Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Oh Yeah, I Forgot

Really interesting article on memory training and the human brain over on Wired. My favorite quote:

We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.
..."Swim in the epicene"? Awesome.

5 uninformed opinions:

Leila said...

afraid i must abjure the episteme...

erin said...

Very interesting. I don't quite get, though, why the dude would spend so much time uploading and backing up info in his brain, and then not share or interact with anyone. Perhaps the ideas of dialogue and feedback have been inserted, but haven't looped around enough times to have registered as important. What good is a brainiac in isolation? This is why I blog. (yes, that's a joke.)

Cool Ranch Luke said...

Lol: Epicene. Talk about a Freudian spill.

Cool Ranch Luke said...

Erin: I didn't get the impression that he was eschewing any social interaction. I didn't read the whole thing, of course (short attention span), and I don't remember what I did read (short memory), so maybe I'm wrong. Is this guy a hermit?

erin said...

I understood that he (Piotr) was so intent on devoting his time to seeing how well his techniques work on his own memory, that most else was set aside:

"Having turned over his mental life to a computerized system, he refuses to be pushed around by random inputs and requests....A person who understands the exact relationship between learning and time is forced to measure out his hours with certain care....The guarantee that he would not forget what he learned was both a gift and a demand, requiring him to sacrifice every extraneous thing."

He has obviously come up with an effective system for learning and remembering. Maybe he'll come out and share once he's finished his self-experiment. It would be interesting to see the result...