calling notes "paper memory"?
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The creative faculty largely depends on the wis- dom and controlled activity of the memory.
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Fifty data are no better than one, if they all stand only in the same relation to the fundamental idea; un- coordinated they remain fruitless,
The style is dramatically different, but this easily could appear in pieces on zettelkasten today.
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Look always for what connects this thing with that, what condi- tions are necessary for this and for that; let this co- ordination, and not scattered fragments, fix itself in your memory. A
A surprising number of references to connecting ideas and knowledge...
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On the pretext that you may have to catch any train, you do not learn the Railway Guide by heart.
Generally good advice, but some people in modern times take this too far. Perhaps we ought to memorize more that could be useful in our everyday lives.
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We do not live by memory, we use our memory to live.
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It might seem that St. Thomas recommends this, when he writes in his Sixteen Precepts: “Lay up in the treasury of your mind all that you can, like a man aiming at fill- ing a vessel.”
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PREPARATION FOR WORK
This whole section looks the most interesting and promising to me: reading, memory, and notes!
I'll likely read these first and at best skim the rest depending on content.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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There's a new book out that touches extending the mind beyond the body that gives an overview of the past decade or so of psychology and neuroscience in the areas of thinking and memory.
I've seen several references to it in my reading over the past few months, but this review in particular put it over the edge for me to read: https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/. Here are my notes on it for those interested in quick highlights.
Those interested in the overlap of psychology and memory will likely appreciate some of the researched mind hacks which are mentioned. I have a feeling those interested in education and pedagogy will also appreciate it. Some of the reviews and discussions remind me of @LynneKelly's work with students in Australia though I suspect that Paul is writing here from a very western-centric point of view. In particular I'm curious about the sections on thinking with movement/gesture, walking, and using one's surroundings/natural spaces/built spaces which I suspect will have some familiar overlaps with songlines and memory palaces.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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The Bruniquel cave, in southwest France, is believed to be a Neanderthal dwelling 100,000 years before humans in Europe. Stalagmites in the cave may have been arranged as walls, and possibly as a fireplace. Charred bone found in the walls date to 175,000 years ago.
This cave is apparently fairly deep. Cross reference this with deep cave fires and asphyxiation research.
- Article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/25/neanderthals-built-mysterious-cave-structures-175000-years-ago
- Related journal article: http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature18291
Is it possible that such a place was used as a memory palace? Being secluded away and the play of fire inside would certainly fit some of Lynne Kelly's criteria from Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies. More evidence would be needed however.
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>LynneKelly </span> in "Ancient Australian Aboriginal Memory Tool Superior to ‘Memory Palace’ Learning" - Neuroscience, Psychology, and Health - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>10/19/2021 09:26:03</time>)</cite></small>
I don’t think the methods were worked out as much as evolved with the human brain. I suspect those who started using mnemonics survived and bred better than those who didn’t.
I have been pointed to this discovery of a Neanderthal cave many times, with archaeologists suggesting to me that it points to Neanderthal use of a memory palace. It would need more evidence to be convincing, but that would go back a very long time.
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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https://web.archive.org/web/20210323175407/https://www.pmemory.com/
This memory courses' website seems to have gone down sometime in the past six months or so. Fortunately I'd gotten a copy of most (?) of their system before it went down. I'm adding it to my list of systems to take a look at.
It generally went by PMemory and in some cases by Ruslan M Phenomenal Memory (GMS). See also: https://brainlearns.com/courses/ruslan-m-phenomenal-memory-gms/
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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I don’t think the methods were worked out as much as evolved with the human brain. I suspect those who started using mnemonics survived and bred better than those who didn’t.
I've had this same suspicion for a while. Might be interesting to try to collect some evidence to support it.
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I have been pointed to this discovery of a Neanderthal cave many times, with archaeologists suggesting to me that it points to Neanderthal use of a memory palace. It would need more evidence to be convincing, but that would go back a very long time. the Guardian – 25 May 16 Neanderthals built mysterious cave structures 175,000 years ago 2 Constructions discovered deep in a French cave rank among the earliest human building projects ever discovered, but their purpose remains unclear
Interesting article to read and build evidence as Kelly suggests.
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The Natural Navigator (Tristan Gooley) is worth a look as it is how these people would have seen the world. We live in a world of clock and compass while they lived by a circle, wind and light. I also wonder what other surviving memory methods there are out there like maybe the Story Knife from Alaska?
These may be worth looking into.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Mattias Ribbings book Vagen till Masterminne at the moment that is based on GMS and it is mind blowing what he accomplished with these techniques.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Lynne Kelly's excellent book Memory Craft (Pegasus, 2020) has 6 pages of Appendix A which lists 31 memory methods along with examples, what they might be used for, and references to where they're described in the book. It's one of the most comprehensive lists I've seen to date and in particular covers a variety of methods used by indigenous cultures which aren't discussed in many other (Western focused) texts.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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I just bookmarked this article published today in Current Biology for later reading and annotation. While the article isn't specifically focused on memory, the fact that it touches on visual structures, emotion, music, and movement (dance) which are core to some peoples' memory toolkits, I thought that many here would find it to be of interest.
One of the authors provided the following tl;dr synopsis:
"Across the world, people express emotion through music and dance. But why do music and dance go together?
We tested a deceptively simple hypothesis: Music and movement are represented the same way in the brain."
- Article: Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception01283-5) (Current Biology, 2021)
- Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/254961v4
For those who haven't integrated song or dance into their practices, searching around for the idea of songlines will give you some background on their possible uses.
cc: @LynneKelly
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www.cell.com www.cell.com
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Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)01283-5
This portends some interesting results with relation to mnemonics and particularly songlines and indigenous peoples' practices which integrate song, movement, and emotion.
Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/254961v4
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Across the world, people express emotion through music and dance. But why do music and dance go together? <br><br>We tested a deceptively simple hypothesis: Music and movement are represented the same way in the brain.
— Beau Sievers (@beausievers) October 12, 2021<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Beau Sievers </span> in "New work published today in Current Biology Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception With @ThaliaWheatley @k_v_n_l @parkinsoncm @sergeyfogelson (thread after coffee!) https://t.co/AURqH9kNLb https://t.co/ro4o4oEwk5" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>10/12/2021 09:26:10</time>)</cite></small>
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www.science.org www.science.org
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Mateus, J., Dan, J. M., Zhang, Z., Rydyznski Moderbacher, C., Lammers, M., Goodwin, B., Sette, A., Crotty, S., & Weiskopf, D. (n.d.). Low-dose mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccine generates durable memory enhanced by cross-reactive T cells. Science, 0(0), eabj9853. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj9853
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www.cogsciwa.com www.cogsciwa.com
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Www.cogsciWA.com. (n.d.). Www.CogsciWA.Com. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://www.cogsciwa.com/
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Blomberg, B., Mohn, K. G.-I., Brokstad, K. A., Zhou, F., Linchausen, D. W., Hansen, B.-A., Lartey, S., Onyango, T. B., Kuwelker, K., Sævik, M., Bartsch, H., Tøndel, C., Kittang, B. R., Cox, R. J., & Langeland, N. (2021). Long COVID in a prospective cohort of home-isolated patients. Nature Medicine, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01433-3
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www.researchsquare.com www.researchsquare.com
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Divergent trajectories of antiviral memory after SARS-Cov-2 infection. (2021, June 15). https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-612205/v1
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- Sep 2021
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=578JJeLN9Kw
Short and basic... nothing new to me, but clever intro.
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tracydurnell.com tracydurnell.com
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Note to self: mind garden is the first term I came across for this type of note-taking, but perhaps in the way I use this site, it would be more accurate to think of it as a commonplace book?
I love the phrase mind garden here. It almost feels to me like a portmanteau concept that ties together the ideas of mind (or memory) palace and digital garden.
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journals.plos.org journals.plos.org
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Pluviano, S., Watt, C., & Della Sala, S. (2017). Misinformation lingers in memory: Failure of three pro-vaccination strategies. PLoS ONE, 12(7), e0181640. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181640
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Some interesting finds Josh.
Related to some of the bullet journal (aka BuJo) and journaling space you will eventually come across the idea of "morning pages" which is a technique where you spend a block of time (usually in the morning, but ideally just before you want to do your creative thinking work) where you write for a set amount of time or number of pages. The goal of this method (and to some extent bullet journaling) is to clear the cruft and extraneous details out of your head to be able to better prioritize and focus on your creative work. There's a relatively large group of people doing this as a technique, so even knowing the phrase can help one to find the literature.
Tangentially related to this and memory (via our old friend rhetoric), I've been doing some significant research into the commonplace book tradition and general note taking with an eye towards knowledge acquisition, creation, and spaced repetition systems. This has led into research into the areas of the zettelkasten, digital note taking, digital gardens and the like. All fascinating areas which overlap memory via rhetoric. I suspect that many mnemonists in the Renaissance used commonplace books as physical written memory palaces, though I've yet to find anything in my research that directly links them other than the relationship they have in the long tradition of rhetoric in Western culture. Since you mention music and writing lyrics, I recently noted that Eminem has a commonplace technique which he calls "stacking ammo" by which he compiles ideas for his lyrics. His method is certainly less structured than a traditional commonplace book, but the overall form traces back to our friends Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.
If you delve into some of the Bullet Journal and journaling literature you'll find a subculture of people (YouTube has hundreds of people with entire channels dedicated to the topic) who write into their daily/weekly planners and decorate them with stickers, washi tape, photos, calligraphy, drawings, etc. I've called some of this "productivity porn" before, but if you search commonplace book on Instagram or Pinterest you'll find examples of people whose journals and notes are becoming physical memory palaces where the visuals are likely helping them remember portions of their lives or what they're writing. The stickers and images to some extent are serving the purpose of drolleries seen in Medieval manuscripts as mnemonic devices.
And finally, tangentially related to all of this is another interesting sub-genre of memory and note taking called sketchnotes which combines active listening, writing, and drawing into a mnemonic related note taking activity. I'm actually a bit surprised to find so little on the technique here on the forum. Searching for sketchnotes on social media will provide lots of examples and there are many "What are sketchnotes" short videos on YouTube that will give you an idea of what's going on. Many of these talk about a memory component, but not being mired into the sub-topic of rhetoric, they're usually not using the same framings we would (here on the forum), though the effects one might expect are the same.
Some related richer resources for these areas, to help people from going down the rabbit hole within the performative social media spaces:
- How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking–for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens
- This touches on note taking within a zettelkasten framing, but is also applicable to the commonplace book tradition
- Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde
- This is one of the bibles in the space and gives a solid overview of what, why, how, etc.
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton
- How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking–for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa84hA3OsHU
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Josh Cohen</span> in Aphantasia Video: Living without Mental Imagery (Wired) - Neuroscience, Psychology, and Health - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>09/19/2021 21:25:12</time>)</cite></small>
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Mnemonist and prolific memory researcher/writer Lynne Kelly also describes herself as having aphantasia and indicates that it isn't a problem for her either. She's described some of her experiences here: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?page_id=4236
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Ebook devices are extremely compatible with an idea of bookiness that values holding and carrying a potentially large number of books at once; that prefers direct flow from start to finish over random access; that reads for the meaning and force of the words as text first, if not primarily; and that isn’t concerned with the use of books as stores of reader-added information or as memory palaces.
Intriguing reference of a book as a memory palace here.
The verso/recto and top/middle/bottom is a piece of digital books that I do miss from the physical versions as it serves as a mnemonic journey for me to be able to remember what was where.
I wonder if Ian Bogost uses the method of loci?
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sakai.duke.edu sakai.duke.edu
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Voice is lost
Can we, like Shepherds, tell a merry Tale? Stephen Duck, The Thresher's Tale (poem)
There's a link here to shepherds and a bardic tradition. In some sense, shepherds have lots of time to kill during the day and thus potentially tell stories. But they're also moving around their environment which also makes it easier for them to have used songline-like methods for attaching their memories to their environment.
How far back might this tradition go in our literate culture?
I also wonder at the influence of time on oral traditions as the result of this. Lynne Kelly describes calendrical devices in a variety of indigenous settings in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies for potential use in annual spaced repetition. What about the spaced repetition within daily cycles of regular work as described in this paper with respect to shepherds, fishing communities, and crofting?
The daily cycle of life may have been a part of the spaced repetition for memory.
How might we show this?
A quick example that comes to mind is the French children's song Alouette, Gentille Alouette which details how one kills, cleans, and dresses a chicken for cooking.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA
Learning styles have been debunked.
Learning styles: V.A.R.K. model originated by Neil Flemiing stands for:
- visual
- auditory
- reading/writing
- kinesthetic
References:
Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119. — https://ve42.co/Pashler2008
Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The scientific status of learning styles theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271. — https://ve42.co/Willingham
Massa, L. J., & Mayer, R. E. (2006). Testing the ATI hypothesis: Should multimedia instruction accommodate verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style?. Learning and Individual Differences, 16(4), 321-335. — https://ve42.co/Massa2006
Riener, C., & Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change: The magazine of higher learning, 42(5), 32-35.— https://ve42.co/Riener2010
Husmann, P. R., & O'Loughlin, V. D. (2019). Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy students’ study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning styles. Anatomical sciences education, 12(1), 6-19. — https://ve42.co/Husmann2019
Snider, V. E., & Roehl, R. (2007). Teachers’ beliefs about pedagogy and related issues. Psychology in the Schools, 44, 873–886. doi:10.1002/pits.20272 — https://ve42.co/Snider2007
Fleming, N., & Baume, D. (2006). Learning Styles Again: VARKing up the right tree!. Educational developments, 7(4), 4. — https://ve42.co/Fleming2006
Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: Effects on comprehension. Journal of educational psychology, 107(1), 64. — https://ve42.co/Rogowskyetal
Coffield, Frank; Moseley, David; Hall, Elaine; Ecclestone, Kathryn (2004). — https://ve42.co/Coffield2004
Furey, W. (2020). THE STUBBORN MYTH OF LEARNING STYLES. Education Next, 20(3), 8-13. — https://ve42.co/Furey2020
Dunn, R., Beaudry, J. S., & Klavas, A. (2002). Survey of research on learning styles. California Journal of Science Education II (2). — https://ve42.co/Dunn2002
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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The minds of other people can also supplement our limited individual memory. Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, named this collective remembering “transactive memory.” As he explained it, “Nobody remembers everything. Instead, each of us in a couple or group remembers some things personally — and then can remember much more by knowing who else might know what we don’t.” A transactive memory system can effectively multiply the amount of information to which an individual has access. Organizational research has found that groups that build a strong transactive memory structure — in which all members of the team have a clear and accurate sense of what their teammates know — perform better than groups for which that structure is less defined.
Transactive memory is how a group encodes, stores, and shares knowledge. Members of a group may be aware of the portions of knowledge that others possess which can make them more efficient.
How can we link this to Cesar Hidalgo's ideas about the personbyte, etc.?
How would this idea have potentially helped oral cultures?
She uses the example of a trauma resuscitation team helping to shorten hospital stays, but certainly there are many examples in the corporate world where corporate knowledge is helpful in decreasing time scales for particular outcomes.
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The burgeoning field of embodied cognition has demonstrated that the body — its sensations, gestures and movements — plays an integral role in the thought processes that we usually locate above the neck.
Worth delving into this area of research for memory related effects.
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punctumbooks.com punctumbooks.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Suzanne Conklin Akbari</span> in Growing a Research Network: Approaches to Global Book History | Penn Libraries (<time class='dt-published'>09/12/2021 21:11:23</time>)</cite></small>
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thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com
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https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-005-interview-with-chris-aldrich/
This didn't turn out too badly for a half an hour. As ever I dislike listening to my own voice.
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/
A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.
I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.
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Bigger is better.
Research shows that high-resolution monitors make thinking easier. This also seems true of classrooms which use large posters and maps as teaching aids at lower grades.
Why don't we use these methods as we grow older?
When used in mnemonic traditions, one can use vast spaces to create memory palaces that become thinking vistas within the brain. How can we better leverage these effects while still maintaining the effectiveness of focused journeys?
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Schools don’t teach students how to restore their depleted attention with exposure to nature and the outdoors, or how to arrange their study spaces so that they extend intelligent thought.
I'm reminded of Lynne Kelly's use of Indigenous Australian memory techniques which do both of these things at the same time: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?p=4794
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Paul likes to quote the philosopher who first came up with the idea of the extended mind, Andy Clark, when he says that humans are “intrinsically loopy creatures”.
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Small motions are so important that Paul devotes an entire chapter to the value of gestures. “Gestures,” she says, “don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; they carry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch” (69). Gestures strengthen our ability to give form to thoughts, they increase the effectiveness of communication, they help groups understand each other, they create and direct attention.
This likely underlies some of the thoughts I've had about dance and movement and which are touched on by indigenous cultures as documented in Lynne Kelly's work.
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We have piles of good research from the last few decades into how brains actually work. Or, if not how brains work (much remains mysterious!), what they like and don’t like.
We're also dramatically missing thousands of years of indigenous experience as well.
Tags
- pedagogy
- thinking spaces
- read
- thinking
- memory palaces
- method of loci
- songlines
- gestures
- Lynne Kelly
- movement
- neuroscience
- tools for thought
- posters
- indigenous cultures
- zettelkasten
- instructional design
- philosophy
- memory
- mnemotechniques
- nature
- psychology
- mnemonic pedagogy
- dance
- extended mind
- commonplace books
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Psychologist Jerome Bruno suggests we're 22x more likely to remember facts when told through story.
General plan for his approach
- immersion
- learn
- activate
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Michael Mina on Twitter: “With all the news of vaccines & immunity, did you know measles infections destroy immunity and cause ‘Immune Amnesia’, increasing risk of all other infections Our research in ‘15 & ‘19 discovered this & the abbreviated story is written up nicely here: 1/ https://t.co/t5DKoQljxM” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved September 7, 2021, from https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1435037668027641861
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www.timeshighereducation.com www.timeshighereducation.com
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Cognitive scientists have found also that when we answer a question in our own words, we integrate the information better into our long-term memory.
Reference for this?
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Researchers found that students remembered passages of text better when the extracts began with a question, for example, “Is this evidenced?”
Reference for this?
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Seek out the silliest, craziest, wildest ideas as metaphors. The most bizarre ideas capture attention and are unforgettable.
Where have we heard this before?
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Wu, K. J. (2021, September 3). What We Actually Know About Waning Immunity. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/waning-immunity-not-crisis-right-now/619965/
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https://fs.blog/2021/07/mathematicians-lament/
What if we taught art and music the way we do mathematics? All theory and drudgery without any excitement or exploration?
What textbooks out there take math from the perspective of exploration?
- Inventional geometry does
Certainly Gauss, Euler, and other "greats" explored mathematics this way? Why shouldn't we?
This same problem of teaching math is also one we ignore when it comes to things like note taking, commonplacing, and even memory, but even there we don't even delve into the theory at all.
How can we better reframe mathematics education?
I can see creating an analogy that equates math with art and music. Perhaps something like Arthur Eddington's quote:
Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories–
distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody.
I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three. —Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (1882-1944), a British astronomer, physicist, and mathematician in The Nature of the Physical World, 1927
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fs.blog fs.blog
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Schedule time to read and review these notes.
This is an incredibly important part of the process for absorbing, creating links, and remembering one's notes. A sad pity that it's a single sentence in its own paragraph.
This should have been underlined.
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Active reading helps you make connections within your latticework of mental models. Connections help retention.
Connections ARE retention. They are memory.
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marksstorm.medium.com marksstorm.medium.com
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Zweig continues: “This weakness, which Montaigne endlessly bemoans, is in fact his strength. An inability to remain fixed at a certain point allows him always to go further. With him nothing is ever set in stone. He never stops at the boundary of past experiences; he does not rest on his empiricism; he amasses no capital; before properly consuming them his spirit must acquire experiences over and again. So his life becomes an operation of perpetual renewal: ‘Unremittingly we begin our lives anew.’
Stefan Zweig on the benefit of Montaigne's lack of a good memory.
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slate.com slate.com
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The earliest attested manicules appeared in the Domesday Book, the exhaustive survey of England carried out for William I in 1086.
I wonder if we can find a direct link to the manicule and the use of the hand as a mnemonic device?
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medievalbooks.nl medievalbooks.nl
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Then there are the really exotic hands, which are turned into a visual feast. Fig. 7 shows and an arm that was turned into the body of a dragon, while the hands in Fig. 8 (which look like ladies’ gloves) are attached to the wrong location on the human body. These hands are not just meant to point out an important passage, they must also have been intended to bring a smile on the reader’s face.
Far beyond this, they're most likely used as mnemonic devices to associate the important information with a more memorable image for storing in one's memory palace.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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I'd start with the basics of 0-9 of the Major System and then introduce the method of loci. Once they've got those two basics down reasonably I'd expand their Major system up to 99 at a minimum.
The tougher part then is expanding your pedagogy to build these tools into the curriculum so that you're actively using them with your content.
You might appreciate the experience from Lynne Kelly here: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?p=4794. Her excellent book Memory Craft also has some interesting examples and stories for children including the use of what she calls rapscallions for use in multiplication tables, languages, and other educational applications. Her book also has a wealth of other methods and potential applications depending on the subjects you're teaching.
I'd love to hear your experiences as you progress with your class.
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Local file Local file
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West, Theatres and Encyclopaedias, ch. 2; Garberson ‘Libraries, Memory and the Spaceof Knowledge’. For a multicultural introduction to the architectural imagery of early modern memory practices, seeSpence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.
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The interaction between topical arrangement and early modern spaces like theatres,libraries and museums has been emphasized by a number of scholars and my thoughts on this
This brings up the idea of how much architects did or didn't build and structure their spaces with the ideas of memoria within rhetoric?
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In recent decades there have been a number of stud-ies that have shown how humanist approaches to commonplacing not only evolved in tandemwith attempts to coherently arrange naturaliain studioli, wunderkammernand museums, butalso facilitated the conceptual development of natural history. Key works that led up to this rein-terpretation were Walter Ong’s work on Ramus, Frances Yates’s history of the art of memory,Tony Grafton’s defence of humanistic textual practices and, crucially, Paolo Rossi’s argumentthat Francis Bacon used topical logic to organize his lists and tables.7Once the topical box wasopened, a number of seminal studies on commonplacing natural knowledge followed. Keyentries in this canon are works written by Ann Blair, Ann Moss, Jonathan Spence and HowardHotson.8
Lots of references to add or read here.
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collect.readwriterespond.com collect.readwriterespond.com
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https://collect.readwriterespond.com/how-to-remember-more-of-what-you-read/
Some useful looking links here. Thanks Aaron.
I've been digging deeper and deeper into some of the topics and sub-topics.
The biggest problem I've seen thus far is a lot of wanna-be experts and influencers (especially within the Roam Research space) touching on the very surface of problem. I've seen more interesting and serious people within the Obsidian community sharing their personal practices and finding pieces of that useful.
The second issue may be that different things work somewhat differently for different people, none of whom are using the same tools or even general systems. Not all of them have the same end goals either. Part of the key is finding something useful that works for you or modifying something slowly over time to get it to work for you.
At the end of the day your website holds the true answer: read, write, respond (along with the implied "repeat" at the end).
One of the best and most thorough prescriptions I've seen is Sönke Ahrens' book which he's written after several years of using and researching a few particular systems.
I've been finding some useful tidbits from my own experience and research into the history of note taking and commonplace book traditions. The memory portion intrigues me a lot as well as I've done quite a lot of research into historical methods of mnemonics and memory traditions. Naturally the ancient Greeks had most of this all down within the topic of rhetoric, but culturally we seem to have unbundled and lost a lot of our own traditions with changes in our educational system over time.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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It was today as I was doing Chinese vocabulary that it struck me. I tried to add words using the locations from memory because it was cold, and I didn’t want to go out. I know each of the houses in the songline, but adding vocabulary is way way easier when I walk and do the learning in the physical space. I couldn’t do it from home.
I seem to recall reading anecdotes of aboriginal peoples who knew areas and water holes in places they'd never visited in their lives. I'm wondering how they may have encoded these in songlines for places they'd never been to and physically seen.
It would seem that it's better to use a physical space when you have access to it, but I don't think I have as much issue adding things to pre-existing palaces/songlines as Kelly describes here. I wonder how this works out for others?
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I am beginning to think that the significant difference is that with songlines, learning is always done in the physical ‘memory palace’ which is constantly revisited. It can be recalled from memory, but is encoded in place. For me, that is way more effective, but I have aphantasia and very poor visualisation, so it may not be as big a factor for others. So recalling your childhood home can be a memory palace, but not a songline.
Lynne Kelly is correct here that we need better delineations of the words we're using here.
To some of us, we're taking historical methods and expanding them into larger super sets based on our personal experiences. I've read enough of Kelly's work and her personal experiences on her website (and that of many others) that I better understand the shorthand she uses when she describes pieces.
Even in the literature throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance we see this same sort of picking and choosing of methods in descriptions of various texts. Some will choose to focus on one or two keys, which seemed to work for them, but they'd leave out the others which means that subsequent generations would miss out on the lost bits and pieces.
Having a larger superset of methods to choose from as well as encouraging further explorations is certainly desired.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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How To Do Sketchnoting (Even If You "Can't Draw"!)
a lesson with Emily Mills of the Sketchnote Academy
Types of Sketchnotes
- Lecture based
- Experience based
Skills for sketchnotes
- Listening
- looking for ideas, high level
- Writing
- Drawing
Pairing images and words together to be dynamic and memorable.
One doesn't need to be the greatest artist to do sketchnotes.
memorable >> masterpiece recognizable >> realistic big ideas >> nitty gritty
Basic drawing
Seven building blocks for drawing
- dot
- straight line
- crooked line
- curvy line
- circle
- triangle
- square
Rules
- The fewer elements, the easier
- Rearrange rotate, reorient shapes
People
- standard stick person
- A person
- oval person
- star person
Containers and connectors
Boxes are boring, so add frames or more interesting Use containers to separate information that is different from the rest or to highlight.
- boxes
- frames
- nails/thumbtacks
- star "pow" outline
- box with a shadow
Tell people where to read next
- Create a really clear header
- help people with connectors (dotted lines, arrows, numbering)
Start out small first as it's more intimidating to use bigger formats
Tools
- Sketchone marker (thin point ink, pigment or permanent and not water-based, otherwise bleedover in coloring)
- Tombow dual brush markers for color
- two grey tones, one lighter and one darker
- small handful of colors (red, blue, yellow, green)
How to Sketchnote
- Step 1: Header
- Step 2: Layout (top to bottom/left to right is usually more intuitive) Pre-plan this. Think about connectors.
- Step 3: Consistency
- headers, characters, size of writing,
- Step 4: Refine
- check spelling
- whiteout for mess ups (gellyroll white gel pen)
- ensure connectors are obvious
- Step 5: Guiding shapes (to help flow of information on page)
- stippling
- cloud outlines
- lines in the negative space (also creates contrast)
- Step 6: Coloring in
- greys first, dark then light
- highlighting connectors
- shadows on boxes, ribbons, connectors
- color should be more of a highlight than a background filler (it's not a coloring book)
Higher contrast notes are better
Resources
- 👉🏻 Find Emily (and her awesome resources!) at https://www.emilyamills.com
- 👉🏻 The Sketchnote Academy free course: https://www.sketchnoteacademy.com
- 👉🏻 The Art of Visual Note taking by Emily Mills
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Named after Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, in psychology the Zeigarnik effect occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. It postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition.
People remember interrupted or unfinished tasks better than completed tasks.
Examples: I've had friends remember where we left off on conversations months/years later and we picked right back up.
I wonder what things effect these memories/abilities? Context? Importance? Other?
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The Zeigarnik effect should not be confused with the Ovsiankina effect. Maria Ovsiankina, a colleague of Zeigarnik, investigated the effect of task interruption on the tendency to resume the task at the next opportunity.
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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Liu, Q., & Chai, L. (2021). Opinion Dynamics Models with Memory in Coopetitive Social Networks: Analysis, Application and Simulation. ArXiv:2108.03234 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03234
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomnema
Hypomnema (Greek. ὑπόμνημα, plural ὑπομνήματα, hypomnemata), also spelled hupomnema, is a Greek word with several translations into English including a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, an anecdotal record, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.
Compare and contrast the idea of this with the concept of the commonplace book. There's also a tie in with the idea of memory, particularly for meditation.
There's also the idea here of keeping a note of something to be fixed or remedied and which needs follow up or reflection.
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Yeo, “Notebooks as Memory Aids” (II, G), locates Locke’s views at a crucialjuncture in the status of memory, when commonplace books were seen assites for ordering information and not as prompts for recalling it.
Interesting datum along the timeline of commonplacebooks and memory. Worth logging and following.
Note the difference in the ideas of ordering information versus being able to recall it. How does this step in the evolution figure for the concept of the zettelkasten?
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Local file Local file
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asignificant barrier to progress in computer science was thefact that many practitioners were ignorant of the history ofcomputer science: old accomplishments (and failures!) areforgotten, and consequently the industry reinvents itself every5-10 years
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Local file Local file
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Moss shows how Protestant pedagogues such as Johann Sturm at Strasbourg used commonplace books in the schoolroo
What was the relationship, if any, between Johann Sturm, a Protestant pedagogue, and Petrus Ramus? Any link here in the offloading of memory into the commonplace book as a means of sidelining the ars memoria?
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- Jul 2021
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drkimburns.com drkimburns.com
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How do you remember what you read?
I too keep a commonplace book. First it was (and in part still is) on my personal website. Lately I've been using Hypothes.is to annotate digital documents and books, the data of which is piped into the clever tool (one of many) Obsidian.md, a (currently) private repository which helps me to crosslink my thoughts and further flesh them out.
I've recently found that Sönke Ahrens book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers is a good encapsulation of my ideas/methods in general, so I frequently recommend that to friends and students interested in the process.
In addition to my commonplace book, I also practice a wealth of mnemonic techniques including the method of loci/songlines and the phonetic system which helps me remember larger portions of the things I've read and more easily memorized. I've recently been teaching some of these methods to a small cohort of students.
syndication link: https://drkimburns.com/why-i-keep-a-commonplace-book/?unapproved=4&moderation-hash=d3f1c550516a44ba4dca4b06455f9265#comment-4
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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In the Western tradition, these memory traditions date back to ancient Greece and Rome and were broadly used until the late 1500s. Frances A. Yates outlines much of their use in The Art of Memory (Routledge, 1966). She also indicates that some of their decline in use stems from Protestant educational reformers like Peter Ramus who preferred outline and structural related methods. Some religious reformers didn't appreciate the visual mnemonic methods as they often encouraged gross, bloody, non-religious, and sexualized imagery.
Those interested in some of the more modern accounts of memory practice (as well as methods used by indigenous and oral cultures around the world) may profit from Lynne Kelly's recent text Memory Craft (Allen & Unwin, 2019).
Lots of note taking in the West was (and still is) done via commonplace book, an art that is reasonably well covered in Earle Havens' Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2001).
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www.frontiersin.org www.frontiersin.org
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Aizpurua, A., Migueles, M., & Aranberri, A. (2021). Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 666977. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.666977
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www.nature.com www.nature.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jill Rosen </span> in Team finds brain mechanism that automatically links objects in our minds | Hub (<time class='dt-published'>07/24/2021 18:07:51</time>)</cite></small>
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https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/09/how-the-mind-links-objects/
A study that quantifies association within the brain and indicates the region where it occurs.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Facebook AI. (2021, July 16). We’ve built and open-sourced BlenderBot 2.0, the first #chatbot that can store and access long-term memory, search the internet for timely information, and converse intelligently on nearly any topic. It’s a significant advancement in conversational AI. https://t.co/H17Dk6m1Vx https://t.co/0BC5oQMEck [Tweet]. @facebookai. https://twitter.com/facebookai/status/1416029884179271684
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"The earlier systems of writing were extremely difficult to learn," says Schwartz, the Whiting Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. "There were thousands of symbols used in very complicated ways, which meant that only a very small group of people could ever learn how to write or read. With the invention of the alphabet, it meant that a much larger number of people could, in theory, learn how to read and write. And so it ultimately led to the democratization of writing. And of course it is the system that all Western European writing systems used because Greeks, who borrowed the Semitic alphabetic system, then used it to write their own language."
Early writing systems used thousands of symbols and were thus incredibly complex and required heavy memorization. This may have been easier with earlier mnemonic systems in oral (pre-literate societies), but would have still required work.
The innovation of a smaller alphabetic set would have dramatically decreased the cognitive load of massive memorization and made it easier for people to become literate at scale.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Bird sound encoding
I was at the bookstore yesterday and ran into two new useful resources that looked interesting in this space.
Specific to birdsong, there was
200 Bird Songs from Around the World by Les Beletsky (Becker & Mayer, 2020, ISBN: 978-0760368831)
Read about and listen to birds from six continents. A beautiful painting illustrates each selection along with concise details about the bird's behavior, environment, and vocalizations. On the built-in digital audio player, hear each bird as it sings or calls in nature with audio of the birds provided by the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
This could be useful in using the book itself as a memory palace in addition to the fact that the bird calls are built directly into the book for immediate playback while reading/memorizing. There are a few other related books with built in sound in this series as well.
The other broader idea was that of
"A bird a day"
I saw the book A Bird A Day by Dominic Couzens (Batsford, 2021, ISBN: 978-1849945868) to help guide one towards learning about (or in our context maybe memorizing) a bird a day. It had names, photos, and other useful information which one might use to structure a palace to work at in small chunks. I know there are also many other related calendars which might also help one do something like this to build up a daily practice of memorizing data into a palace/journey/songline.
The broader "Thing-a-day" calendar category might also be useful for other topics one might want to memorize as well as to have a structure set up for encouraging spaced repetition.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Has anyone read The Memory Arts in Renaissance England 16?
@Josh I'd picked up a copy of this recently and have started into it. The opening is a quick overview of some general history, background, and general techniques.
The subtitle is solidly accurate of the majority of the book: "A Critical Anthology". The bulk of the book are either translations or excerpts of pieces of memory treatises in English throughout the Renaissance. They also include some history of the texts, their writers, and some analysis of the pieces.
Some of us have been digging up old editions of books and struggling with reading and creating context. These authors have done yeoman's work on a lot of this and collected some of the more interesting historical works on the memory arts and added lots of context, at least for works in English (and focused on England) during the Renaissance. It's a great text for those interested in the history as well as more readable versions of some of the (often incomprehensible) middle/late English. They also have some analysis often conflicting with statements made by Frances Yates about some of the more subtle points which her broad history didn't cover in detail.
Given it's anthology nature, its a nice volume to pick up and read self-contained portions of at leisure based on one's interest. It isn't however comprehensive, so, for example, they've got "translated portions" of part of Peter of Ravenna's The Phoenix, but not all of it, though they do outline the parts which they skip over. (Cross reference https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/peter-of-ravenna/27737.) Other segments are only a page or so long and may contain tangential passages or even poems about the art to better situate it for scholars/students looking at it historically.
I've corresponded a bit with Bill Engel, one of the authors who has been wonderfully helpful. He said he's got another related book Memory and Morality in Renaissance England (Cambridge) coming out later this summer as well as a few other related books and articles thereafter. Some are mentioned on his site: https://www.williamengel.org/.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Has anyone here read the book Excavating the Memory Palace: Arts of Visualization from the Agora to the Computer by Seth Long? It looks interesting.
I picked up a copy of it in April and have made it through the introduction and first chapter. He’s a professor writing from the perspective of a rhetorician and is generally extending some of the academic research started by Frances Yates. I’ll write more as I have time, but I’m in the midst of a few dozen books at the moment. I wish I could focus on this and one or two others.
I’ll note that for those interested, it’s likely based on a shorter journal article that the same author wrote in 2017 with a similar title: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07350198.2017.1281691 A little digging around should uncover a free copy of it. If you’re desperate, I have a digital copy he emailed me a while back.
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www.inc.com www.inc.com
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For the second keynote, I took copious notes and followed the spaced interval formula. A month later, by golly, I remember virtually all of the material. And in case if you're wondering, both talks were equally interesting to me--the difference was the reversal of Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve.
Not exactly a real scientific trial, but...
Note also that the other part was his having taken notes and actively engaged with the material as he heard it. The notes also formed the basis of his ability to do the spaced repetition.
Mnemonic methods could be used in place of the note taking for the properly trained. Visual memory just goes to expand on it.
This is an awfully fluff article that's probably too prescriptive. I wonder how many people it influences to try it out? How successful will they be without a more specific prescription?
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Ebooks don’t have those limitations, both because of how readily new editions can be created and how simple it is to push “updates” to existing editions after the fact. Consider the experience of Philip Howard, who sat down to read a printed edition of War and Peace in 2010. Halfway through reading the brick-size tome, he purchased a 99-cent electronic edition for his Nook e-reader:As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern …” Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text. For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern …”A search of this Nook version of the book confirmed it: Every instance of the word kindle had been replaced by nook, in perhaps an attempt to alter a previously made Kindle version of the book for Nook use. Here are some screenshots I took at the time:It is only a matter of time before the retroactive malleability of these forms of publishing becomes a new area of pressure and regulation for content censorship. If a book contains a passage that someone believes to be defamatory, the aggrieved person can sue over it—and receive monetary damages if they’re right. Rarely is the book’s existence itself called into question, if only because of the difficulty of putting the cat back into the bag after publishing.
This story of find and replace has chilling future potential. What if a dictatorial government doesn't like your content. It can be all to easy to remove the digital versions and replace them whole hog for "approved" ones.
Where does democracy live in such a world? Consider similar instances when the Trump administration forced the disappearance of government websites and data.
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Libraries in these scenarios are no longer custodians for the ages of anything, whether tangible or intangible, but rather poolers of funding to pay for fleeting access to knowledge elsewhere.
A major archiving issue in the digital era is that libraries are no longer the long term storage repositories they have otherwise been for the past two thousand years.
What effects will this have on the future? Particularly once the financial interests of the owning companies no longer exists?
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How a memory palace works When we’re learning something new, it requires less effort if we connect it to something we already know, such as a physical place. This is known as elaborative encoding. Once we need to remember the information, we can “walk” around the palace and “see” the various pieces. The idea is to give your memories something to hang on to. We are pretty terrible at remembering things, especially when these memories float freely in our heads. But our spatial memory is actually pretty decent, and when we give our memories some needed structure, we provide that missing order and context. For example, if you struggle to remember names, it can be helpful to link people you meet to names you already know. If you meet someone called Fred and your grandmother had a cat called Fred, you could connect the two. Creating a multisensory experience in your head is the other part of the trick. In this case, you could imagine the sound of Fred meowing loudly. To further aid in recall, the method of loci is most effective if we take advantage of the fact that it’s easiest to remember memorable things. Memory specialists typically recommend mentally placing information within a physical space in ways that are weird and unusual. The stranger the image, the better.
This notion of using spatial memory to encode other concepts - or even the P-A-O sytem where a 2 digit number encodes a person performing an action is an interesting idea for someone like me who forgets quite a bit.
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www.heise.de www.heise.de
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Ohne zu schreiben, kann man nicht denken; jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvoller, anschlussfähiger Weise.
You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way. —Niklas Luhmann
(Source of the original??)
This is interesting, but is also ignorant of oral traditions which had means of addressing it.
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“It certainly makes me want to improve my own record-keeping and organization,” he says. “I think there’s a lot people can learn not just about building a comedy routine but about approaching mortality honestly. There’s a real sense of impermanence in all of what he saved.”
This links together the ideas of memory, commonplace books, and mortality.
This also underlines the idea that commonplaces could be very specific to their creators.
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- Jun 2021
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www.artkavanagh.ie www.artkavanagh.ie
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Art Kavanagh </span> in note (<time class='dt-published'>06/16/2021 06:24:59</time>)</cite></small>
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
the idea of an "[[associative trail]]" here brings to mind both the ars memorativa and the method of loci as well as--even more specifically--the idea of songlines.
Bush's version is the same thing simply renamed.
<small><cite class='h-cite ht'>↬ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jeremy Dean</span> in Via: ‘What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’ - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>06/09/2021 14:50:00</time>)</cite></small>
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
I feel like Western culture has lost so much of our memory traditions that this trite story, which I've seen often repeated, doesn't have the weight it should.
Why can't we simultaneously have the old system AND the new? Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale touch on this in their coinage of the third archive in Songlines.
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Seth Long takes a closer look at the number of memory treatises from 1550-1650 to come up with a more concrete reason for the disappearance of mnemonic imagery (and the method of loci) in English rhetoric and pedagogic traditions. Some writers have attributed it to the rise of more writing and publishing. Long extends Frances Yates' idea of its decline to the rise of Ramism by presenting some general data about the number and quality of memory treatises published during the time period in question. Comparison of this data with European continental publications helps to draw some more concrete conclusions.
In particular, he highlights an example of a Ramist sympathizer re-writing a previous treatise and specifically removing the rhetorical imagery from the piece.
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in the early1600s, the encyclopedist Johann Heinrich Alsted, a Calvinist, published treatises on both Ramus and Giordano Bruno, whosemnemonic system utilized zodiac imagery. To my knowledge, there is no English equivalent of a scholar who found value inboth Ramus and Bruno.
It would be interesting to note other authors who found value in both Ramus and Bruno.
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Green and Murphy,Renaissance Rhetoric; Plett,English Renaissance; Middleton,Memory Systems; British Library,Incunabula Short Title Catalogue. Green and Murphy were the primary source. Middleton and Plett, who compiled memorytreatises as a distinct category, allowed me to add extra titles to Green and Murphy’s listings. An Excel file containing the266 early modern treatises graphed here can be emailed upon request.
Sources of data for this paper. I'd definitely love to get a copy of this Excel file. Might be worth expanding to other languages, countries, and timeperiods as well.
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Yet even thisdecline is followed by an unexpected resurgence in mnemonics in the 1800s, when Connors claimsthat writing was replacing speaking in school settings (127).
I would question this statement, as annotated separately in this article. I have a feeling that the mnemonic tradition into the 1800's was more heavily influenced by the rise of the idea of the major system and not so much by the memory palace or the method of loci. This definitely seems to be the case in the United States based on my readings.
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Quintilian is skeptical of the art of memory. His preferred scheme is to divide words on the page intosmall, memorizable chunks, each subdivision serving as a sort oflocusin page-space. Indeed, Quintilian even suggests thatthe best mnemonic image one can construct is simply an image of the tablet or papyrus on which one wrote (11.2.27–32).
And for renaissance scholars, this quote may be the reason that drolleries are so widespread in illuminated manuscripts.
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Not only does England fail to producemany memory treatises post-1600, the memory treatises she does produce are largely devoid of theinventive images that mark earlier English treatises and that continued to mark treatises on thecontinent
Are these methods still heavily used on the continent (aka Europe)? Surely these methods waned there as well at some point as I don't think they're still heavily used in modern times.
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Butler then moves on toquote—not Cicero, as Wilson does—but Quintilian, who among classical authorities is the mostskeptical about the art of memory’s efficacy (see endnote 4). Echoing Quintilian’s complaint, Butlersays that it is probably more difficult to construct a memory palace than simply to remember thingsby rote (54–55).
Construction is definitely work. The question about how much it may be should be addressed on a continuum of knowing or understanding particular concepts as well.
Creating palaces for raw data de-novo, as in a memory championship, takes a lot of practice for speed and the lack of relationships. However in a learning setting, it may be better to read, grasp, and understand material and then create a palace to contain the simple raw facts which might then also bring back other bits of the knowledge and understanding.
This might be a useful idea to explore further, gather some data, and experiment with.
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Herdson also discusses how toconvert numbers and letters into such uninspiring mental pictures as a candle, a foot, a pipe, and similarhousehold items.
What relation does Henry Herdson's The Art of Memory Made Plaine (1651, 1654) have to the potential development of the major system. The description here sounds like it's relatively similar. Who/What were his precursors, and who may have been influenced by his version of this system which sounds very similar.
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Other treatises exemplifying the retreat of imagery from the fourth canon include Henry Herdson’sThe Art of Memory Made Plaine, which saw two printings in 1651 and another in 1654, and ThomasFuller’s 1641 bookThe Holy State and the Profane State, which contains a section“On Memory.”
Add these to our list.
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Willis is more concerned with the construction of a perfectly orderedmental place system than with imagery.
How similar or dissimilar is this over description in Mnemonica by John Willis to the palace built using Noah's Ark by Hugh of St. Victor?
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Willis’s primary interest was shorthand writing—he is chiefly noted forArt of Stenographie—andhis memory treatise is clearly influenced by shorthand’s mechanism of one-to-one correspondence.
John Willis's Mnemonica (Latin 1618, English 1621, 1654, and 1661) covers memory, but he was apparently more interested in shorthand writing and also wrote Art of Stenographie.
I'll have to read this for a view into the overlap of memory and shorthand with respect to the development of the major system. Did this influence others in the chain of history? It definitely fits into the right timeline.
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Another English memory treatise that diminishes the role of stimulating imagery is JohnWillis’sMnemonica, published in Latin in 1618, with English translations printed in 1621, 1654,and 1661.
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William Fulwood’sCastel of Memorie—printed in 1562, 1563, and 1573—is a curious treatisededicated almost entirely to medicinal and herbal remedies for improving the memory
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Methodaids the mental grasping—the memory—of the complex content with which one is engaged; it“relieve[s]theburdenplacedonmemory,”writes Sharon Crowley,“by calling on the assistance of reason”(35).
I definitely use reason as a memory technique this way.
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Though he doesnot discuss mnemonics, Thomas Sloane similarly argues that classical invention—a process thattakes not only logic but also“sense, imagination, and emotions”into consideration—is irreparablyneutered by Ramism (137).
This makes me wonder what the relation of this mode of "limited" thinking (represented by Ramism) has with Max Weber's ideas of Protestant work ethic? If we're not being creative like we may have been in the past, does it help us to focus on the mundane drudgery of our work at hand?
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Though it is often assumedthat mnemonics were used to memorize speeches, the importance of memory to theinventionofspeech was readily apparent to ancient orators—thus the famous praise of memory as athesauruminventorum(Herennium3.16.28). As Cicero writes inDe Oratore, the orator must commit tomemory“the whole past with its storehouse of examples and precedents,”as well as a knowledgeof all laws general and civil, for without such memories, the orator is left speechless (1.17–18).Expanding on Cicero’s point, Quintilian claims that“it is the power of memory alone that bringsbefore us all the store of precedents, laws, rulings, sayings, and facts which the orator must possessin abundance . . . and hold ready for immediate use”(Institutio11.2.1). The art of memory was thusto be used to recollect not only pre-written orations but also knowledge from a variety of sources tobe called upon when constructing new texts, speakingex tempore, or responding to an interlocutor’sarguments.
Too often, this seems to me to be a missing piece that few talk about now. Those posting to the Art of Memory forum are usually talking about the need to memorize for memorization's sake. Rarely are they talking about or noticing the second or third level order changes as the result of an improved memory.
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In my view, the most detrimental result of this change to rhetorical theory is the loss of theclassical outlook that imagination and memory are central to invention
I can agree with this.
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William Perkins, an influential Puritan theologianknown today for having tutored John Robinson, founder of the Congregationalist Church.
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Regarding theinfluence of iconoclasm, the inaugural moment can be set circa 1536–1541, during Henry VIII’sdissolution of the monasteries.
Long places the influence of iconoclasm in the destruction of the method of loci at the time period of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries around 1536-1541.
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I offer general remarks on the need for a more detailed history of the canonof memory, which is often (but erroneously) assumed to be a casualty of writing (Corbett andConnors 22) or“modernist”ideologies (Crowley; Pruchic and Lacey). The former argument isdemonstrably untrue; the latter is on the right track but incomplete.
I've often heard mnemonists talk about the effects of writing as being part of its downfall in western traditions. Are their guesses simply that, or had they read works like these?
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contemporary scholars have instead analyzed these arts as“logical tool[s],”early examples of iconic logic and cipher encryption (Gatti 5). Mary Carruthers, Lina Bolzoni, andJanet Coleman are among those who have removed the magical charm from Yates’s dreamlike arts ofmemory, describing mnemonic precepts as manifestations of psychological processes, not invitationsto explore the occult skeletons in rhetoric’s closet.
I've generally gleaned most of the gist of this from Yates directly myself.
I've dipped into some of Carruthers' work, but not the others yet, though based on our present situation of memory, I can see that this is likely the case.
I want to pull up the other researchers he mentions here to read their material as well.
Tags
- John Willis
- pedagogy
- shorthand
- Ramism
- mnemonic techniques
- memory for thinking
- Quintilian
- read
- method of loci
- mnemonic devices
- rhetoric
- religion
- major system
- Janet Coleman
- memory texts
- memory
- Noah's Ark
- data science
- Henry VIII
- Peter Ramus
- Cicero
- invention
- open questions
- memory palaces
- iconoclasm
- protestantism
- Giordano Bruno
- drolleries
- memory work
- Frances A. Yates
- Max Weber
- Western death of memory
- creativity
- reason
- Major System
- Hugh of St. Victor
- monasteries
- Lina Bolzoni
- want to read
- thinking tools
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- May 2021
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localhost:4000 localhost:4000
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Polar is an integrated reading environment to build your knowledge base. Actively read, annotate, connect thoughts, create flashcards, and track progress.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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To more easily memory text verbatim, practice methods for reclling the information rather than simply repeating it.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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With some continued clever searching today along with some help from an expert in Elizabethan English, I've found an online version of Robert Copland's (poor) translation from the French, some notes, and a few resources for assisting in reading it for those who need the help.
The text:
- The art of memory, that otherwyse is called the Phenix A boke very behouefull and profytable to all professours of scyences. Grammaryens, rethoryciens dialectyke, legystes, phylosophres [and] theologiens. Petrus, Ravennas, ca. 1448-1508 or 9., Copland, Robert, fl. 1540-1547. [Imprynted at London: In Fletestrete at the sygne of the George by Wyllyam Myddylton, [ca. 1545]]
This is a free text transcription and will be easier to read than the original black-letter Elizabethan English version.
For those without the background in Elizabethan English, here are a few tips/hints:
For the more obscure/non-obvious words:
- Middle English Dictionary (online) from University of Michigan
- Project Gutenberg Middle English Dictionary
Finally, keep in mind that the letter "y" can often be a printer's substitution for the English thorn character) Þ, so you'll often see the abbreviations yͤ for "the" and yͭ as an abbreviation for "that".
Copland's original English, first printing of Ravenna can be accessed electronically through a paid Proquest account at most universities. It is listed as STC 24112 if you have access to a firewall-free site that lets you look at books on Early English Books Online (EEBO). A photocopy can be obtained through EEBO reprints on Amazon. Unless you've got some reasonable experience with Elizabethan black-latter typography, expect this version to be hard to read. It isn't annotated or modernized.
@ehcolston I'm curious to hear what the Wilson/Pena text looks like. I'm guessing it's not scholarly. I think Wilson is a recent college grad and is/was a publishing intern at a company in the LA Area. I'm not sure of Pena's background. I suspect it may be a version of the transcribed text I've linked with a modest updating of the middle English which they've self-published on Amazon.
Of course, given the multiple translations here, if anyone is aware of a more solid translation of the original Latin text into English, do let us know. The careful observer will notice that the Latin version is the longest, the French quite a bit shorter, and the English (Copland) incredibly short, so there appears to be some untranslated material in there somewhere.
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I haven't searched all the versions of Peter of Ravenna's name (yet) in all locations, but I recall hearing of an Italian version as well (and it's likely that there was one given its popularity).
A bit of digging around this morning has uncovered a digital copy of a French translation in the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé (Paris).:
Given the date and the scant 16 pages, this is likely to be the edition which was the source of Robert Copland's English translation. As the edition doesn't appear to have an author, it's possible that this was the reason that Copland's translation didn't list one either.
The Latin -> French -> middle English -> modern English route seems an awfully muddy way to go, but without anything else, it may have to suffice for some of us for the moment.
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As someone who knows both methods and has likely practiced them in reasonable depth, I'm curious what Dr. @LynneKelly thinks. I'd love to see this same study done to include song, dance, painting, etc. to expand the potential effects.
If nothing else, it's good to see some positive research on the methods which will hopefully draw more attention to the pedagogy and classroom use.
Dr. Reser said the Monash School of Rural Health is considering incorporating these memory tools into the medical curriculum once teaching returns to a post-COVID normal. “This year we hope to offer this to students as a way to not only facilitate their learning but to reduce the stress associated with a course that requires a lot of rote learning,” he said. —https://scitechdaily.com/ancient-australian-aboriginal-memory-tool-superior-to-memory-palace-learning-technique/
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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hazelfaceHazel3dAs you likely know, “back in the day” stories, poetry, and religious texts were passed down from generation to generation. My big question is “how”. Does anyone know how this was done historically? Or how you would do it yourself today? I do some verbatim memorization for fun and have a process/formula I’m comfortable with. I’m really curious what sort of procedure I could build if I was limited Thank you!
In both older and current cultures we see stories, songs, poetry, and a variety of knowledge passed down orally. Some of these, like Homer, were eventually written out and passed down using the written word. Texts, once extant, were generally passed around by copying out or mass printing, but generally were not memorized and passed along via orality or memory techniques. Obviously there are examples of people memorizing large portions of text personally, but this has generally not been the major mode of passing knowledge from one generation to the next.
Dr. Lynne Kelly's text book Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) does a solid job of covering some of the techniques in the archaeological and even contemporary records on this score.
We have modern anthropologists attesting the oral methods you describe from several peoples around the world. Kelly's book, based on her Ph.D. thesis, does a good job of summarizing many of these. She and Dr. Margo Neale also recently published Songlines: The Power and Promise (Thames & Hudson, 2020) which covers current Australian Aboriginal tribes which use these oral techniques for knowledge transmission as well. The techniques do vary from culture to culture, but on the whole they tend to share many features.
As others have mentioned, Walter Ong's work, and the book Orality and Literacy (Routledge, 1982) in particular, will provide some additional context.
On your question of practicality, I'd recommend Kelly's book Memory Craft which currently outlines the broadest number of mnemotechniques out there and provides some advice about which methods are best/better for particular applications. Following this, if necessary, you might focus in on the methods you're interested in most and hone in on other texts, audiobooks, or posts here in the forum.
Everyone's abilities and needs are slightly different, so experiment a bit to see what appeals to and/or works best for you.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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@chrisaldrich, I’ll be intested to see how you help bring together your knowledge to create a more mnemonic way to visualize and remember bird calls and traits. I’ve also added your blog to my news reader with all the good ideas there as well. Thanks for all your great feedback!
https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/bird-sound-encoding/63013/15
I'll apologize in advance for the noisy-ness of my website. I use it as a commonplace book and post almost everything I do on the web there first (including social media). If it gets to be too much, you can subscribe to individual topics of interest (like https://boffosocko.com/category/Memory/feed/, which is sure to include any bird related work) so that you're just getting what you want instead of the overzealous firehose which can be upwards of 10 to 20,000 posts a year, depending on how much of my stream I make public.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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I must stop equating songlines and memory palaces - the professor and student involved see the complexity of songlines as a level higher than memory palaces because so much knowledge and understanding is layered. The first post-grad working on my stuff, and she’s found fault already! And rightly so. They are also arguing against some researcher who claims that the peg system and the method of loci are equivalent. That is part of the research project, but I haven’t read the psychology papers they have sent yet.
songlines != memory palaces
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journals.plos.org journals.plos.org
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Consistent with the notion that exploitation of spatial memory is among the most effective memorization techniques, an early MRI study of competitors in the World Memory Championships showed that 90% of the memory athletes employed some variation of the method of loci for rapid learning and accurate recall of information [30].
What were the others using? Only the major system perhaps? Or were they the marginal under-performers?
If there were solid performers in the other 10%, what method(s) were they using?
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It is worth noting that no instructions were provided to the participants with respect to sequence, yet this measure exhibited the largest effect size of any of the parameters measured
They should have mentioned this before. Not knowing what the function does, I'm curious to see how abysmal the sequence numbers were for the control group.
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Both methods of loci improved upon the already high level of recall among medical students relative to those who received no memory training.
I'm saddened to see the erasure of the Australian Aboriginal approach (possibly better termed Songlines or Dreaming for specificity) here only to have it lumped into the Western method. This is worse when their general results show the Australian approach to be significantly better.
This may be due to over-familiarity with the techniques which are broadly similar, but for rigor and respect they should remain separate in this paper.
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After 10 minutes, the word lists were collected and students were asked to write down as many of the list items as they could recall within five minutes.
Were students asked or told if they'd be tested with this on long-term memory?
Personally, I'd have used a simple major system method to memorize such a list for short term memory, but would have used other techniques for long term memory.
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These “Songline” stories are ancient, exhibit little variation over long periods of time, and are carefully learned and guarded by the Elders who are its custodians [7].
What is the best way we could test and explore error correction and overwriting in such a system from an information theoretic standpoint?
Tags
- pedagogy
- memory championships
- erasure
- error correction
- read
- open questions
- method of loci
- information theory
- songlines
- mnemonic devices
- short term memory
- research methods
- indigenous cultures
- major system
- evolution
- mnemotechniques
- memory research
- long term memory
- education reform
- memory sequence
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www.jeffpippen.com www.jeffpippen.com
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List of butterflies.
Used in the memory research study at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0251710#pone-0251710-t001
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scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com
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Great news on Memory. Was song and art used too?
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augmentingcognition.com augmentingcognition.com
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www.supermemo.com www.supermemo.com
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crookedtimber.org crookedtimber.org
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“Monetising what we see as sacred knowledge, our way of being – driving, walking – is sacred knowledge and the only people who should have any purview over that is our community. … What if we look at what the data could do for our community and how to achieve that? … We are gathering our data because we love our people, we want a better future for the next generations. What if all data was gathered for those reasons? What would it look like?”
A great quote and framing from Abigail Echo-Hawk.
This reliance on going to community elders (primarily because they have more knowledge and wisdom) is similar to designing for the commons and working backward. Elders in many indigenous cultures represent the the commons.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to innovate and explore the evolutionary space for better answers, but going slow and fixing things is far more likely to be helpful than moving fast and breaking things as has been the mode for the last fifteen years. Who's watching the long horizon in these scenarios?
This quote and set up deserves some additional thought into the ideas and power structures described by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture
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hyperlink.academy hyperlink.academy
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The announcement of my memory course.
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brainbaking.com brainbaking.com
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There’s this thing I simply call “365”. With each new year (or sometimes at the end of a notebook, when I feel like it), I make a 2-page spread mind map of things that kept me busy. It’s more or less an analog tag cloud and it’s extremely rewarding to make. You get to browse through previous journals, look at things you’ve written down and actually managed to pull of, and take note of that in one or two words. That creates a thick cloud full of the things that defined you for the last year. It’s actually quite incredible to look at. When I’m done doing that, I try to underline the words that meant more to me than others. Applying the retrospective principles from software development on your own personal life and writing down what made you glad, mad or sad actually helps you do something about that.
This is an example of spaced repetition being done as retrospective and hiding some of the value of making the important things stand out and reviewing them for better long term retention.
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The palest ink is better than the best memory - Chinese proverb.
Faint ink and faint memories compared....
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Petrus Ramus
Just making note of the fact that Petrus Ramus was the advisor of Theodor Zwinger and apparently influcnced Jean Bodin, about whom Ann M. Blair writes about in Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age.
I suspect these influences may impinge on my work on the history of memory and its downfall due to Ramism since the late 1500s and which impacts the history of information.
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newrepublic.com newrepublic.com
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We still do not understand how information practices from the worlds of learning, finance, industry, and administration cross-pollinated. From the fourteenth century onward, accountants developed complex instructions for note-taking to describe holdings and transactions, as well for the recording of numbers and calculations. By the seventeenth century, merchants, and indeed ship captains, engineers, and state administrators, were known to travel with trunks of memoranda, massive inventories, scrap books, and various ledgers and log books that mixed descriptive notes and numbers. By the eighteenth century, tables and printed forms cut down on the need for notes and required less description and more systematic numerical notes. Notaries also were master information handlers, creating archives for their legal and financial documents and cross-referencing catalogue systems.
I'm noticing no mention here of double entry book keeping or the accountant's idea of waste books.
There's also no mention of orality or memory methods either.
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