Starting with The Art of Memory by Frances Yates.
Let’s turn to those artificial repositories of thoughts and facts – books.
#Memory master book how to#
To some extent, we’ve forgotten how to remember.
We no longer needed to exercise our memories to the limits of their capacity. Once you had printed books, it was no longer important to keep thoughts in your mind because you could reference them externally. I’m referring to technology in the broadest possible sense, encapsulating everything from the alphabet to the Blackberry. Technology allowed us to outsource our memories. So how did we become estranged from this “primal capacity?” Today we don’t think of furnishing our minds, and few schools emphasise memorisation. Once upon a time, people treated their memories with more sanctity. One of the things that I was surprised by in my research was that although the idea of a disciplined, trained memory feels novel to us today, it was commonplace in ancient history. You wrote that memorising is a “primal capacity from which too many of us have become estranged”. Artificial memory is what you are able to do with your natural capacity through training, practice and using mnemonic techniques. It’s our brain’s biological capacity for recall.
Natural memory is like the basic cable package. The original Latin memory treatises talk about a distinction between natural memory and artificial memory. Your theme is memory, but not the sort of memory that automatically embeds itself in our minds, like a first kiss. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
0 kommentar(er)
