Memory Key Newsletter

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T h e M e m o r y K e y

<http://www.memory-key.com>

Your resource for information about memory and memory improvement

May 2005

http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_58.htm

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THIS MONTH ON MEMORY-KEY.COM:

NEUROFEEDBACK TRAINING

IT'S ALL ABOUT INDEXING

ERRATUM

BLOG

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NEUROFEEDBACK TRAINING

In my blog on May 30, I noted a New Scientist article reviewing a number of strategies that might help you improve your cognitive function. I have of course discussed most of these on my site (I provide links to the relevant articles and reports in the blog item), but I was stimulated to look further into one particular strategy that has had only brief mention on my site — neurofeedback.

Looking into recent research, I was favourably impressed with the potential of this approach — principally for those with attention problems. I’ve posted a brief article on my site explaining a little about how it works and whom it might help. You can read it at: http://www.memory-key.com/Articles/neurofeedback.htm

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Find out more about my e-book on "Remembering intentions" at:

http://www.memory-key.com/shop/intention_ebook.htm

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IT'S ALL ABOUT INDEXING

I have added a subject index for my archived newsletters at http://www.memory-key.com/indices/newsletter_index.htm and for my blog: http://www.memory-key.com/indices/blog_index2.htm . They’re still a little crude, but quite usable. I’ll be refining them as part of my redesign of the website.

Indexing is a valuable tool in the task of finding information, but it is far more than that. Indexing is an organizational tool, and organization is at the heart of both memory and understanding.

Western education today has been greatly influenced by the philosophy that, because there is so much information now (far more than any individual can hope to absorb in a lifetime), education is about learning how to learn and learning how to find out, rather than the traditional passing on of knowledge.

While I tend to think we’ve gone rather too far in that direction (you need some “facts”, after all, if you’re to understand what you’re reading, and know where to look for information), I don’t think there’s any denying the basic validity of this argument. It is worth contemplating, however, the history that has brought us to this point.

The first “books” were scrolls. Think about this for a moment. Think of unrolling a 40-foot scroll, rolling it up behind you as you read down. There is no easy way of finding a particular place, a particular chapter or phrase. The only way is to unroll your way through until you get where you want to be. Is it any wonder that people relied heavily on their memory of what they had read, rather than bothering to consult the work again?

Eventually the codex of bound pages supplanted the scrolls; after the 12th century, some had tables of contents and even (very basic and not alphabetic) indexes — but this was still not common even by the 16th century. The first book to have its pages numbered was published in 1499, but this didn’t become standard until more than a century later. It was not until the end of the 18th century that alphabetic indexes became standard.

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s important to put our forebears’ need for memory in context. When writing was invented, it is said the Egyptian god Thoth (credited with the invention) was warned that “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves” [from Plato’s Phaedrus].

It reminds me of how we were told that computers would mean the end of paper! As we all know, computers have in fact led to a proliferation of paper. In the same way, writing led to people having more to remember, not less. Hence the enthusiasm in classical and medieval times for mnemonic strategies.

Now we have a veritable ocean of knowledge, far more than our ancestors could have dreamed of. But we also have tools beyond their imagining. We have sorted and catalogued our knowledge (and there’s another story! The history of this too is so very recent, relatively). We have raised indexing to a professional science (or at least an art). We have chapters, and summaries, headlines and graphs, punctuation!

We have keyword searches.

Ah, yes. Today, to help us navigate the ocean of knowledge, we have Google. Where we would be without Google? I admit, sometimes I find it easier to plug some words into Google than find the information I know is in one of my books, somewhere.

One day, all our books will be on the Web, and open to Google. Our own computers will be able to be Googled (already available, I believe, but still in beta I think.)

Has all this rendered our memories null and void?

Hardly. Without our tools, we would surely drown, but they are tools only — liferafts in the ocean. All of it is pointless without memory. Perhaps our memories cannot hold all the details we need or would like (depending on how wide-ranging our interest are), but what is needed now is an index. Our memory must be an index.

Consider again the scroll — a long expanse of information, unseparated, unpaginated, unpunctuated; forever rolling up behind us as we unroll it. No way to compare different sections. No easy way to check what was once said against something that is now said.

Although our ocean of knowledge is catalogued and punctuated and indexed, we still need to remember enough to be able to use the index — at its simplest, to know where to look. And because the ocean is so vast, it is in some ways like those early scrolls — to cross-reference, compare, relate different bits of knowledge to other bits, we still need to rely on memory.

This is why working memory is, more than ever, so important. And why, more than ever, we need to learn how to organize effectively — not only our written documents, but also our mental files. It’s all about indexing.

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ERRATUM

Last month I referenced a book I carelessly called "The Making of a Memorist". As a reader kindly pointed out, the book by A.R. Luria is in fact entitled “The Mind of a Mnemonist”. A fine example of one of those absentminded slips of the tongue!

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