Class 2, Does Memory Matter? Why Are Universities Studying Slavery and Their Pasts? by David Blight for [[YaleCourses]]

thank goodness I'm not the only one to see this... surely there must be some overlap in scholarship here. But where is it?

This feels like it's tangential to memory palaces, but I'll have to read more of Nora to discern if he had any experience here or if he's simply stumbled upon a related idea, but one which wasn't taken to it's logical extreme.

reply to u/chiefkeif at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/18fjaya/new_member_here_is_zettelkasten_the_right_method/

Some of your root issues may be addressed directly by engaging with by spaced repetition systems (for improving memory recall: try Anki, Mnemosyne, et al.) as well as mnemonic systems (memory palaces, the major system, etc.). Given that a Zettelkasten can be an instantiation of both of these simultaneously, you may find benefits for using it in such a setting. This being said, you may be better off with either one or both of the more proximal solutions with a zettelkasten being somewhat more distal for your specific needs.

[[Jorge Arango]] interviews Veronica Erb on Annotating Books

Anecdotal evidence that dyslexia has an overlap with creating links to see a "bigger picture"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrN0kaE6DkY<br /> Is The Zettelkasten Method Really The Best Personal Knowledge Management System? by Anthony Metivier

meh...

https://zh.m.wikisource.org/zh-hans/%E8%A5%BF%E5%9C%8B%E8%A8%98%E6%B3%95

This is NOT what a memory palace is... ugh.

Following interruptions by colleagues or phone calls at work, people may frequently ask themselves "where was I?" more frequently than "what was I doing?" This colloquialism isn't surprising as our memories for visual items and location are much stronger than actions. Knowledge workers will look around at their environments for contextual clues for what they were doing and find them in piles of paper on their desks, tabs in their computer browser, or even documents (physical or virtual) on their desktops.

Kidd indicates that knowledge workers may prefer to take notes in physical notebooks because they're not forced to classify them immediately, but they can use their physical presence and location as a means of indicating that some sort of follow up is required. Comparing this to most digital notes which don't have this same sort of location, one is more worried that the computer filing them away will mean that they become lost almost instantaneously. Some notes like diary dates and phone numbers which may have very specific locations for noting them don't fall under these auspices, but other longer and more detailed notes certainly would.

A digital zettelkasten or commonplace may help to alleviate this as individual ideas are linked and indexed in multiple ways which make them easier to both find, use and expand upon.

I'm reminded here of the old aphorism "Out of sight is out of mind."

This harkens back to the idea of oral cultures using their environments as memory palaces to remember their culture, laws, and knowledge. Things being within sight mean that they were immediately brought to mind.

For an office worker, filing an item is tantamount to literally putting both out of their sight as well as their mind.

Compare this to the more advanced zettelkasten methods where knowledge workers file everything away out of their sight, but with the tacit idea that they'll be regularly revisiting their ideas on index cards to link other ideas to them to keep building upon them. While things may be temporarily out of mind, they're regularly recycled and linked to new ideas. Their re-emergence can cause them to be remembered, re-contextualized, and often feel like serendipity for linking to other ideas in one's collection.

The quote from this paper references Mander 1992:

It seems that knowledge workers use physical space, such as desks or floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use [12].

leads me to believe that the original paper has information which supports office workers using their physical environments as thinking and memory spaces much as indigenous peoples have for their knowledge management systems using orality and memory.

For scholars of orality, the value of the messiness in many knowledge workers' work spaces is probably not surprising. It's likely that these workers are using their local environment as oral cultures have since time immemorial. They're creating physical songlines or memory palaces in their local environment to which they're spatially attaching memories of the work they're doing, performing, or need to perform. This allows them to offload some of their memory work, storage, and retention to items in their physical space.

Jordan Peterson apparently has described using a memory palace (castle?) he used with 12 spaces for writing his book (presumably 12 Rules for life?).

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting article to read and build evidence as Kelly suggests.

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.

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?

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

songlines != memory palaces