A fascinating exploration of the intricacies of how we remember, why we forget, and what we can do to protect our memories, from the Harvard-trained neuroscientist and bestselling author of Still Alice.
Have you ever felt a crushing wave of panic when you can't for the life of you remember the name of that actor in the movie you saw last week, or you walk into a room only to forget why you went there in the first place? If you're over forty, you're probably not laughing. You might even be worried that these lapses in memory could be an early sign of Alzheimer's or dementia. In reality, for the vast majority of us, these examples of forgetting are completely normal. Why? Because while memory is amazing, it is far from perfect. Our brains aren't designed to remember every name we hear, plan we make, or day we experience. Just because your memory sometimes fails doesn't mean it's broken or succumbing to disease. Forgetting is actually part of being human.
In Remember, neuroscientist and acclaimed novelist Lisa Genova delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. You'll learn whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds (like a passcode) while others can last a lifetime (your wedding day). You'll come to appreciate the clear distinction between normal forgetting (where you parked your car) and forgetting due to Alzheimer's (that you own a car). And you'll see how memory is profoundly impacted by meaning, emotion, sleep, stress, and context. Once you understand the language of memory and how it functions, its incredible strengths and maddening weaknesses, its natural vulnerabilities and potential superpowers, you can both vastly improve your ability to remember and feel less rattled when you inevitably forget. You can set educated expectations for your memory, and in doing so, create a better relationship with it. You don't have to fear it anymore. And that can be life-changing.
Category: Memory
Ideal for the armchair bird enthusiast or dedicated bird watcher, this book includes stunning full-color photographs, revealing each species with unrivaled clarity.
A lavish introduction describes bird characteristics and behavior, while stunning full-color photographs reveal individual species for easy identification.
The 550 most commonly seen birds are pictured in clear, close-up photographs, with images of similar birds provided to make differentiation easy, from game birds and waterfowl to shorebirds and swifts to owls, hummingbirds, finches, and more. Discover which species to expect when and where with up-to-date, color-coded maps highlighting habitation and migratory patterns.
The most commonly seen species are given a whole page in the species catalog, and each full-page profile includes images of plumage variations, subspecies, information on similar birds, and artwork of the bird in flight that reveal their outstretched wings.
Rare birds and vagrants who occasionally stray into North America are also described, making AMNH Birds of North America one of the most comprehensive guides on the market and essential for anyone interested in birding.
Publish Date: November 10, 2020
Pages: 752
8.6 X 11.0 X 1.8 inches | 6.45 pounds
Hardcover
ISBN/EAN/UPC: 9780744020533
After doing some research on various bird books, I’ve picked up this massive textbook as the structure for creating a bird memory palace.
Purchased from Amazon.com for $26.60 on 2020-12-07; arrived today.
Birds of North America Texts and Field Guides
Spent some time tonight looking at the seven most popular bird books for North America for my memory project. I’m still figuring out how to set up the memory palace for the project though. Lots of data to encode.
While all are generally solid I’m arranging them for data/information, layout, and image purposes. Here’s the rough order of preference I think I’m going to put them in moving forward:
- American Museum of Natural History, Birds of North America (and/or the Western Region) (DK)
- The Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America
- National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Birds of North America,
- Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America
- Sibley Birds West
- Golden Field Guides: Birds of North America
I’ll probably buy the top two as I proceed. It looks like DK just published an update to theirs in the last month! In particular, I like the volume of detail of the DK edition and the layout for potentially making memorization easier.
Now to figure out how to best lay out the various pieces. I’m thinking that Lynne Kelly’s idea of using a Lukasa memory board may be best. But what to fashion it out of and how?
Winter Counts and related holiday traditions
Some indigenous American tribes kept annual winter counts which served as both a physical historical account of their year, but served as visual mnemonic devices leveraging a bit of the idea of a drawn memory palace along with spaced repetition by adding a new image to their “journey” each year.
I was reminded about the idea over the weekend by a dreadful, cheeseball Hallmark Holiday movie A Royal Christmas Ball (2017) (please don’t torture yourself by watching it). The two main characters had a Christmas ritual of creating a holiday ornament every year for their Christmas tree with a design that represented something significant in their lives that year. Because most families generally use and reuse the same ornaments every year, the practice becomes a repeated ritual which allows them to reminisce over each ornament every year to remember past years. It’s a common occurrence (at least in Western society) for people to purchase souvenir ornaments when they travel, and these serve the same effect of remembering their past travels.
If others haven’t come across this idea as a fun mnemonic device for the whole family with built in spaced repetition, I recommend you give it a try. Just don’t everyone necessarily make coronavirus ornaments for this year.
Non-Christians could leverage a similar idea for their annual holidays, feasts, or events if they like. Of course, you could follow the Lakota tribe and make a more traditional winter count.
For those interested in some of the further history and description of the idea of an annual count in the framing of mnemotechny, I would recommend LynneKelly’s book Memory Craft or some of her more academic works.
Directed by Douglas Watkin. With Stephen Page, David McAllister, Ella Havelka, Suzanne Duffy. In October 2012, Ella Havelka became the first Indigenous dancer to be invited into The Australian Ballet in its 50 year history. It was an announcement that made news headlines nationwide. A descendant of the Wiradjuri people, we follow Ella's inspirational journey from the regional town of Dubbo and onto the world stage of The Australian Ballet. Featuring intimate interviews, dynamic dance sequences, and a stunning array of archival material, this moving documentary follows Ella as she explores her cultural identity and gives us a rare glimpse into life as an elite ballet dancer within the largest company in the southern hemisphere.
Started watching for the ballet, stayed with hope for mnemotechny. I was generally disappointed on the second count.
Either Ms. Havelka didn’t want to personally, didn’t have permission to speak of it via elders, or she didn’t know about some of the deeper uses of dance within her culture. It just wasn’t covered here at all. I’ve been fascinated by Lynne Kelly’s research programme and in particular I’m reading my way through her most recent text Songlines with Margo Neale about the uses of song, dance, and arts within indigenous cultures in Australia. I’m curious how much time she spent in country to learn what she did. Was it just a few weeks for some exposure, or was there a deeper learning experience? Is she passing that experience along to her students? Was some of it filmed, but lost in editing?
Presuming they’re not already acquainted, I suspect that Ella Havelka, Lynne Kelly, and Margo Neale might enjoy meeting and discussing dance, culture, arts, and teaching.
Ella Havelka did speak about the significance of her feather tattoo within her culture, so there was at least some representation of associative memory here. The comment was simply a passing one (and sadly focused on covering it up with makeup to hide it for ballet). The discussion of the feather just didn’t connect with the greater body of knowledge I’m sure is hiding just behind it.
I was a bit proud that my 9 year old ballet enthusiast wasn’t able to discern what made Ella different despite that being a large part of the story arc. Still she enjoyed the dancing and journey anyway.
Note: This film was renamed Ballerina for airing via Amazon Prime.
Rating: ★★★½
Directed by David DeCoteau. With Tara Reid, Ingo Rademacher, Mira Furlan, Haley Pullos. Dateless for the Christmas ball, 39-year-old bachelor, King Charles of Baltania, tracks down his American college sweetheart, only to discover Allison has never been married, yet raised a 17-year-old daughter, Lily, who mathematically might be Charles’ biological princess.
Rating: ½
I didn’t think there could be a worse Hallmark Christmas movie than the one saw yesterday. This was an order of magnitude worse.
It did have an interesting Christmas tradition of creating a custom ornament each year to commemorate the year much like the Lakota winter counts. I’ve seen references to these types of decorations before, but it’s rare to see them represented as a recurring thing.
Baltania, what a great name for a generic non-existent European country.
The animated gilded book page turning and sparkles with voice overs were appallingly bad. I think that almost every bit of footage they shot for the film got used twice. The production value was atrocious. The casting was painfully drunk. The green screen work was pure misery and I’m fairly certain a 9 year old could do a better job using Zoom right now.
Spot the silhouette of a Northern Goshawk in flight. Identify the raucous call of the Red-winged Blackbird. Discover the secret of picking out a Chipping Sparrow from its look-alike cousins. It's simple with this classic field guide, a treasured favorite among amateur bird lovers and exacting professionals. Recognized as the authority on bird identification, this invaluable resource provides:
-All of North America in one volume
-Over 800 species and 600 range maps
-Arthur Singer's famous illustrations featuring male, female, and juvenile plumage
-Sonograms that picture sound for easy song recognition
-Migration routes, feeding habits, and characteristic flight patterns
-American ornithologists' classifications
-Convenient check boxes to record birds you have identified
-Color tabs for quick references
Read introductory pages 1-17.
This seems to have most North American birds with good layouts, information, sonograms, and ranges. Could be a solid contender and is a nice size.
Peterson First Guides are the first books the beginning naturalist needs. Condensed versions of the famous Peterson Field Guides, the First Guides focus on the animals, plants, and other natural things you are most likely to see. They make it fun to get into the field and easy to progress to the full-fledged Peterson Guides.
Read pages 1-17 of opening.
A very slim, but nice pocket-sized guide. Probably the least comprehensive on my list. Has some basic names, info, and few pictures than others. Opening was pretty good on laying out structure for what to look out for.
This is definitely not the guide for me.
Prepping to create a memory palace or songline for birds in the Western United States
Picking up a big pile of books on birds for some memory research.
We are taking 'Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters' to the world! #MediaRelease - Award-winning National Museum exhibition to tour internationally: https://t.co/fxbq79MCKa pic.twitter.com/kWhlZH5Y4E
— NationalMuseumAust (@nma) October 29, 2020
Earlier this evening I bought a copy of Neale & Kelly’s new book Songlines: The Power and Promise (First Knowledges), so obviously I can’t wait for this exhibition to come to the US! Perhaps LACMA might pick it up?
Songlines are an archive for powerful knowledges that ensured Australia's many Indigenous cultures flourished for over 60,000 years. Much more than a navigational path in the cartographic sense, these vast and robust stores of information are encoded through song, story, dance, art and ceremony, rather than simply recorded in writing.
Weaving deeply personal storytelling with extensive research on mnemonics, Songlines: The Power and Promise offers unique insights into Indigenous traditional knowledges, how they apply today and how they could help all peoples thrive into the future. This book invites readers to understand a remarkable way for storing knowledge in memory by adapting song, art, and most importantly, Country, into their lives.
About the series: The First Knowledges books are co-authored by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers; the series is edited by Margo Neale, senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia.
Forthcoming titles include: Design by Alison Page & Paul Memmott (2021); Country by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe (2021); Healing, Medicine & Plants (2022); Astronomy (2022); Innovation (2023).
I bookmarked this earlier in the year, but noticed this afternoon that it had been released yesterday. I bought a copy immediately so I can start reading it this evening after dinner. I’ve got high hopes for it with respect to memory and anthropology.
It’s only available for shipment from Australia at the moment, so I opted to purchase it from Amazon in digital form so I could start reading it right away.
with Special Reference to the Setting of the Genealogies of Jesus
Genealogical material occurs frequently in the Old Testament, and in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as well as in later Jewish literature. What is the purpose of these lists? How do they relate to their historical and literary context, and what is their function in the Hebraic-Christian literary tradition? Dr. Johnson answers these questions in relation to contemporary biblical scholarship, and is concerned to show that such genealogies are not merely appendices to biblical narratives but are closely related to their context in language, structure and theology He attempts to assess the extent to which they reflect the views of the authors of the books or contexts into which they are placed. He also examines the transition of the genealogical form, and shows how its function changed from tribal expressions to the Gospel writers' use of it to illustrate the conviction that Jesus is the fulfillment of the hope of Israel. Concerned as he is more with the literary purpose of this type of biblical literature than with the historical authenticity of various lists, Dr. Johnson examines a subject that is only now beginning to engage the attention of scholars generally.
An interesting find that may have some discussion of early associative memory. Might also give other sociological interesting tidbits if it’s any good.
Tim Doner is a senior at the Dalton School in New York City who has studied over 20 languages. His interest started at the age of 13, after several years of French and Latin, when he began learning Hebrew and soon moved on to more obscure tongues such as Pashto, Ojibwe and Swahili. As he describes it, his goal is not to achieve fluency in each, but rather to learn about foreign history and culture through the medium of language. He spends much of his time perfecting his linguistic skills in different neighborhoods around the city, and to date his Youtube channel has received over 3 million hits. Tim has been interviewed (in English, Mandarin, Arabic and Farsi, among others) for media outlets such as The New York Times, BBC, The Today Show, Reuters and The Economist. He is starting his freshman year at Harvard next year and plans to study linguistics.
A nice hook to pull one into some of the reasons why one would want to pick up languages as well as how to do so.
8:44 method of loci (locorum)
10:02 Learning words in groups based on related sounds.
11:22 Why learn languages? Some useful motivation here.
Language represents a world cultural view. This is particularly poignant because a language (and its methods of thinking, viewing the world, and usually lots of associated culture) disappears from the world every two weeks.
University of Adelaide research has for the first time statistically proven that the earliest standing stone monuments of Britain, the great circles, were constructed specifically in line with the movements of the Sun and Moon, 5000 years ago.
“These people chose to erect these great stones very precisely within the landscape and in relation to the astronomy they knew. They invested a tremendous amount of effort and work to do so. It tells us about their strong connection with their environment, and how important it must have been to them, for their culture and for their culture’s survival.” ❧
Connection to environment and importance for culture’s survival.
Annotated on September 18, 2020 at 07:46AM