Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy most of the Mindscape podcasts, but this is the most inspirational and illuminating one yet. I'm sure that is partly because the topics covered here are very important, deeply connected to what it is to be a human being and that I know very little about this subject matter, but I'm also sure that it's just as much because Lynne Kelly is such a unique thinker. Please do a follow up sometime - perhaps on some of the things that had to be missed out or covered briefly due to time constraints.
As always, great podcast Sean Carrol! This speaks to me personally as a native of West Africa (Ivory Coast) where there is a long and rich tradition of Griots aka Djelis. Djelis are storyteller, historians and troubadours of some sort. They are known to have a gigantic memory and to have good knowledge of past historical events, of genealogy, etc. I am not sure if they use "memory palaces" as a technique to remember anyhting but I suspect they do. In their case I also suspect that melodic music and rhythms play a big part in their ability to record the community's past and to boost their nearly encyclopedic memories. Interesting research path to explore . . .
Hello! Sound-Guy here! I am currently working part time in a NGO that has kids lerning to make music all over africa and I would be highly interested in finding out about Djelis' ways! I do not want to interrupt that root of african culture, as I am a european, but I am a humanist on the most fundamental level and I like to make sound to heal/help.
Hello! Sound-Guy here! I am currently working part time in a NGO that has kids lerning to make music all over africa and I would be highly interested in finding out about Djelis' ways! I do not want to interrupt that root of african culture, as I am a european, but I am a humanist on the most fundamental level and I like to make sound to heal/help.
Thank you Lew Kor for this great additional feedback! This all really connects the dots to our origins. Pretty dishartening was to find out though, that the impact of colonization was even more destructive than the story we all know, but forget purposely.
Thanks for posting the lukasas photo on the blog! I’m obsessed😻♥️ spot-on interview questions. Super excited about the neuroscience collab and the research yet to come on this!
5 лет назад
It seems that memory palaces are a type of linked lists. We walk through the chain to retrieve what we need. Personally, I remember things by first remembering where was I when I thought the things I want to remember. I guess that makes sense in how our mind associate places and things.
This kind of discussion underestimates the huge amount of memorized items carried around by modern humans, which far surpasses anything a primitive, preliterate human might have carried around. It's because of the sheer emphasis on survivability under conditions of extreme scarcity. We don't live under such conditions, nevertheless I would argue that we conversely exercise survivability under conditions of extreme complexity. It's a different game, but which demands a great deal of memorizing just as well. No doubt for preliterate societies, the usefulness of memory techniques must have been obvious. But once you have the simplicity of a phonetic set of symbols, and a durable writing medium, you can memorialize a great deal more than you could with ideographic memory techniques. In fact, the utter simplicity of only having to memorize a simple writing code, and an ultra simple counting method, liberates the mind to conceptualize(and name, and classify) everything else about the world. For many kinds of problems, primitive peoples had summary answers. You killed strangers. Even in medieval societies, strangers arriving in a village were often violently dealt with, branded, expelled, warned to never come back. Etc., etc. Today we have a whole bunch of memorized rules that prohibit that sort of thing. How would you operationalize Pythagora's Theorem with "memory devices"? Furthermore, my "memory palace" is unique to me. You would have to re-invent the whole thing for yourself. That's totally unlike the universality of 2+2=4, once you know how to count and perform simple operations.
The Ainu people of Japan, an illiterate nation, had a very complex code of conduct, and the desert Bedouin believe they must let you stay at their guest-tent for three days if you happen upon them in the desert, even if you're their mortal enemy. Pre-modern, pre-literate peoples don't necessarily have a simple social structure, or engage in indiscriminatory murder of strangers.
@@TheLittleRussian2 I'm not arguing that preliterate peoples were not capable of devising complex systems to remember conditions, events, relationships, codes of conduct, techniques, etc. But the most obvious thing about the evolution of peoples is the search for non memory-dependent aide-memoires: notches on sticks, writing on clay tablets, domesticating watch dogs, etc. Transmission of knowledge practically demands inventing other-than-human aids. Modern rules of conduct are extremely complex as well. And what we have in abundance are prohibitions, set down in law, or by custom. But no one thinks you need a memory technique to remember what you can (or can't) do inside your property, or outside.
@@hc8379-f4f I guess I misunderstood you. Do you mean that we carry much more information in our heads than our pre-literate ancestors, because so much is encoded in writing today and that information saturates our culture, whether or not we read all of that stuff ourselves?
@@TheLittleRussian2 Yes, basically. Perhaps the question is, What kind of "memory" is most useful today, as opposed to in pre-literate societies, for survival? Carroll's interlocutor made much of the fact that she found a way to remember the rank order of countries by population. I mean, all that effort for one in a million trivial set of facts, when you can find that info at tradingeconomics.com -- along with a whole lot of other stuff. Here's a thought experiment: What are the things a primitive person needed to know in order to go into the woods and hunt some game successfully? What does a modern human need to know in order to go into a market and successfully acquire some quantity of meat? I don't know that we really depend less on "memory" than our predecessors.
I wonder... I make my living as a classical musician, and one of the things we agonize over is memorizing music. In order to memorize, say, an hour and ten minute concert program, we usually do loads of mechanical repetition to build 'muscle memory' as some call it (although that term is certainly misleading). But no matter how much repetition, memory blanks are very common, usually related to nerves and performance anxiety. I've had experiences where even though I 'know' the piece, I've blanked so badly in the middle that I can't even remember where to put my hands on the keyboard to jump back on. I've heard public speakers have similar experiences. Some performers I know sort of visually 'scan' through the score, the black dots on the page. But what's interesting is that the visualization is usually of a specific copy of the score, not generic. I've visualized a passage of music on stage and even seen the coffee stain from the copy I learnt from. I wonder if memory palaces could help somehow, although I wouldn't be sure how to go about connecting the physical act of performing (i.e. actually pressing the keys in real time) with a physical space. Maybe visualizing yourself performing as you move steadily through a familiar landscape, connecting each passage with a feature as it passes by? Although I suppose there's a chance this could be more distracting than helpful. Very thought provoking indeed.
@B. De Campo That's what I've always thought, although it can be oddly difficult to look straight at the keys and remember what to do. They all look the same (nothing particularly distinguishing, except for the obvious pattern of black and white keys, and perhaps their left/right position across the body), and each key is used many many times in different contexts throughout the course of a piece. However, the biggest memory problem is usually the form. Say a section repeats 3 times, but the 3rd departs from the other 2. How to remember which one you're in, and where the particular point of change occurs? The beginning of all 3 sections will feel the exact same. In this sense, it's more akin to an actor trying to remember their lines.
Really good point. This happened to me in a piano recital. I "remembered" the whole piece but it was in my fingers, ie procedural memory? I could only play if I started again, then the notes would come out in a flow, like the movements of fingers and pressure, speed, etc, across the keys were more place indicators than the keys themselves. The muscle memory thing may be different when it related to visual memory and it may be too abstract for those performance freeze moments but it's certainly interesting to consider. Sorry you went through that and hope you continue doing music!
@@suzieQna Like you mentioned, its very interesting how if you go back to the beginning of a phrase or section you can often play through where you slipped, but continuing on right from the moment of the blank is much harder. Perhaps to do with neural paths being grouped as specific units across time (probably because we practice in these groups). The really interesting thing this podcast made me think about is how visualization of a specific score seems to be the way it works for most of us (the coffee stain example I gave in my original post). Usually all we write on scores are fingerings, phrase markings, crescendi etc. Maybe certain words or images could be written at the start of passages to associate them with something memorable? The mantra for musicians has always just been repeat repeat repeat, until the automaticity takes over, which usually works out fine. However, the example of memorizing the countries in order from the podcast - what if someone had told her to repeat reading the list over and over, until the recitation became automatic? Connecting two things together is the best strategy, that's what I took away. And no, I'd never stop doing music! I have a nice career going :) These moments are rare, and much more common as a student of course. Although taking a huge piece from zero to completely memorized is always an uphill battle, no matter how old or experienced you are.
Lynne Kelly gives a nice theory of how we passed on information before writing. In the field of Machine Learning, particularly in the subset of Reinforcement Learning, we call these Memory Palaces pathways, "Eligibility Traces". They are an elegant algorithmic mechanism which provides significant computational advantages by refining credit-assignment.
one of my favorite topics! Coming from a sound-engineering background, it feels really powerful how one can wield sound these days... though finding PURPOSE in this garden of major labels and millions upon millions of really unpaid and unadvertised original music/art-creatives to show how sound can help reinforce information as a collective making it or dancing to it! Problem is society has really gotten their values from daddy capitalism these days... and so we mirror those often materialistic views in order to get accepted. Those big wielders of power in the music field have so much control over what gets to be that they inevitably start altering the media perspective, and therefore somewhat the "Zeitgeist" of the listeners. The consequence is emotionally powerfull songs without any real reason or information beyond the emotional packaging. Everything is made to "touch you" but does NOT use the CLOSENESS OF INFORMATION that is individually possible if there is a worthwhile context in the "touching" song. Have a good day everyone :)
Thank you Sir for your brilliant podcasts. I admire all the geniuses that surround me. I love versatility, multitalents blessesd with charisma, wit, politeness, hardworking and unassuming. Being versatile myself am competitive and cooperative at the same time. Thats why i adore Judy Garland. As far as memorizing goes artists I know find litte problems with memorizing faces and voices and music.. me including. Some musicians are quite good at math because making compositions and poutting them in musical notations are like using integral and differential calculus. We have 7 senses in fact, 5 obvious and two not quite imprinted in peoples mind. I mean body movement and intuition.. Just some food for thought for today Sir. By the way please say hello to your RU-vid friends and tell them please that I would love to make some donation to your YT channel. Would it be possible this way or another ? Cheers to you and to your wonderful guests anyway Sir !
_Moonwalking with Einstein_ is an amazing read! After 10 yeas, I can still recall most of the list of things he has us memorize using the memory palace technique! All these unrelated things mapped onto the house I grew up in. I still see Claudia Schiffer in a wading pool of cottage cheese in the driveway!
Another approach to memory is memory hotels, developed by Prof. Trump. Pursuant to this technique you just create multiple possibilities, "my approval rate is 50%, 55%, more than 100%". Each number is assigned a room and randomly chosen for recall, often in the same sentence. Accuracy is close to perfect.
I really like the historical aspect of this lesson. I'm not sure that I would advocate going back to pre-writing memory systems in the modern world. I'm a teacher and I am no fan of tricking people into learning things. If you want to know something you will learn it, if not you won't. Information can be learned a million different ways, motivation; that's the secret.
@@suzieQna Of course. One could say that, if objects are that important to them. This would never work for me because I don't really care about the stuff lying around my house. I like ideas.
This has nothing to do with supernatural, paranormal or magical phenomena. It's all about how our brains link information in the many memory pathways and areas it uses. The techniques however can be thought in three principles: imagination, location and association. Although today most speak about this, the strength of these techniques rely in their aiding of our long term memory. The ancient as Kelly, says used it for knowlegede: oral and textual, plus every other details. For techniques search: method of loci, memory peg lists, linking memory system or story method and linkword. Famous mnemonist of the past: Rene Descartes, Aristotle(highly probable), Cicero (De Oratore), Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Thomas de Aquinas, Matteo Ricci, Metrodorus of Scepsis, Ramon Llull, Isaac Beeckam. Probably but I have no credible information for: Leibniz and Newton. Notice how apart in time these people are. For the story of the memory techniques: The Art of Memory by Frances Yates and Lynne Kelly's books. For the practices: join us in the public forum.artofmemory.com
She sounds like a person that could learn to read Asian language easily... A force is a translation of space time, I mostly stick to a relativistic view of it.
Her memory is foggy. Based on her population example she omitted Nigeria which is the seventh most populous nation. So that memory palace is missing a couple of bricks.
Ooops. Very foggy there! Yes, I have Nigeria in the memory palace exactly as you suggest. It's not the memory palace which is lacking, but my recall of it under pressure. Sorry!
