I appreciate the space for an oral perspective here in a book from1911.

quoted section from:<br /> [au moyen âge, on lit généralement en pronançant avec les lèvres, au moins à voix basse, par conséquent en entendant les phrases que les yeux voient.] Jean Leclercq, Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge, 2nd edn (Paris: Cerf, 1963), p. 72.

What connection, if any, is there to the muscle memory of movement while speaking/reading along with sound/hearing to remembering what we read? Is there research on this? Implications for orality and memory?

Ted Nelson felt visible connections between text were the most important part of his Xanadu project.

There are close parallels between these in digital spaces and songlines and related orality based mnemonic techniques.

Something fascinating here with respect to orality and associative memory in ancient texts at the border of literacy.

What do others have to say about the use of "key words" with respect to storytelling and orality with respect to associative memory.

The highlighted portion is an interesting example.

What do other examples look like? How common might they be? What ought we call them?

In neighboring cultures in which both have oral practices relating to massebah, one is not just destroying "sacred stones" to stamp out their religion, but it's also destroying their culture and cultural memory as well as likely their laws and other valuable memories for the function of their society.

View this in light also of the people of Israel keeping their own sacred stones (Hosea 10:1) as well as the destruction of pillars dedicated to Baal in 2 Kings 18:4 and 2 Kings 23:14.

(Link and) Compare this to the British fencing off the land in Australia and thereby destroying Songlines and access to them and the impact this had on Indigenous Australians.

It's also somewhat similar to the colonialization activity of stamping out of Indigenous Americans and First Nations' language in North America, though the decimation of their language wasn't viewed in as reciprocal way as it might be viewed now. (Did colonizers of the time know about the tremendous damage of language destruction, or was it just a power over function?)

Use of massebah for remembrance of a name...

Potentially used for other factors? translation? context?

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/oqgH4mx9Ee68_dMgihgD0A (Rachel's massebah in Genesis 35:19-20)

Relationship to the first two commandments against worshiping other gods and the use of idols?

How does this relate to the standing stone found in the room at Khirbet Qeiyafa from the time of David?

Dates of this text with respect to Khirbet Keiyafa?

Description of the arrangement? Circle? Further or suggested usage?

Link to Genesis 28:18: https://hypothes.is/a/NF5p8Gx6Ee65Rg_J4tfaMQ

Hamacher, Duane, Patrick Nunn, Michelle Gantevoort, Rebe Taylor, Greg Lehman, Ka Hei Andrew Law, and Mel Miles. “The Archaeology of Orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal Oral Traditions to the Late Pleistocene.” Journal of Archaeological Science, August 10, 2023, 45pp.

Pre-print.

See also: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440323000997

Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:d4ccd0952073ac59932f4638381e6b69

Popular press coverage: https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/august/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives

It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.

Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.

As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.

How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1611801002415632385.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/3-000-year-old-artifacts-reveal-history-behind-biblical-david-761720

ways to link this to oral traditions in music and memory?!?

Timestamps 19:11 - 35:20

CA Senate Bill 488 2021; signed, in process,

Orton-Gillingham method (procedure/process) but can be implemented differently. Rigorous and works. Over 100 years old.

Wilson program uses pieces of OG. What's this? Not enough detail here.

Dyslexia training will be built into some parts of credentialling programs.

Each child is different.

This requires context knowledge on the part of the teacher and then a large tool bag of methods to help the widest variety of those differences.

In the box programs don't work because children are not one size fits all.

Magic wand ? What would you want?

Madhuri would like to have: - rigorous teaching in early grades - if we can teach structured literacy following a specific scope in sequence most simple to most complex - teaching with same familiar patterns over and over - cumulative (builds on itself) - multisensory - explicit - Strong transitional kindergarten through grade 3 instruction

Prevention trumps intervention.

Otherwise you're feeding into the school to prison pipeline.

Madhuri's call for teaching that is structured, cumulative, multisensory, and explicit sounds a lot like what I would imagine orality-based instruction looks like as well. The structure there particularly makes it easier to add pieces later on in a way that literacy doesn't necessarily.

In his youth, while selling drugs on the side, Jay-Z would write down material for lyrics into a green notebook. He never took the notebook around with him on the streets, but instead would buy anything at a corner store just for the paper bags as writing material. He would write the words onto these paper bags and stuff them into his pockets (wearable Zettelkasten anyone? or maybe Zetteltasche?) When he got home, in long standing waste book tradition, he would transfer the words to his notebook.

Jay-Z has said he hasn't written down any lyrics since his first album, but warns, "I've lost plenty of material. It's not the best way. I wouldn't advise it to anyone. I've lost a couple albums' worth of great material."

https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2010/11/20101116_fa_01.mp3

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/T3Z38uDUEeuFcPu2U_w_zA (Jonathan Edwards' zettelmantle)

Just as a trail of pheromones serves the function of a shared external memory for an ant colony, annotations can create a set of associative trails which serve as an external memory for a broader human collective memory. Further songlines and other orality based memory methods form a shared, but individually stored internal collective memory for those who use and practice them.

Vestiges of this human practice can be seen in modern society with the use and spread of cultural memes. People are incredibly good at seeing and recognizing memes and what they communicate and spreading them because they've evolved to function this way since the dawn of humanity.

Come back and read these particular texts, but these look interesting with respect to my work on orality, early "religion", secrecy, and information spread:<br /> - Ancient practices removed from their lineage lose their meaning - In spiritual practice, secrecy can be helpful but is not always necessary

timestamp

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1557092705485967360.html

Possible that in addition to the linguistic portions that MS 408 serves as part/parcel of the art of memory with some hidden meaning with respect to alchemical work?

https://twitter.com/_35millimetre/status/1556586974928068611

Turns out the world’s greatest drawing of a frog was done in 1790, by Itō Jakuchu pic.twitter.com/GttSfHA7Kl

— Charlie (@_35millimetre) August 8, 2022

Makes me want to revisit some of the history of early haiku and frog references. What was the literacy level within Japanese culture at this time? Were there more methods entwining elements of orality and memory into the popular culture?

Below are some sources to give you a start on orality. I've arranged them in a suggested watching/reading order with some introductory material before more technical sources which will give you jumping off points for further research.

• Modern Memory, Ancient Methods. TEDxMelbourne. Melbourne, Australia, 2018. https://www.ted.com/talks/lynne_kelly_modern_memory_ancient_methods.
• Kelly, Lynne. The Memory Code. Allen & Unwin, 2016.
• Kelly, Lynne. Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107444973.
• Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Taylor & Francis, 2007.
• Parry, Milman, and Adam Parry. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Neale, Margo, and Lynne Kelly. Songlines: The Power and Promise. First Knowledges, 1.0. Thames & Hudson, 2020.

Van Acker, Wouter, and Pieter Uyttenhove, eds. Analogous Spaces: Conference Reader. Ghent University. University library, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-770404.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547390915689566211.html via https://twitter.com/nicolas_gatien/status/1547390946156969984

Nicolas, I broadly agree with you that many of these factors of reading and writing for understanding and retention are at play and the research in memory and spaced repetition underlines a lot of this. However in practice, one needs to be revisiting and actively using their notes for some particular project to remember them better. The card search may help to create both visual and physical paths that assist in memory too.

Reliance solely on a physical zettelkasten however may not be enough without active use over time, particularly for the majority of users. It's unlikely that all or even many may undertake this long term practice. Saying that this is either the "best", "optimum", or "only" way would be disingenuous to the diversity of learners and thinkers.

Those who want to add additional strength to these effects might also use mnemonic methods from indigenous cultures that rely on primary orality. These could include color, images, doodles (drolleries anyone?), or other associative methods, many of which could be easily built into an (antinet) zettelkasten. Lynne Kelly's work in this area can be highly illuminating. For pure practical application and diversity of potential methods, I recommend her book Memory Craft https://amzn.to/3zdqqGp, but she's got much more academic and in depth work that is highly illustrative.

With this background on orality and memory in mind we might all broadly view wood and stone circles (Stonehenge), menhir, standing stones, songlines, and other mnemonic devices in the archaeological and sociological records as zettelkasten which one keeps entirely in their memory rather than writing them down. We might also consider, based on this and the historical record concerning Druids and their association with trees that the trees served a zettelkasten-like function for those ancient societies. This continues to extend to lots of other cultural and societal practices throughout history. Knowledge from Duane Hamacher et al's book The First Astronomers and Karlie Noone and Krystal De Napoli's Astronomy: Sky Country will underline these theories and practices in modern indigenous settings.

Medieval culture had imbued its perspective of the natural world with a variety of emblematic associations. Plants and animals were not simply specimens or organisms in the world but were emblematic representations of ideas which were also associated with them.

example: peacock / pride

Did this perspective draw from some of the older possibly pagan forms of orality and mnemonics? Or were the potential associations simply natural ones which (re-?)grew either historically or as the result of the use of the art of memory from antiquity?

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.

This also happens with the techniques of orality, but from an entirely different perspective. Again, these methods are totally invisible even to an expert on productivity and personal knowledge management.

Not even a mention here of the ancient Greeks bemoaning the invention of literacy as papering over valuable memory.

Face-to-face teaching and learning has been the majority default for nearly all of human existence. Obviously it was the case in oral cultures, and the tide has shifted a bit with the onset of literacy. However, with the advent of the Internet and the pressures of COVID-19, lots of learning has broken this mold.

How can the affordances of literacy-only modalities be leveraged for online learning that doesn't include significant fact-to-face interaction? How might the zettelkasten method of understanding, sense-making, note taking, and idea generation be leveraged in this process?

I'm not a fan of digs at the idea of our "Paleolithic memory", particularly as there is some reasonable evidence that oral memory methods in the Paleolithic are probably vastly superior to those "modern" humans are using now.

Cross reference: Kelly, Lynne. Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107444973.

"Social encoding advantage" is what psychologists refer to as the phenomenon of people remembering social information more accurately than other types.

Reference to read: “social encoding advantage”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 284.

It's likely that the social acts of learning and information exchange in oral societies had an additional stickiness over and beyond the additional mnemonic methods they would have used as a base.

The Western cultural tradition doesn't value the social coding advantage because it "excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect" (Paul, 2021). Instead it provides advantage and status to the individual thinking on their own. We greatly prefer the idea of the "lone genius" toiling on their own, when this is hardly ever the case. Our availability bias often leads us to believe it is the case because we can pull out so many famous examples, though in almost all cases these geniuses were riding on the shoulders of giants.

Reference to read: remember social information more accurately: Jason P. Mitchell, C. Neil Macrae, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (May 2004): 4912–17

Reference to read: the brain stores social information: Jason P. Mitchell et al., “Thinking About Others: The Neural Substrates of Social Cognition,” in Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People, ed. Karen T. Litfin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 63–82.

The process seen in cognitive apprenticeships seems more akin to the sorts of knowledge transfer done in primary oral indigenous cultures by passing down stories and performing (song, dance, art, etc.) knowledge.

It shouldn't be surprising that cognitive apprenticeships work well given their general use by oral cultures over millennia.

link to: Writing out answers will show gaps in knowledge Performing actions will show gaps in knowledge

These two should be interesting to read on memory and how they delineate its various layers.

See: Stiegler, B. (2009) Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Trans. S. Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

The dendroglyphs (markings on trees) or the petroglyphs (markings on stone in the stony territories) are the libraries of the indigenous peoples who always relate their stories from the markings back up to the sky.

via Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson

Can this be linked to the practices of the Druids who may have had similar methods? How about linking the petroglyphs in the Celtic (English) countryside?

The white fellas learned very quickly from the Romans that the first thing you attack is other people's religious beliefs, which are the modern day equivalent of communication towers. That's how oral societies communicate their knowledge and culture.

via Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson

Hidden in the phrase that "everything on Earth is reflected in the sky" or the idea of "reading the stars to understand one's environment" is the idea of associative memory. If you know one thing, you necessarily know another. Don't let this subtle idea of the words 'reflect' or 'read' hide what is going on.

Are these graphic and memorable stories strikingly similar because of the underlying packages of orality and memory used in these cultures?

This is one of my primary motivations for reading this text.

Indigenous sciences are highly interconnected while Western sciences tend to be highly sub-divided into ever smaller specializations.

Are Indigenous sciences naturally interconnected or do they form that way because of the associative memory underlying the cultural orality by which they are formed and transmitted? (I would suspect so, but don't yet have the experience to say definitively. Evidence for this should be collected.)

Even in the western tradition, the earliest methods of mnemonics tied ideas to locations, from whence we get the ideas of loci communes (in Latin) and thence commonplaces and commonplace books. The idea of loci communes was koinos topos in Greek from whence we have derived the word 'topic'.

Was this a carryover from other local oral traditions or a new innovation? Given the prevalence of very similar Indigenous methods around the world, it was assuredly not an innovation. Perhaps it was a rediscovery after the loss of some of these traditions locally in societies that were less reliant on orality and moving towards more reliance on literacy for their memories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_circle

Some timber circle sites to look into: - Secotan in North Carolina circa 1585 - Poverty Point - Hopewell timber circles (Moorehead Circle and Stubbs Earthworks) in Ohio - Cahokia

Artist, illustrator and mapmaker John White painted a watercolor in July 1585 of a group of Native Americans in the Secotan village in North America. Both he and chronicler Thomas Harriot described a gathering of Indigenous peoples gathered in the Algonquian village as part of Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke Colony expedition. They describe a festival with participants holding a dance at a timber circle, the posts of which were carved with with faces.

Harriot wrote that participants had come from surrounding villages and that "every man attyred in the most strange fashion they can devise havinge certayne marks on the backs to declare of what place they bee."

This evidence would generally support some of Lynne Kelly's thesis in Knowledge and Power. A group of neighboring peoples gathering, possibly for the Green Corn Ceremony, ostensibly to strengthen social ties and potentially to strengthen and trade knowledge.

Would we also see others of her list of markers in the area?

Read references: - Daniels, Dennis F. "John White". NCpedia. Retrieved 2017-12-19. - Tucker, Abigal (December 2008). "Sketching the Earliest Views of the New World". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2017-12-19. - "A Selection of John White's Watercolors : A festive dance". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 2017-12-19.

Lorenzo Nigro indicates that the "kothon" of Motya in southern Sicily was a pool of Baal whose surface may have been used to observe and map the stars. He also indicates that the Phoenicians adored the stars potentially as gods or deceased ancestors. This is an example of a potentially false assumption often seen in archaeology of Western practitioners misconstruing Indigenous practices based on modern ideas of religion and culture.

I might posit that this sort of practice is more akin to that of the science of Indigenous peoples who used oral and mnemonic methods in combination with remembering their histories and ancestors.

Cross reference this with coming reading in The First Astronomers (to come) which may treat this in more depth.

Leonardo da Vinci documented the attributes of standing water for studying the night sky.

Where was this and what did it actually entail?

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?

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