The Thinkulum

Learning

🙂

Douglas Hoff recommends Nelson Dellis’s Remember It! as a first book on memory techniques, and I’d say it’s a good choice. My top choice is still Kenneth Higbee’s Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It. That’s because I like that Higbee orients his discussion around the psychology research on memorization while still keeping the book practical. But if all you’re after is a friendly intro to the techniques with a bunch of applications to everyday memory situations, Remember It! is a good one.

In Preaching by Heart Ryan Tinetti zooms in on one specific type of memorizing—learning a speech to deliver it thought-for-thought. The book focuses on the memory palace approach but places it in the context of the whole process of classical rhetoric, covering sermon preparation in terms of each of rhetoric’s five steps. It was a different angle on memory techniques that I appreciated.

It was also both more academic and more lighthearted than I expected. Discussions of memory can be very humanizing. In these mnemonic guidebooks the authors admit how ordinary and flawed they are, reveal the everyday memory needs they encounter, and expose the quirks of their minds as they work to make information memorable. You learn a lot about the parts of their culture they connect with, since it shows up all over their mnemonic imagery.

As much as I’ve wanted to get this project moving, the most I ended up with time for was collecting more use cases. These were from surveying the examples in the Dellis book. I’m starting to form a framework for organizing these uses. If I keep working on that, it’ll encompass the modality and structure of the information, the circumstances of encountering and recalling it, and maybe other factors. For example, at a new job you might meet a coworker on your first day, learn their name, associate it with their face, and then need to greet them at an unforeseen time later in the week. That would be a bidirectional word and image pair, and the circumstances of learning and recall would both be impromptu conversations.

But a framework of use cases isn’t really what this project is for, so this week I’m turning my attention to the lists of mnemonic substitutes in my sources. I collected several in a spreadsheet a few years ago, so I’ll add to that from my new sources.

AI

🧐

I resisted the distraction of the latest AI weirdness, the Infinite Backrooms. It’s a growing set of conversations between two instances of Claude 3, the new state-of-the-art language model from Anthropic. It’s partly based on another recent prompt called worldsim (video demo). I could see myself exploring the Infinite Backrooms for hours, but I reminded myself I already have an interesting project to work on that’s been waiting long enough, and I put the AI esoterica on hold. Mainly what I take from these experiments is that the new language models are still deeply capable of petertodd behavior if you dig in the right places.

Spirituality

😎

I became a virtual Lutheran for Good Friday. I didn’t feel up to showing up for my church’s Good Friday service, so later I looked for one to watch online. After casting about a bit, I decided to find a traditional Lutheran one and landed on the tail end of a service at St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. (I could’ve watched Ryan Tinetti’s service, but at the time I didn’t know his church was on YouTube.) The music sparked my curiosity, and I got a few minutes into my research before realizing I had the book they were using, the Lutheran Service Book. So I followed along in that during the hymns. I was also struck by the solemnity of hammering nails into the cross and hearing the bell toll during the Lord’s Prayer and watching the room slowly darken as the candles were progressively extinguished. Overall the service showed me it doesn’t take elaborate pageantry to convey a message.