The Art of Memory by Frances Yates
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/1847922929
The Lost Arts of Memory - Daniel Boorstin
BEFORE the printed book, Memory ruled daily life and the occult learning.
The inventor of the mnemonic art was said to be the versatile Greek lyric
poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-46878.0.). Once at a banquet in the house
of Scopas in Thessaly. A message was brought to Simonides that there were
two young men at the door who wanted him to come outside. Castor and
Pollux. To pay Simonides for their share of the panegyric. At the very
moment when Simonides had left the
banquet hall the roof fell
in, burying
all the other guests in the ruins.
When relatives came to take away the corpses for the burial honors, the mangled bodies could not be identified. Simonides then exercised his remarkable memory to show the grieving relatives which bodies belonged to whom. He did this by thinking back to where each of the guests had been seated. Then he was able to identify by place each of the bodies.
He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it. Simonides' art, which dominated European thinking in the Middle Ages, was based on the two simple concepts of places (loci) and images (imagines).
A treatise (c. 86-82 B.C.) by a Roman teacher of rhetoric known as Ad Herrenium, ...He described the "architectural" technique for imprinting the memory with a series of places. Think of a large building, Quintilian said, and walk through its numerous rooms remembering all the ornaments and furnishings in your imagination. Then give each idea to be remembered an image, and as you go through the building again deposit each image in this order in your imagination. For example, if you mentally deposit a spear in the living room, an anchor in the dining room, you will later recall that you are to speak first of the war, then of the navy, etc. This system still works.
Petrarch (1304-1374) also had a great reputation as an authority on the artificial memory and how to cultivate it. He offered his own helpful rules for choosing the "places" where remembered images were to be stored for retrieval. The imagined architecture of Memory, he said, must provide storage places of medium size, not too large or too small for the particular image.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century ...Peter of Ravenna advised that the best memory loci were in a deserted church. When you have found your church, you should go around in it three or four times, fixing in your mind all the places where you would later put your memory-images. Each locus should be five or six feet from the one before. Peter boasted that even as a young man he had fixed in his mind 100,000 memory loci, and by his later travels he had added thousands more. The effectiveness of his system, he said, was shown by the fact that he could repeat verbatim the whole canon law, two hundred speeches of Cicero, and twenty thousand points of law.
After Gutenberg, realms of everyday life once ruled and served by Memory would be governed by the printed page. ...the printed book was far more portable, more accurate, more convenient to refer to, and, of course, more public. Whatever was in print, after being written by an author, was also known to printers, proofreaders, and anyone reached by the printed page. A man could now refer to the rules of grammar, the speeches of Cicero, and the texts of theology, canon law, and morality without storing them in himself.
The Discoverers - Daniel Boorstin - Pages 480-488
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679743758/
The Method of Loci
The method of loci (loci [ˈlɔkiː] being Latin for "places") is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique. This method is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria). Many memory contest champions report using this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words.
Spatial mnemonics and specific brain activation
Brain scans of "superior memorizers", 90% of whom use the method of loci technique, have shown that it involves activation of regions of the brain involved in spatial awareness, such as the medial parietal cortex, retrosplenial cortex, and the right posterior hippocampus.[25][26] The medial parietal cortex is most associated with encoding and retrieving of information. Patients who have medial parietal cortex damage have trouble linking landmarks with certain locations; many of these patients are unable to give or follow directions and often get lost. The retrosplenial cortex is also linked to memory and navigation. In one study on the effects of selective granular retrosplenial cortex lesions in rats, the researcher found that damage to the retrosplenial cortex led to impaired spatial learning abilities. Rats with damage to this area failed to recall which areas of the maze they had already visited, rarely explored different arms of the maze, almost never recalled the maze in future trials, and took longer to reach the end of the maze, as compared to rats with a fully working retrosplenial cortex.
In a classic study in cognitive neuroscience, O'Keefe and Nadel proposed "that the hippocampus is the core of a neural memory system providing an objective spatial framework within which the items and events of an organism's experience are located and interrelated." This theory has generated considerable debate and further experiment. It has been noted that "[t]he hippocampus underpins our ability to navigate, to form and recollect memories, and to imagine future experiences. How activity across millions of hippocampal neurons supports these functions is a fundamental question in neuroscience, wherein the size, sparseness, and organization of the hippocampal neural code are debated."
In a more recent study, memory champions during resting periods did not exhibit specific regional brain differences, but distributed functional brain network connectivity changes compared to control subjects. When volunteers trained use of the method of loci for six weeks, the training-induced changes in brain connectivity were similar to the brain network organization that distinguished memory champions from controls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
Elaborative Encoding
Elaborative encoding is a mnemonic that relates to-be-remembered information to previously existing memories and knowledge. One can make such connections visually, spatially, semantically or acoustically. Practitioners use multiple techniques, such as the method of loci, the link system, the peg-word method, PAO (person, action, object), etc., to store information in long-term memory and to make it easier to recall this information in the future.
Explanation
New information and stimuli tend to be better remembered when they can be associated with old memories and experiences. The efficiency and success of encoding (and subsequent retrieval) is largely dependent upon the type of associations you choose to make. It is generally accepted that the more unusual and meaningful these elaborately encoded memories are, the more successful one will be in trying to retrieve them; this process is referred to as elaborative encoding. This type of encoding helps learning, as it constructs a rich set of integrated memories.
Several theories[which?] suggest that the ability to recall information is heightened when physical and mental conditions match those experienced when the information was first encoded. For example, one will often be more successful in recalling a stimulus while chewing bubble gum if one were also chewing gum when one originally encoded the new stimulus. This has also been found to encompass drug and alcohol-induced recollection; people who encoded memories in an intoxicated state were more successful at recalling them when in a similar state later on.[9] Verbal elaboration has also been shown to strengthen mental connections and boost retrieval (see also rehearsal). Because the intensity and effectiveness of encoded connections varies from person to person, it is often difficult to study with consistent results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaborative_encoding
Storytelling and Cultural Traditions | National Geographic Society
Storytelling is universal and is as ancient as humankind. Before there was writing, there was storytelling. It occurs in every culture and from every age. It exists (and existed) to entertain, to inform, and to promulgate cultural traditions and values.
Oral storytelling is telling a story through voice and gestures. The oral tradition can take many forms, including epic poems, chants, rhymes, songs, and more. Not all of these stories are historically accurate or even true. Truth is less important than providing cultural cohesion. It can encompass myths, legends, fables, religion, prayers, proverbs, and instructions.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/storytelling-and-cultural-traditions
The Forager Oral Tradition and the Evolution of Prolonged Juvenility
The foraging niche is characterized by the exploitation of nutrient-rich resources using complex extraction techniques that take a long time to acquire. This costly period of development is supported by intensive parental investment. Although human life history theory tends to characterize this investment in terms of food and care, ethnographic research on foraging skill transmission suggests that the flow of resources from old-to-young also includes knowledge.
Given the adaptive value of information, parents may have been under selection pressure to invest knowledge – e.g., warnings, advice – in children: proactive provisioning of reliable information would have increased offspring survival rates and, hence, parental fitness. One way that foragers acquire subsistence knowledge is through symbolic communication, including narrative. Tellingly, oral traditions are characterized by an old-to-young transmission pattern, which suggests that, in forager groups, storytelling might be an important means by which adults transfer knowledge to juveniles. In particular, by providing juveniles with vicarious experience, storytelling may expand episodic memory, which is believed to be integral to the generation of possible future scenarios (i.e., planning).
In support of this hypothesis, this essay reviews evidence that: mastery of foraging knowledge and skill sets takes a long time to acquire; foraging knowledge is transmitted from parent to child; the human mind contains adaptations specific to social learning; full assembly of learning mechanisms is not complete in early childhood; and forager oral traditions contain a wide range of information integral to occupation of the foraging niche. It concludes with suggestions for tests of the proposed hypothesis.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3160140/?report=classic
Knowing How vs Knowing That
There is an important distinction between "knowing that" (know a concept), "knowing how" (understand an operation), and "acquaintance-knowledge" (know by relation).
Gilbert Ryle is also credited with stressing the distinction between knowing how and knowing that in The Concept of Mind.
In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi argues for the epistemological relevance of knowledge how and knowledge that; using the example of the act of balance involved in riding a bicycle, he suggests that the theoretical knowledge of the physics involved in maintaining a state of balance cannot substitute for the practical knowledge of how to ride, and that it is important to understand how both are established and grounded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
