Their alignment rule is based on the principle that any primitiveobject of K bytes must have an address that is a multiple of K.
data alignment 的原则是什么?
Their alignment rule is based on the principle that any primitiveobject of K bytes must have an address that is a multiple of K.
data alignment 的原则是什么?
The memory system must periodically refresh every bit of memory byreading it out and then rewriting it.
DRAM 不稳定,在计算机中如何防止其变化?
when the nose of theshark touches the horizon at sunset, it is supposed to signify thatsharks are breeding and are considered dangerous as they swimclose to shore.
The Big Dipper, part of Ursa Major, appears upside down in the southern Hemisphere and is associated with the shape of a shark in the Torres Strait. When its "nose" touches the horizon at sunset, it's associated with breeding of nearby sharks who swim in shallow waters.
Notice the variety of associations of time (both of year, sunset, and breeding) with an animal (in both the water and in the sky) along with a specific location (Torres Strait).
The First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders read the stars by Duane Hamacher, with Elders and Knowledge Holders
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>LynneKelly</span> in Un-Stupiding Myself - a Memory Training Journal - Memory Training Journals - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>03/14/2022 18:43:38</time>)</cite></small>
Washington State mathteacher Brendan Jeffreys turned to gesture as a way of easing the mental loadcarried by his students, many of whom come from low-income households,speak English as a second language, or both. “Academic language—vocabularyterms like ‘congruent’ and ‘equivalent’ and ‘quotient’—is not something mystudents hear in their homes, by and large,” says Jeffreys, who works for theAuburn School District in Auburn, a small city south of Seattle. “I could see thatmy kids were stumbling over those words even as they were trying to keep trackof the numbers and perform the mathematical operations.” So Jeffreys devised aset of simple hand gestures to accompany, or even temporarily replace, theunfamiliar terms that taxed his students’ ability to carry out mental math.
Mathematics can often be more difficult compared to other subjects as students learning new concepts are forced not only to understand entirely new concepts, but simultaneously are required to know new vocabulary to describe those concepts. Utilizing gestures to help lighten the cognitive load of the new vocabulary to allow students to focus on the concepts and operations can be invaluable.
Evaluations of the platform show that users who follow the avatar inmaking a gesture achieve more lasting learning than those who simply hear theword. Gesturing students also learn more than those who observe the gesture butdon’t enact it themselves.
Manuela Macedonia's research indicates that online learners who enact specific gestures as they learn words learn better and have longer retention versus simply hearing words. Students who mimic these gestures also learn better than those who only see the gestures and don't use them themselves.
How might this sort of teacher/avatar gesturing be integrated into online methods? How would students be encouraged to follow along?
Could these be integrated into different background settings as well to take advantage of visual memory?
Anecdotally, I remember some Welsh phrases from having watched Aran Jones interact with his cat outside on video or his lip syncing in the empty spaces requiring student responses. Watching the teachers lips while learning can be highly helpful as well.
In a study published in 2020, for example, Macedonia and a group of sixcoauthors compared study participants who had paired new foreign-languagewords with gestures to those who had paired the learning of new words withimages of those words. The researchers found evidence that the motor cortex—the area of the brain that controls bodily movement—was activated in thegesturing group when they reencountered the vocabulary words they hadlearned; in the picture-viewing group, the motor cortex remained dormant. The“sensorimotor enrichment” generated by gesturing, Macedonia and hercoauthors suggest, helps to make the associated word more memorable
Manuela Macedonia and co-authors found that pairing new foreign words with gestures created activity in the motor cortex which helped to improve the associative memory for the words and the movements. Using images of the words did not create the same motor cortex involvement.
It's not clear which method of association is better, at least as written in The Extended Mind. Was one better than the other? Were they tested separately, together, and in a control group without either? Surely one would suspect that using both methods together would be most beneficial.
the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory during foreign-language encoding.
Manuela Macedonia wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory for language acquisition.
Back then, Macedonia foundherself increasingly frustrated with the conventional format of foreign-languagecourses: a lot of sitting, listening, and writing. That’s not how anyone learnstheir native language, she notes. Young children encounter new words in a richsensorimotor context: as they hear the word “apple,” they see and touch theshiny red fruit; they may even bring it to their mouth, tasting its sweet flesh andsmelling its crisp scent. All of these many hooks for memory are missing fromthe second-language classroom.
Most foreign language leaners spend all their time in classrooms or at home sitting down, listening, reading, and writing. This is antithetical to how children acquire language in more natural settings where they're able to move around, interact, taste, touch, smell, etc. as they learn new words in their language. These additional sensory mnemonic techniques add an incredible amount of information and associative hooks to help them remember new words and grammatical structures.
Kerry Ann Dickson, an associate professor of anatomy and cell biology atVictoria University in Australia, makes use of all three of these hooks when sheteaches. Instead of memorizing dry lists of body parts and systems, her studentspractice pretending to cry (the gesture that corresponds to the lacrimal gland/tearproduction), placing their hands behind their ears (cochlea/hearing), and swayingtheir bodies (vestibular system/balance). They feign the act of chewing(mandibular muscles/mastication), as well as spitting (salivary glands/salivaproduction). They act as if they were inserting a contact lens, as if they werepicking their nose, and as if they were engaging in “tongue-kissing” (motionsthat represent the mucous membranes of the eye, nose, and mouth, respectively).Dickson reports that students’ test scores in anatomy are 42 percent higher whenthey are taught with gestures than when taught the terms on their own.
Example of the use of visual, auditory, and proprioceptive methods used in the pedagogy of anatomy.
proprioceptive cue may be the mostpowerful of the three: research shows that making gestures enhances our abilityto think even when our gesturing hands are hidden from our view.
Annie Murphy Paul indicates that proprioceptive associations may be more powerful than auditory or visual ones as she notes that "research shows that making gestures enhances our ability to think even when our gesturing hands are hidden from our view."
This is something that could be researched and analyzed.
My personal experience is that visual >> auditory >> smell >> proprioception. Smell with respect to memory is incredibly difficult to exercise as are auditory method. Visual and proprioceptive methods are easier to actively practice though.
Designed gestures offer another benefit as well: they are especially effectiveat reinforcing our memory.
Intentional gestures can be used as mnemonic devices as the movement can be associated with things we wish to remember.
In a study carried out by Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues at theUniversity of Chicago, a group of adults was recruited to watch video recordingsof children solving conservation problems, like the water-pouring task weencountered earlier. They were then offered some basic information aboutgesture: that gestures often convey important information not found in speech,and that they could attend not only to what people say with their words but alsoto what they “say” with their hands. It was suggested that they could payparticular attention to the shape of a hand gesture, to the motion of a handgesture, and to the placement of a hand gesture. After receiving these simpleinstructions, study subjects watched the videos once more. Before the briefgesture training, the observing adults identified only around 30 to 40 percent ofinstances when children displayed emerging knowledge in their gestures; afterreceiving the training, their hit rate shot up to about 70 percent.
Concentrating on the shape, motion, and placement of hand gestures dramatically help a learner to more concretely understand material and understanding in others.
Link this to the use of movement in dance with respect to memory in Lynne Kelly's work.
In one study, subjects who had watched a videotapedspeech were 33 percent more likely to recall a point from the talk if it wasaccompanied by a gesture. This effect, detected immediately after the subjectsviewed the recording, grew even more pronounced with the passage of time:thirty minutes after watching the speech, subjects were more than 50 percentmore likely to remember the gesture-accompanied points.
People are more likely to remember points from talks that are accompanied by gestures. This effect apparently increases with time.
What does the effect of time have on increased lengths? Does it continue to increase and then decrease at some point? Anecdotally I often recall quotes and instances from movies based on movements that I make.
What effects, if any, are seen in studies of mirror-neurons and those with impairment of them? What memory effects might be seen with those on the autism spectrum who don't have strong mirror-neuron responses? If this is impaired, what might account for their improved memories for some types of material? Which types of material do they have improved memories for?
Is the same true of drawing points from a speech using the ideas of sketchnotes? Is drawing an extension of gestural improvement of memory?
Research shows that moving our hands advances our understanding ofabstract or complex concepts, reduces our cognitive load, and improves ourmemory.
movement and gesture as a mnemonic device
Research demonstrates that gesture can enhance our memory by reinforcing thespoken word with visual and motor cues.
Research shows that gesture can impact our memories by helping to associate speech with visual cues.
References for this?
Link this to the idea that our visual memories are much stronger than our verbal ones.
Psychologists call this mechanism activeinhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007
Active inhibition is the filter that prevents our minds from being constantly flooded with memories and allows us to focus. It acts as a barrier between our long term memories and our immediate present.
Is the filter behind active inhibition really active or is it passive? What is the actual physiological mechanism?
Although hewas very good at remembering facts, Shereshevsky was almostincapable of getting the gist of something, the concepts behind theparticulars and distinguishing the relevant facts from minor details.
Solomon Shereshevsky faced an extreme version of the sort of information overload many of can relate to, however in his case, because his memory was so good, he found it difficult to get the gist of something because the minor details drowned out the broader ideas.
Transferring ideas into the external memory also allows us toforget them.
While placing our ideas into external memory devices like notebooks or zettelkasten may allow us to forget them, mnemotechniques allow us to perform a similar task, but provides us hooks upon which they might be hung by means of association with other ideas. These hooks and association can be reactivated at later times when the ideas may be needed.
The zettelkasten allows us to do multiple things. It encourages us to clarify our ideas by writing them down, we extend them by linking them to other contexts, we actively write towards a multitude of interesting goals, by writing, we can forget the original ideas which we can later serendipitously re-link to new concepts.
Like computers, the human brain also builds up garbage that needs to be recycled, because memory space is finite, not infinite.
Example of a writer thinking that the human memory is more finite than is probably the case.
To create trails When we are studying a text we need to take the time to understand more than just the storyline. During your second reading, any comments made during the first reading (marginal comments or summaries) will quickly give you the gist of your first reading, so that you can take advantage of your second.
While multiple readings of a text in antiquity may have been rarer, due to the cheap proliferation of books, one can more easily "blaze a trail" through their reading to make it easier or quicker to rebuild context on subsequent readings.
Look at history of reading to see which books would have been more likely re-read, particularly outside of one's primary "area" of expertise.
Link to the trails mentioned by Vannevar Bush in As We May Think.
The techniques we have outlined—randomization, stack protection, and lim-iting which portions of memory can hold executable code—are three of the mostcommon mechanisms used to minimize the vulnerability of programs to bufferoverflow attacks
有什么技术可以保护程序免收攻击?
The array elements areordered in memory in row-major order, meaning all elements of row 0, whichcan be written A[0], followed by all elements of row 1 (A[1]), and so on.
array 在 memory 中的排列顺序是怎么样的?
The final example shows that one cancompute the difference of two pointers within the same data structure, with theresult being data having type long and value equal to the difference of the twoaddresses divided by the size of the data type.
如何计算两个 pointers 的差?
At times, however, local data mustbe stored in memory. Common cases of this include these:.There are not enough registers to hold all of the local data..The address operator ‘&’ is applied to a local variable, and hence we must beable to generate an address for it..Some of the local variables are arrays or structures and hence must be accessedby array or structure references.
什么时候 local data 必须要被存放在 memory 里面?
Amy Rae Fox@thoughtafoxYES I underline and highlight when I read and YES I know xyz studies demonstrate highlighting is not an 'effective learning technique' ... but not all learning is about remembering #toolsforthought9:41 PM · Feb 1, 2022·Twitter Web App
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>YES I underline and highlight when I read and YES I know xyz studies demonstrate highlighting is not an 'effective learning technique' ... but not all learning is about remembering #toolsforthought
— Amy Rae Fox (@thoughtafox) February 2, 2022
An interesting perspective. Worth comparing the ideas of learning and remembering and what relationship they have to each other.
Trying to find research on sketchnoting during presentations. Research directly comparing sketchnoting and more traditional notetaking does not seem to exist. References to dual coding theory do not count. Why is this popular?
“Good manners can replace intellect by providing a set of memorized responses to almost every situation in life,” he wrote. “Memorized responses eliminate the need for thought. Thought is not a very worthwhile pastime anyway. Thinking allows the brain, an inert and mushy organ, to exert unfair domination over more sturdy and active body parts.”
Even thoughelaboration works verifiably well for deep understanding, it might notbe the best choice if you just want to learn isolated encyclopaedicfacts (Rivard 1994).
For deep understanding the elaboration method may be the best tool, but may not be the best choice for learning isolated encyclopedic facts.
By learning isolated facts do they really mean memorizing here? In which case, perhaps using mnemotechniques is the best way to create synthetic associative links by which to tie one's knowledge into their other mental frameworks of knowledge. If thought about this way one is really elaborating their knowledge in a synthetic manner instead of more naturally. Either way, you're doing some form of elaborating as a means of assuming the knowledge. Both forms are work, though slightly different.
Even without any feedback, we will be better off ifwe try to remember something ourselves (Jang et al. 2012).
If we put effort into the attempt of retrievinginformation, we are much more likely to remember it in the long run,even if we fail to retrieve it without help in the end (Roediger andKarpicke 2006)
When we try to answer a question before we know how to, we willlater remember the answer better, even if our attempt failed (Arnoldand McDermott 2013)
“Manipulations such as variation, spacing, introducing contextualinterference, and using tests, rather than presentations, as learningevents, all share the property that they appear during the learningprocess to impede learning, but they then often enhance learning asmeasured by post-training tests of retention and transfer. Conversely,manipulations such as keeping conditions constant and predictable andmassing trials on a given task often appear to enhance the rate oflearning during instruction or training, but then typically fail to supportlong-term retention and transfer” (Bjork, 2011, 8).
This is a surprising effect for teaching and learning, and if true, how can it be best leveraged. Worth reading up on and testing this effect.
Indeed humans do seem built for categorizing and creating taxonomies and hierarchies, and perhaps allowing this talent to do some of the work may be the best way to learn not only in the short term, but over longer term evolutionary periods?
Learning requires effort, because we have to think to understandand we need to actively retrieve old knowledge to convince ourbrains to connect it with new ideas as cues. To understand howgroundbreaking this idea is, it helps to remember how much effortteachers still put into the attempt to make learning easier for theirstudents by prearranging information, sorting it into modules,categories and themes. By doing that, they achieve the opposite ofwhat they intend to do. They make it harder for the student to learnbecause they set everything up for reviewing, taking away theopportunity to build meaningful connections and to make sense ofsomething by translating it into one’s own language. It is like fastfood: It is neither nutritious nor very enjoyable, it is just convenient
Some of the effort that teachers put into their educational resources in an attempt to make learning faster and more efficient is actually taking away the actual learning opportunities of the students to sort, arrange, and make meaningful connections between the knowledge and to their own prior knowledge bases.
In mathematics, rather than showing a handful of methods for solving a problem, the teacher might help students to explore those problem solving spaces first and then assist them into creating these algorithms. I can't help but think about Inventional Geometry by William George Spencer that is structured this way. The teacher has created a broader super-structure of problems, but leaves it largely to the student to do the majority of the work.
Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory –until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted bythoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. Butthanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’tactually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinkingabout them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way thatconvinces us that it will be taken care of.
The Zeigarnik effect is the idea that open or pending tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory until they are done or our brain is otherwise convinced that they're "finished". This is why note taking can be valuable. By writing down small things, we can free up our short-term or working memories to focus or work on other potentially more important tasks. It is named for Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik.
The Zeigarnik effect is some of the value behind David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system. Writing down to do lists tricks our mind into freeing up space from things we need to take care of. If they're really important, we've got a list and can then take care of them. Meanwhile our working memories are freed up for other tasks.
This is why it is so much easier to remember things we understandthan things we don’t. It is not that we have to choose to focus eitheron learning or understanding. It is always about understanding – andif it is only for the sake of learning. Things we understand areconnected, either through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic,mental models or explanations. And deliberately building these kindsof meaningful connections is what the slip-box is all about.Every step is accompanied by questions like: How does this fact fitinto my idea of ...? How can this phenomenon be explained by thattheory? Are these two ideas contradictory or do they complementeach other? Isn’t this argument similar to that one? Haven’t I heardthis before? And above all: What does x mean for y? Thesequestions not only increase our understanding, but facilitate learningas well. Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, itis difficult not to remember it when we think about what it isconnected with.
Our natural associative memories make learning easier when we can associate a new piece of knowledge into our previously existing framework of knowledge and understanding.
Associative questions can help us to assume new knowledge. Try some of the following:
How does this new fact X fit into my conception of Y?
How can new phenomenon be explained by theory Z?
Is this new idea contradictory with this prior theory or do they complement and reinforce each other?
Is this new argument similar to that one? Is one subsumed into or abstracted by the other?
This sounds familiar, haven't I heard this before?
What does x mean for y?
Our brains work not that differently in terms of interconnectedness.Psychologists used to think of the brain as a limited storage spacethat slowly fills up and makes it more difficult to learn late in life. Butwe know today that the more connected information we alreadyhave, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock tothat information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeedlimited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept
isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed.
Our natural memories are limited in their capacities, but it becomes easier to remember facts when they've got an association to other things in our minds. The building of mental models makes it easier to acquire and remember new information. The down side is that it may make it harder to dramatically change those mental models and re-associate knowledge to them without additional amounts of work.
The mental work involved here may be one of the reasons for some cognitive biases and the reason why people are more apt to stay stuck in their mental ruts. An example would be not changing their minds about ideas of racism and inequality, both because it's easier to keep their pre-existing ideas and biases than to do the necessary work to change their minds. Similar things come into play with respect to tribalism and political party identifications as well.
This could be an interesting area to explore more deeply. Connect with George Lakoff.
As proper note-taking is rarely taught or discussed, it is no wonderthat almost every guide on writing recommends to start withbrainstorming. If you haven’t written along the way, the brain isindeed the only place to turn to. On its own, it is not such a greatchoice: it is neither objective nor reliable – two quite importantaspects in academic or nonfiction writing.
Brainstorming can be a miserable way to start a creative process. Without a pre-existing source of ideas (one's own notes) it can be the only place to start, but it suffers from being unreliable and having no objectivity. It is tremendously difficult to plumb the depths of one's memory for great ideas, questions, or interesting places to start an endeavor, but if you've been collecting these for ages, it becomes much easier to span a space and see tangential spaces.
We need a reliable and simple external structure tothink in that compensates for the limitations of our brains
Let's be honest that there are certainly methods for doing all of this within our brains and not needing to rely on external structures. This being said, using writing, literacy, and external structures does allow us to process things faster than before.
Can we calculate what the level of greater efficiency allows for doing this? What is the overall throughput difference in being able to forget and write? Not rely on communication with others? What does a back of the envelope calculation for this look like?
It is essential that by far the greater part of what is said or done in the world should be so ephemeral as to take itself away quickly; it should keep good for twenty-four hours, or even twice as long, but it should not be good enough a week hence to prevent people from going on to something else.
Melancholy Elephants.
a recitation of their names will be accompanied by a traditional libation, or pouring out of water, in accordance with West African traditions for honoring the deceased. "The ritual of libation holds the belief that saying people's names keeps them alive. It makes them free. It carries their personhood beyond their physical time on this earth," says event organizer Jasmine Blanks Jones, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship who is also part of Inheritance Baltimore, an interdisciplinary program for humanities education, research, and community engagement in Baltimore.
The West African tradition of libation, or pour out of water, honors the deceased and holds the belief that saying people's names aloud keeps them alive.
We might stumble across the above unanswered HQ&A note. Giving us a starting point can use it as a springboard to make the research and writing process faster. That's all part of achieving more with less by using yesterday's momentum.
Remembering and being able to more quickly recall prior contexts allows our thinking to build momentum.
education has been moving farther and farther away from memorization-based learning. The standardized tests I give are modeled off of the AP History exams’ Document Based Questions, which prioritize analysis and communication skills over rote memorization.
Education has been moving farther away from memorization-based learning and instead prioritizing analysis and communication skills.
Zhao, S., Shibata, K., Hellyer, P. J., Trender, W., Manohar, S., Hampshire, A., & Husain, M. (2022). Rapid vigilance and episodic memory decrements in COVID-19 survivors. Brain Communications, 4(1), fcab295. https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcab295
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.
If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
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."
And pundits quipped, "Nothing is more common than a fool with a strong memory."
In 1580 Montaigne declared that "a good memory is generally joined to a weak judgment."
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Memory," agreed Cicero, "is the treasury and guardian of all things."
"Memory," said Aeschylus, "is the mother of all wis- dom."
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.
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.
The Lost Arts of Memory by Daniel J. Boorstin The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1984 104-113
culture that taught to learn by rote and a culture that taught to forget instead
Pedagogical cultrues:
Is there a (linear) progression? How do they differ? How are they they same? Is there a 1-1 process that allows them to be equivalence classes?
•. (n.d.). Even Mild COVID Infections Can Have Lasting Impacts Like ‘Chemo Brain,’ Study Finds. NBC New York. Retrieved 12 January 2022, from https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/even-mild-covid-infections-can-have-lasting-impacts-like-chemo-brain-study-finds/3489958/
Fernandez-Castaneda, A., Lu, P., Geraghty, A. C., Song, E., Lee, M.-H., Wood, J., Yalcin, B., Taylor, K. R., Dutton, S., Acosta-Alvarez, L., Ni, L., Contreras-Esquivel, D., Gehlhausen, J. R., Klein, J., Lucas, C., Mao, T., Silva, J., Pena-Hernandez, M., Tabachnikova, A., … Monje, M. (2022). Mild respiratory SARS-CoV-2 infection can cause multi-lineage cellular dysregulation and myelin loss in the brain (p. 2022.01.07.475453). https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.07.475453
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".
https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html
Manfred Kuehn looks at Karl Kraus' criticism of the idea of a zettelkasten as a tool which can be misused.
Of course this begs the question of what one is using their index card catalog for? Are you using it as a rhetorical thinking and creation device or simply a second memory?
What we Remember by Manfred Kuehn https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/
archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021192005/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/
Dutch psychologist Wilem Wagenaar conducted memory related experiments on recollecting what, where, who, and when for the most interesting experiences of his days. It turned out that the "What?" was most useful followed by where? and who?, but that "when?" was "useless in every instance".
p.116 of Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life's Scarcest Commodity, Marlowe & Company, 2007, New York.
Despite this, timestamps might serve other functions within a note taking system. The might include conceiving of ideas, temporal order of ideas presented, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Worth delving into more deeply for additional sources and archaeological evidence.
http://www.diveintomark.link/2006/digg-users-are-dumber-than-goldfish
Users of some aggregation sites collectively forget prior articles and news and resubmit them at intervals. This may give rise to the colloquialism "goldfish effect".
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?
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."
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).
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).
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.
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.
an inquiry into filing systems is an inquiry into how society manages its own memory.11
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.
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"?
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
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.
Adamo, S., Michler, J., Zurbuchen, Y., Cervia, C., Taeschler, P., Raeber, M. E., Sain, S. B., Nilsson, J., Moor, A. E., & Boyman, O. (2021). Signature of long-lived memory CD8+ T cells in acute SARS-CoV-2 infection. Nature, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04280-x
Sloman, S. A. (2021). How Do We Believe? Topics in Cognitive Science, 0(2021), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12580
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?
This operand can be either a register ora memory location.
unary 的操作数可以是什么?
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?
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?
Wagner, U., & Echterhoff, G. (2021). Socially induced false memories in the absence of misinformation. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f8eyr
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.
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.
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
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?
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).
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
́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.
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"?
The creative faculty largely depends on the wis- dom and controlled activity of the memory.
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.
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...
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.
We do not live by memory, we use our memory to live.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Is it possible that such a place was used as a memory palace? Being secluded away and the play of fire inside would certainly fit some of Lynne Kelly's criteria from Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies. More evidence would be needed however.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>LynneKelly </span> in "Ancient Australian Aboriginal Memory Tool Superior to ‘Memory Palace’ Learning" - Neuroscience, Psychology, and Health - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>10/19/2021 09:26:03</time>)</cite></small>
I don’t think the methods were worked out as much as evolved with the human brain. I suspect those who started using mnemonics survived and bred better than those who didn’t.
I have been pointed to this discovery of a Neanderthal cave many times, with archaeologists suggesting to me that it points to Neanderthal use of a memory palace. It would need more evidence to be convincing, but that would go back a very long time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210323175407/https://www.pmemory.com/
This memory courses' website seems to have gone down sometime in the past six months or so. Fortunately I'd gotten a copy of most (?) of their system before it went down. I'm adding it to my list of systems to take a look at.
It generally went by PMemory and in some cases by Ruslan M Phenomenal Memory (GMS). See also: https://brainlearns.com/courses/ruslan-m-phenomenal-memory-gms/
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
Lynne Kelly's excellent book Memory Craft (Pegasus, 2020) has 6 pages of Appendix A which lists 31 memory methods along with examples, what they might be used for, and references to where they're described in the book. It's one of the most comprehensive lists I've seen to date and in particular covers a variety of methods used by indigenous cultures which aren't discussed in many other (Western focused) texts.
I just bookmarked this article published today in Current Biology for later reading and annotation. While the article isn't specifically focused on memory, the fact that it touches on visual structures, emotion, music, and movement (dance) which are core to some peoples' memory toolkits, I thought that many here would find it to be of interest.
One of the authors provided the following tl;dr synopsis:
"Across the world, people express emotion through music and dance. But why do music and dance go together?
We tested a deceptively simple hypothesis: Music and movement are represented the same way in the brain."
For those who haven't integrated song or dance into their practices, searching around for the idea of songlines will give you some background on their possible uses.
cc: @LynneKelly
Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)01283-5
This portends some interesting results with relation to mnemonics and particularly songlines and indigenous peoples' practices which integrate song, movement, and emotion.
Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/254961v4
<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>
Mateus, J., Dan, J. M., Zhang, Z., Rydyznski Moderbacher, C., Lammers, M., Goodwin, B., Sette, A., Crotty, S., & Weiskopf, D. (n.d.). Low-dose mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccine generates durable memory enhanced by cross-reactive T cells. Science, 0(0), eabj9853. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj9853
Www.cogsciWA.com. (n.d.). Www.CogsciWA.Com. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://www.cogsciwa.com/
Blomberg, B., Mohn, K. G.-I., Brokstad, K. A., Zhou, F., Linchausen, D. W., Hansen, B.-A., Lartey, S., Onyango, T. B., Kuwelker, K., Sævik, M., Bartsch, H., Tøndel, C., Kittang, B. R., Cox, R. J., & Langeland, N. (2021). Long COVID in a prospective cohort of home-isolated patients. Nature Medicine, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01433-3
Divergent trajectories of antiviral memory after SARS-Cov-2 infection. (2021, June 15). https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-612205/v1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=578JJeLN9Kw
Short and basic... nothing new to me, but clever intro.
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.
Pluviano, S., Watt, C., & Della Sala, S. (2017). Misinformation lingers in memory: Failure of three pro-vaccination strategies. PLoS ONE, 12(7), e0181640. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181640
Some interesting finds Josh.
Related to some of the bullet journal (aka BuJo) and journaling space you will eventually come across the idea of "morning pages" which is a technique where you spend a block of time (usually in the morning, but ideally just before you want to do your creative thinking work) where you write for a set amount of time or number of pages. The goal of this method (and to some extent bullet journaling) is to clear the cruft and extraneous details out of your head to be able to better prioritize and focus on your creative work. There's a relatively large group of people doing this as a technique, so even knowing the phrase can help one to find the literature.
Tangentially related to this and memory (via our old friend rhetoric), I've been doing some significant research into the commonplace book tradition and general note taking with an eye towards knowledge acquisition, creation, and spaced repetition systems. This has led into research into the areas of the zettelkasten, digital note taking, digital gardens and the like. All fascinating areas which overlap memory via rhetoric. I suspect that many mnemonists in the Renaissance used commonplace books as physical written memory palaces, though I've yet to find anything in my research that directly links them other than the relationship they have in the long tradition of rhetoric in Western culture. Since you mention music and writing lyrics, I recently noted that Eminem has a commonplace technique which he calls "stacking ammo" by which he compiles ideas for his lyrics. His method is certainly less structured than a traditional commonplace book, but the overall form traces back to our friends Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.
If you delve into some of the Bullet Journal and journaling literature you'll find a subculture of people (YouTube has hundreds of people with entire channels dedicated to the topic) who write into their daily/weekly planners and decorate them with stickers, washi tape, photos, calligraphy, drawings, etc. I've called some of this "productivity porn" before, but if you search commonplace book on Instagram or Pinterest you'll find examples of people whose journals and notes are becoming physical memory palaces where the visuals are likely helping them remember portions of their lives or what they're writing. The stickers and images to some extent are serving the purpose of drolleries seen in Medieval manuscripts as mnemonic devices.
And finally, tangentially related to all of this is another interesting sub-genre of memory and note taking called sketchnotes which combines active listening, writing, and drawing into a mnemonic related note taking activity. I'm actually a bit surprised to find so little on the technique here on the forum. Searching for sketchnotes on social media will provide lots of examples and there are many "What are sketchnotes" short videos on YouTube that will give you an idea of what's going on. Many of these talk about a memory component, but not being mired into the sub-topic of rhetoric, they're usually not using the same framings we would (here on the forum), though the effects one might expect are the same.
Some related richer resources for these areas, to help people from going down the rabbit hole within the performative social media spaces:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa84hA3OsHU
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Josh Cohen</span> in Aphantasia Video: Living without Mental Imagery (Wired) - Neuroscience, Psychology, and Health - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>09/19/2021 21:25:12</time>)</cite></small>
Mnemonist and prolific memory researcher/writer Lynne Kelly also describes herself as having aphantasia and indicates that it isn't a problem for her either. She's described some of her experiences here: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?page_id=4236
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?
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Suzanne Conklin Akbari</span> in Growing a Research Network: Approaches to Global Book History | Penn Libraries (<time class='dt-published'>09/12/2021 21:11:23</time>)</cite></small>
https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-005-interview-with-chris-aldrich/
This didn't turn out too badly for a half an hour. As ever I dislike listening to my own voice.
https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/
A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.
I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.
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?
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
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”.
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.
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.
Psychologist Jerome Bruno suggests we're 22x more likely to remember facts when told through story.
General plan for his approach
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
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?
Researchers found that students remembered passages of text better when the extracts began with a question, for example, “Is this evidenced?”
Reference for this?
183
Seek out the silliest, craziest, wildest ideas as metaphors. The most bizarre ideas capture attention and are unforgettable.
Where have we heard this before?
Wu, K. J. (2021, September 3). What We Actually Know About Waning Immunity. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/waning-immunity-not-crisis-right-now/619965/
https://fs.blog/2021/07/mathematicians-lament/
What if we taught art and music the way we do mathematics? All theory and drudgery without any excitement or exploration?
What textbooks out there take math from the perspective of exploration?
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
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.
Active reading helps you make connections within your latticework of mental models. Connections help retention.
Connections ARE retention. They are memory.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
a lesson with Emily Mills of the Sketchnote Academy
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
Seven building blocks for drawing
Boxes are boring, so add frames or more interesting Use containers to separate information that is different from the rest or to highlight.
Start out small first as it's more intimidating to use bigger formats
Higher contrast notes are better
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?
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.
Liu, Q., & Chai, L. (2021). Opinion Dynamics Models with Memory in Coopetitive Social Networks: Analysis, Application and Simulation. ArXiv:2108.03234 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03234
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomnema
Hypomnema (Greek. ὑπόμνημα, plural ὑπομνήματα, hypomnemata), also spelled hupomnema, is a Greek word with several translations into English including a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, an anecdotal record, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.
Compare and contrast the idea of this with the concept of the commonplace book. There's also a tie in with the idea of memory, particularly for meditation.
There's also the idea here of keeping a note of something to be fixed or remedied and which needs follow up or reflection.
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?
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
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?
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
In the Western tradition, these memory traditions date back to ancient Greece and Rome and were broadly used until the late 1500s. Frances A. Yates outlines much of their use in The Art of Memory (Routledge, 1966). She also indicates that some of their decline in use stems from Protestant educational reformers like Peter Ramus who preferred outline and structural related methods. Some religious reformers didn't appreciate the visual mnemonic methods as they often encouraged gross, bloody, non-religious, and sexualized imagery.
Those interested in some of the more modern accounts of memory practice (as well as methods used by indigenous and oral cultures around the world) may profit from Lynne Kelly's recent text Memory Craft (Allen & Unwin, 2019).
Lots of note taking in the West was (and still is) done via commonplace book, an art that is reasonably well covered in Earle Havens' Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2001).
Aizpurua, A., Migueles, M., & Aranberri, A. (2021). Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 666977. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.666977
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jill Rosen </span> in Team finds brain mechanism that automatically links objects in our minds | Hub (<time class='dt-published'>07/24/2021 18:07:51</time>)</cite></small>
https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/09/how-the-mind-links-objects/
A study that quantifies association within the brain and indicates the region where it occurs.
Facebook AI. (2021, July 16). We’ve built and open-sourced BlenderBot 2.0, the first #chatbot that can store and access long-term memory, search the internet for timely information, and converse intelligently on nearly any topic. It’s a significant advancement in conversational AI. https://t.co/H17Dk6m1Vx https://t.co/0BC5oQMEck [Tweet]. @facebookai. https://twitter.com/facebookai/status/1416029884179271684
"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.
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
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
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.
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/.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
“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.
<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>
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>
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.
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.
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.