Category: Memory

A lot of this metaverse business sounds like what Ramon Llull was creating in the 13th century with his art of memory and combinatoric wheels. Admittedly, it was a single user space, but he was creating images in his mind and then combinatorically combining them with each other to create new external/imagined ideas, thoughts, and experiences.

It gets (a lot) complicated to see this without significant background reading and experience of what he was doing. (I think even Frances Yates misunderstood some of his intention in her magisterial tome.)

IndieWeb is doing some of what he imagined, but rather than doing it in our physical brains (memory), we’re doing together from website to website in a similar communal manner.

Bookmarked Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception by Beau Sievers, Carolyn Parkinson, Peter J. Kohler, James M. Hughes, Sergey V. Fogelson, Thalia Wheatley (Current Biology)
Emotionally expressive music and dance occur together across the world. This may be because features shared across the senses are represented the same way even in different sensory brain areas, putting music and movement in directly comparable terms. These shared representations may arise from a general need to identify environmentally relevant combinations of sensory features, particularly those that communicate emotion. To test the hypothesis that visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure, we created music and animation stimuli with crossmodally matched features expressing a range of emotions. Participants confirmed that each emotion corresponded to a set of features shared across music and movement. A subset of participants viewed both music and animation during brain scanning, revealing that representations in auditory and visual brain areas were similar to one another. This shared representation captured not only simple stimulus features but also combinations of features associated with emotion judgments. The posterior superior temporal cortex represented both music and movement using this same structure, suggesting supramodal abstraction of sensory content. Further exploratory analysis revealed that early visual cortex used this shared representational structure even when stimuli were presented auditorily. We propose that crossmodally shared representations support mutually reinforcing dynamics across auditory and visual brain areas, facilitating crossmodal comparison. These shared representations may help explain why emotions are so readily perceived and why some dynamic emotional expressions can generalize across cultural contexts.
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

ᔥ Beau Sievers 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 ()

Replied to a tweet by Seth Largo (Twitter)
Perhaps this post by a well-known mnemonist and writer in the space might be a place to start? https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?page_id=4236
I’m curious if anyone has created lists of graduate programs in education that are actively teaching/researching pedagogy described in @CathyNDavidson‘s ? I’m considering tying some of my interests into a potential new career path.
Read Ebooks Are an Abomination by Ian BogostIan Bogost (The Atlantic)
If you hate them, it’s not your fault.
Ian Bogost has a nice look at the UI affordances and areas for growth in the e-reading space.

A🧵 of annotations
theatlantic.com/books/archive/…

What any individual infers about their hopes and dreams for an e-reader derives from their understanding of reading in the first place. You can’t have books without bookiness. Bookiness. That’s the word Glenn Fleishman, a technology writer and longtime bookmaker, uses to describe the situation. “It’s the essence that makes someone feel like they’re using a book,” he told me. Like pornography or sandwiches, you know bookiness when you see it. Or feel it? Either way, most people can’t identify what it is in the abstract. ❧

definition: bookiness

Does this only come out because there’s something that’s book-tangential or similar and it needs to exist to describe the idea of not-book, book-adjacent, or book-like on some sort of spectrum of bookishness.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:28PM

The ancient Romans sometimes connected wax tablets with leather or cords, suggesting a prototype of binding. Replacing the wax with leaves allowed many pages to be stacked atop one another, then sewn or otherwise bound together. ❧

early book prototypes
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:30PM

In other words, as far as technologies go, the book endures for very good reason. Books work. ❧

Aside from reading words to put ideas into my brain, one of the reasons I like to read digital words is that the bigger value proposition for me is an easier method to add annotations to what I’m reading and then to be able to manipulate those notes after-the-fact. I’ve transcended books and the manual methods of note taking. Until I come up with a better word for it, digital commonplacing seems to be a useful shorthand for this new pattern of reading.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:33PM

If you have a high-quality hardbound book nearby, pick it up and look at the top and bottom edges of the binding, near the spine, with the book closed. The little stripey tubes you see are called head and tail bands (one at the top, one at the bottom). They were originally invented to reinforce stitched binding, to prevent the cover from coming apart from the leaves. Today’s mass-produced hardcover books are glued rather than sewn, which makes head and tail bands purely ornamental. And yet for those who might notice, a book feels naked without such details. ❧

It is an odd circumstance that tail bands are still used on modern books that don’t need them. From a manufacturing standpoint, the decrease in cost would dictate they disappear, however they must add some level of bookiness that they’re worth that cost.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:37PM

One site of that erosion, which may help explain ebook reticence, can be found in self-published books. For people predisposed to sneer at the practice, a lack of editing or the absence of publisher endorsement and review might justify self-published works’ second-class status. That matter is debatable. More clear is the consequence of disintermediation: Nobody takes a self-published manuscript and lays it out for printing in a manner that conforms with received standards. And so you often end up with a perfect-bound Word doc instead of a book. That odd feeling of impropriety isn’t necessarily a statement about the trustworthiness of the writer or their ideas, but a sense of dissonance at the book as an object. It’s an eerie gestalt, a foreboding feeling of unbookiness. ❧

Having helped others to self-publish in the past, I definitely do spend a bit of time putting the small sort of bookiness flourishes into their texts.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:41PM

The weird way you tap or push a whole image of a page to the side—it’s the uncanny valley of page turning, not a simulation or replacement of it. ❧

This may be the first time I’ve seen uncanny valley applied to a topic other than recognizing people versus robots or related simulacra.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:44PM

The iPad’s larger screen also scales down PDF pages to fit, making the results smaller than they would be in print. It also displays simulated print margins inside the bezel margin of the device itself, a kind of mise en abyme that still can’t actually be used for the things margins are used for, such as notes or dog-ears. ❧

It would be quite nice if a digital reader would allow actual writing in the margins, or even overlaying the text itself and then allowing the looking at the two separately.

I do quite like the infinite annotation space that Hypothes.is gives me on a laptop. I wish there were UI for it on a Kindle in a more usable and forgiving way. The digital keyboard on Kindle Paperwhite is miserable. I’ve noticed that I generally prefer reading and annotating on desktop in a browser now for general ease-of-use.

Also, I don’t see enough use of mise en abyme. This is a good one.

In Western art history, mise en abyme (French pronunciation: ​[miz ɑ̃n‿abim]; also mise en abîme) is a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. In film theory and literary theory, it refers to the technique of inserting a story within a story. The term is derived from heraldry and literally means “placed into abyss”. It was first appropriated for modern criticism by the French author André Gide.

Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:49PM

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?
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:53PM

So do all manner of other peculiarities of form, including notations of editions on the verso (the flip side) of the full title page and the running headers all throughout that rename the book you are already reading. ❧

I do dislike the running headers of digital copies of books as most annotation tools want to capture those headers in the annotation. It would be nice if they were marked up in an Aria-like method so that annotation software would semantically know to ignore them.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:56PM

Skimming through pages, the foremost feature of the codex, remains impossible in digital books. ❧

This is related to an idea that Tom Critchlow was trying to get at a bit the other day. It would definitely be interesting in this sort of setting.

Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 01:03PM

“We’ve been thoughtful,” Amazon continued, “about adding only features and experiences that preserve and enhance the reading experience.” The question of whose experience doesn’t seem to come up. ❧

They’re definitely not catering to my reading, annotating, and writing experience.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 01:04PM

Reposted Thinking About Tools For Thought: Episode 005 – Interview with Chris Aldrich by Andy Sylvester (thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com)

Links from today’s episode:

And for the crazy rhetoric and note taking nerds:

Early Philosophical Texts

  • Aristotle, Topica, written about 350 BCE Venice, 1495.
  • Aristotle, Rhetorica, written about 350 BCE. Basel, 1529.
  • Cicero, De Oratore, written about 46 BCE. Northern Italian manuscript about 1450.
  • Cicero, Topica, written about 44 BCE. Florentine manuscript, about 1425-30.
  • Seneca the Younger, Epistulae morales, written 62-65 CE. French manuscript, about 1175.
  • Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, written about 100 CE. Paris, 1542.
  • Macrobius, Saturnalia, written about 430 CE. Central Italian manuscript, about 1475.
  • Boethius, De topicis differentiis, written about 480-526 CD. English manuscript, about 1275.

Renaissance Handbooks

  • Rodolphus Agricola, De formando studio. Antwerp, 1532; composed 1484.
  • Desiderius Erasmus, De ratione studii et instituendi pueros comentarii totidem. [Paris, 1512].
  • Philip Melanchthon, Institutiones rhetoricae. Wittenberg [1536].
  • Philip Melanchthon, Rhetorices elementa. Lyon, 1537.
  • Desiderius Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum. Cologne, 1540.
  • Petrus Mosellanus, Tabulae de schematibus et tropis…. In Rhetroica Philippi Melanchthonis. In Erasmi Roterdami libellum De duplici copia. Paris, 1542.
  • Joachim Camerarius, Elementa rhetoricae. Basel, [1545].
  • Henry Peacham, The garden of eloquence: conteyning the figures of grammar and rhetorick. London, 1577.
    • One of the first handbooks in English
  • Philip Melanchthon, De locis communibus ratio. Augsburg [1593].
  • John Brinsley, Ludus literarius: or, The grammar schoole; shewing how to proceede from the first entrance into learning, to the highest perfection. London, 1612.
  • [Obadiah Walker], Of education: especially of young gentlemen. Oxford, 1673.
I may have broadened the discussion that some of the intended audience on tools for thought may be showing up for, but I can never resist introducing people to mnemnotechniques and research on orality, anthropology, or the history of commonplaces.

I provocatively (with only a modest amount of wickedness) put forward the idea that a rock is as good a tool for thought as Obsidian.md or Roam Research.

Replied to How to remember more of what you read by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (Read Write Collect)
Across a series of posts (1,2,3), Steve Brophy explains his use of Roam Research and the Zettelkasten methodology to develop a deeper dialogue with what he reads. This is broken up into three steps, the initial capturing of ‘fleeting notes‘, rewriting the text in our own words as ‘Literature N...
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.

Eminem and “stacking ammo” in the commonplace book tradition

Annotated Why We Love Eminem by Anderson Cooper (60 Minutes (YouTube))
Eminem shows Anderson Cooper his form of commonplace book in a 60 Minutes interview. It’s a large box with stiff sides containing a menagerie of papers including several yellow legal pads, loose sheets of paper, scrap papers, stationery from hotels, etc. upon which he’s written words, phrases, songs, poetry, etc.

Instead of using the historic word “commonplacing”, Eminem uses the fantastic euphemism “stacking ammo”. Given his use of his words and lyrics collection in battle rap, this seems very apropos.

Cooper analogizes the collection as the scrawlings of a crazy person. In some sense, this may be because there is no traditional order, head words, or indexing system with what otherwise looks like a box of random pages and ideas. One might argue that the multitude of notebooks, papers, colors, sizes, etc. provides a sort of context which Eminem could use as a method of loci for remembering where to find particular ideas, thus making the need for an indexing system feel superfluous to him. This is even more likely if he’s regularly using, maintaining, and mining his material for daily work.

❧

ᔥ u/sorrybabyxo in Eminem has his own version of commonplace system containing words that rhyme. : commonplacebook ()

Humanity is the medium. Humanity is the message.

While contemplating orality and indigenous cultures and how they used their own memories, conversation, and dialectic as a means of communicating and storing their knowledge, I thought about Marshall McLuhann’s idea “the medium is the message.” In this framing, indigenous cultures certainly got things right: Humanity is the medium. Humanity is the message.

Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.
— John M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review, March 1967)

Culkin’s framing also makes humanity its own self-contained tool (hopefully for the greater good). We shape our brains and thereafter our brains shape us. While we may use technology and tools, props, and crutches to help us do more or do faster, we shouldn’t loose sight of our humanity. It may be our greatest technology. Perhaps we need to remember to pull it out of our toolbox more often as it’s better evolved and often better fit for more jobs than the tools we’re apt to turn to.

The first session of my Art of Memory course went well this morning.

My favorite part: a student suggested doing a project to memorize knowledge related to (urban) foraging (what’s available, safe, identification, etc.)! Its a fantastic example because this is exactly the sort of practical knowledge many indigenous (primarily oral) peoples have used these techniques for over time.

If you’re late to the game, I think you can still register (and I’m happy to catch people up) before our next session in two weeks on July 24th.

Course Announcement: The Art of Memory

I’m teaching an upcoming course on the Art of Memory. It’ll be an hour a week for five weeks starting on July 10th at 10:00 am on Saturday mornings. I’ll be using the online learning platform Hyperlink.Academy. I hope you’ll have the chance to join me and a group of people interested in exploring the topic.

I’ve had a personal memory practice since I was about eleven years old. I started with an old correspondence course from the 1940s that I found on my parents’ bookshelf. I remember thinking at the time that it was pretty expansive. I’ve realized that the original system I learned was only a small fraction of some of the powerful techniques that humankind has created and evolved over the last 20,000 years. Sadly, the majority of this knowledge, which was once commonplace, has disappeared in Western culture.

As a kid, I used the techniques as they pertained to magic and parlor tricks like counting cards and Rubic’s cubes. Later I learned how to bend and apply them other methods. I learned new methods and used them to memorize material for classes. I discovered I could remember vast troves of information both for pleasure and for work.

Since then, I’ve been researching into the history of mnemotechniques in Western culture. I’ve been uncovering the practice in other oral and indigenous cultures. As a result, I’ve seen and experimented with dozens of other methods. Some are better and more flexible than others.

It’s rare that I encounter people familiar with even one or two of these methods. There are lots of books and internet fora dedicated to some of them. They’re generally esoteric, incomplete, or both. On the whole, they’re difficult to discover, and often even harder to learn—much less practice.

In 2011, Joshua Foer ignited some interest with his book Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. He describes the magic of some of the extant systems and nibbles around the edges. But he doesn’t detail how to enter the space and leaves the topic as esoteric as he began. His book motivates the “why”, but doesn’t describe the practical “how”.

I have seen and read scores of hucksterish and facile approaches. They usually outline a handful of memory “tricks” which some people use intuitively. Most touch on only one or two aspects of a much larger and richer memory tradition.

I’ve also followed some of the bigger memory-related sites online. They discuss many pieces of the whole. But they don’t help newcomers get a bigger picture of what is possible or how to start a practice. Most people want something more practical for daily life. Many start out with interest, but they don’t get very far before abandoning the idea because they don’t find the benefit.

I know there is an easier way.

Based on my experience, I’d like to provide a solid overview and history of the topic. My goal is to give beginners a practical entry point. We’ll look at and practice the bigger and most useful techniques. We’ll also discuss some of the lesser known methods and where they can be applied.

I encourage students to bring a practical list of things they’d like to memorize for use in the course.

After a few weeks, students should have a solid base of knowledge upon which to found a regular memory practice for the rest of their lives.

Those interested can read a copy of the syllabus. If you have any questions about the course or want to discuss if it’s right for you, please reach out.

If you can’t join us for the first cohort this summer, I’ll likely offer it again in either the Fall or Winter.

I look forward to seeing everyone in class.

Just days before the 10th anniversary of the Smallest Federated Wiki, Ward Cunningham will be talking about the future of note taking tomorrow morning.

Free registration for the event at I Annotate 2021 should still be open.

There are also expected appearances by Daniel Doyon, Co-Founder of Readwise; Tienson Qin, Creator/Founder of LogSeq; Oliver Sauter, Founder of WorldBrain/Memex, and Flancian of the Anagora.

With any luck, it may help mark a resurgence of digital versions of the commonplace book on the order of magnitude represented by the works of Rudolphus Agricola, Desiderius Erasmus, and Philip Melanchthon during the Renaissance.

Promo card for I Annotate 2021 with the subtitle Reading Together and featuring a drawing of a book with two hands writing on each other in an ouroboros-like style

Replied to Bird sound encoding by Douglas HoffDouglas Hoff (Art of Memory Forum)
Rey’s star book (already ordered!) is a wonderful way to rekindle my adolescent interest in the stars while learning more about memory methods like pareidolia to finally complete my identification of the skies. I never stored more than three or four constellations permanently. @chrisaldrich, I’ll be intested to see how you help bring together your knowledge to create a more mnemonic way to visualize and remember bird calls and traits. I’ve also added your blog to my news reader with all the goo...
I’ll apologize in advance for the noisy-ness of my website. I use it as a commonplace book and post almost everything I do on the web there first (including social media). If it gets to be too much, you can subscribe to individual topics of interest (like https://boffosocko.com/category/Memory/feed/, which is sure to include any bird related work) so that you’re just getting what you want instead of the overzealous firehose which can be upwards of 10 to 20,000 posts a year, depending on how much of my stream I make public.
Replied to Peter of Ravenna by ehcolstonehcolston (Art of Memory Forum)
Thanks for those links! Originally I wanted to translate the original Latin texts, but I felt like that was better put to rest and that I should first try to translate it from the English version since I can actually speak it. Iirc, there was an Italian version of the book as well.
I haven’t searched all the versions of Peter of Ravenna’s name (yet) in all locations, but I recall hearing of an Italian version as well (and it’s likely that there was one given its popularity).

A bit of digging around this morning has uncovered a digital copy of a French translation in the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé (Paris)]:
* 1545: L’art de memoire qui est aultrement inscript le phenix livre treffort utille & profitable a tous professeurs des sciences, grammariens, rheteurs, dialetiques, legistes philosophes & theologiens

Given the date and the scant 16 pages, this is likely to be the edition which was the source of Robert Copland’s English translation. As the edition doesn’t appear to have an author, it’s possible that this was the reason that Copland’s translation didn’t list one either.

The Latin -> French -> middle English -> modern English route seems an awfully muddy way to go, but without anything else, it may have to suffice for some of us for the moment.