The suggestion of visual highlighting making ideas stand out, but without the idea of their location within the notes being a helpful part of the mnemonic technique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpvEY-2dSdU

In this episode, I explain the memory system I created in order to expand my memory to new heights. I call it the Sirianni Method and with it, you can learn how to create an intentional photographic memory.

Who the hell is the Sirianni this is named for, himself? (In the comments he mentions that "it's my italian grandpa's last name, I always liked it and a while back started naming things after it)

tl;dr: He's reinvented the wheel, but certainly not the best version of it.

What he's describing isn't remotely related to the idea of a photographic memory, so he's over-hyping the results, which is dreadful. If it were a photographic memory, he wouldn't need the spaced-repetition portion of his practice. While he mentions how he's regularly reviewing his cards he doesn't mention any of the last century+ of research and work on spaced repetition. https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm is a good place to start for some of this.

A lot of what he's doing is based on associative memory, particularly by drawing connections/links to other things he already knows. He's also taking advantage of visual memory by associating his knowledge with a specific picture.

He highlights emotion and memory, but isn't drawing clear connections between his knowledge and any specific emotions that he's tying or associating them to.

"Intentional" seems to be one of the few honest portions of the piece.

Overview of his Sirianni method: pseudo-zettelkasten notes with written links to things he already knows (but without any Luhmann-esque numbering system or explicit links between cards, unless they're hiding in his connections section, which isn't well supported by the video) as well as a mnemonic image and lots of ad hoc spaced repetition.

One would be better off mixing their note taking practice with associative mnemonic methods (method of loci, songlines, memory palaces, sketchnotes, major system, orality, etc.) all well described by Lynne Kelly (amongst hundreds before her who got smaller portions of these practices) in combination with state of the art spaced repetition.

The description of Luhmann's note taking system here is barely passable at best. He certainly didn't invent the system which was based on several hundred years of commonplace book methodology before him. Luhmann also didn't popularize it in any sense (he actually lamented how people were unimpressed by it when he showed them). Popularization was done post-2013 generally by internet hype based on his prolific academic output.

There is nothing new here other than that he thinks he's discovered something new and is repackaging it for the masses with a new name in a flashy video package. There's a long history of hucksters doing this sort of fabulist tale including Kevin Trudeau with Mega Memory in the 1990s and going back to at least the late 1800s with "Professor" Alphonse Loisette and the system he sold for inordinate amounts to the masses including Mark Twain.

Most of these methods have been around for millennia and are all generally useful and well documented though the cultural West has just chosen to forget most of them. A week's worth of research and reading on these topics would have resulted in a much stronger "system" more quickly.

Beyond this, providing a fuller range of specific options and sub-options in these areas so that individuals could pick and choose the specifics which work best for them might have been a better way to go.

Content research: D- Production value: A+

{syndication link](https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10ehrbd/comment/j4u495q/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/10acr9j/sut_i_ddweud_i_memorized_yn_gymraeg/

Fascinating that the Welsh language doesn't seem to have a direct translatable word/verb for "to memorize". The closest are dysgu (to learn, to teach) and cofio (to remember).

Related phrase: yn dysgu cerddi ar gof (to learn poems by heart), though this last is likely a more direct translation of an English concept back into Welsh.

Is this lack of a seemingly basic word for such a practice a hidden indicator of the anthropology of their way of knowing?

If to learn something means that one fully memorizes it from the start, then one needn't sub-specify, right?

Like the affordances with respect to memory, giving notes a "place" can give them additional power.

General methods of annotating or marking a text:<br /> - underlining, circling, boxing, enclosing, or highlighting - vertical lines in margin - stars, asterisks, symbols, dogears, (implied: bookmarks) - numbers sequencing arguments - page numbers as cross references - writing in the margin: questions and answers - writing in the endpapers

Are there other methods and marks that aren't catalogued here?

The idea of drolleries used as mnemonics is one which quickly comes to mind.

They do mention cross-references to page numbers within the text, but fail to mention links to ideas in other texts. (Perhaps they cover this later under syntopical reading and marking?)

A line in the margin doesn't fit with any mnemotechniques I'm aware of, so it's more likely a method to indicate what he had read, and up to what point. Likely not an indicator of storage to memory.

She seems to be encouraging the association of dates with easily visualized images, but is she doing so with the knowledge of the art of memory?

I suspect not, but we could look for other evidence here.

retention is facilitated by acquisition conditions that prompt people to elaborate information in a way that increases the distinctiveness of their memory representations.” (Stein et al. 1984, 522)

Want to read this paper.

Isn't this a major portion of what many mnemotechniques attempt to do? "increase distinctiveness of memory representations"? And didn't he just wholly dismiss the entirety of mnemotechniques as "tricks" a few paragraphs back? (see: https://hypothes.is/a/dwktfDiuEe2sxaePuVIECg)

How can one build or design this into a pedagogical system? How is this potentially related to Andy Matuschak's mnemonic medium research?

He's wholly wrong on this score because he lacks a deeper appreciation for how this works or its value to oral societies. He uses the word "trick" in a disparaging sense with respect to mnemotechniques.

this looks interesting and based on quotes in this paper in the final pages might be interesting or useful with respect to pulling apart memory and orality

Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

It shouldn't escape the mnemonists' attention that while Wozniak recognizes some basic attributes of memory and mnemonics, he obviously isn't steeped in the traditions of the art of memory. Specifically he doesn't seem to be aware of associative methods beyond peg systems and some low level basics which he's come across via Tony Buzan. He's also missing the major system and the method of loci in general. However, when looking at his list of "Twenty rules of formulating knowledge", the majority of the items on the list are either heavily informed by the memory canon within classical rhetoric. Some of the items on the list actually move in an opposite direction from good memory principles (his admonitions against sets and enumeration), but it's because Wozniak is explicitly missing some of the basic mnemotechnical tools.

Have any writers on space repetition gone beyond Wozniak's state of the art with respect to mnemotechniques before?

I had started it and lost it due to a technical glitch, but it might be worth highlighting the places where Wozniak's list either directly dovetails or diverges from the arts of memory. His list could be dramatically improved and compressed by brining it closer in line with the fourth canon of rhetoric.

https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm

Who created SuperMemo? ::: Piotr Wozniak

This section reads as if it was lifted from any of the treatises on the art of memory over the last 2000 years.

Piotr Wozniak seems to have independently rediscovered the value of the arts of memory from ancient rhetoric.

He advises to use the "vivid or even shocking" to "enhance retrieval".

He even goes so far as to recommend that people who use the bizarre to keep those images for their private consumption.

Creating links to one's own personal context can help one to both learn and retain new material.

Enumerations are sets with a particular order. The fact that they have an order, in which each item might be associated with the next, makes them easier to remember.

The greater information in an enumeration provides additional structure which makes the items easier to remember.

Piotr Wozniak recommends against avoiding memorizing sets and prefers enumerations.

Is this a result of his not knowing the method of loci as a means of travelling through sets and remembering them easily? It's certainly evidence he wasn't aware of the as a general technique.

He does mention peg techniques, mind maps, and general mnemonic techniques.

Dr. Piotr Wozniak was apparently aware of at least some mnemonic techniques, but didn't rely on them heavily. Was this the result of the fact that he was pushing a product which he relied on for income? Was there something else?

Why didn't he more tightly integrate the two ideas?

I'm surprised that given the topic of the site and a mention of Tony Buzan on this page that mnemonic techniques don't have a more primary place here.

My immediate thought is that this deck of cards was meant as a memory palace. I'm curious what training in rhetoric/memory methods Descartes must have had?

...conversations take random walks through events and ideas in a manner determined by the associative networks of the participants." --Douglas Hofstadter, Foreward, Sparse Distributed Memory

This is reminiscent of Zegnat's mention during the Gardens and Streams session of remembering where things were in the IndieWeb wiki by remembering the pathways more so than the things themselves. This is very reminiscent of Australian songlines.

With the early history of druids going into the 4th century BCE (and keeping in mind that Stonehenge's dates go to about 1600 BCE), is it possible that the druids used trees as the basis for their mnemonics in lieu of standing stones? Thus the name oak-knower is more specific to what they were doing than we give them credit for? To an outsider unaware of their ways, their ritual memory systems would have made it seem like they worshiped the trees in ways other cultures would not have?

mnemotechnics illuminated manuscripts

Add Johann Host von Romberch to my bibliography to read relating to mnemotechnics.

Heidegger: inwardness of memory ["Gedächtnis"] as an allusion to "Being-in-the-world" ||

Stiegler: (partial) critique of "différance" || interested to know whether Derrida ever responds to this point directly