Actually, it’s more of a quasi-experiment from its informal, quasi-scientific nature. It’s taken more time than I’d have liked, to run through ideas on how to organize this, much of that time selecting effective memory cue locations, but here it is, with setup and outcome discussed!

In using any work of art as a memory device, such as that may be as art, there must be locations on it or in it to encode information at in the mind, and these locations on the image must follow an obvious sequence.

First, a shoutout is due: the credit for this goes to the book Memory Craft, by Dr. Lynne Kelly. The book discusses and explains a number of memory aids, including those popular in the Middle Ages and across the world throughout ancient times, prehistory, and during the modern era by indigenous cultures.

Those techniques, because of their reliability, are still useful and valid, even as books have become much more common during the modern era, and much cheaper in the last few centuries. Human brains today work in pretty much the same ways and just as well as those of 500, or 5,000 , or 50,000 years ago. Neuroanatomically, we haven’t evolved that much, and are no smarter than our forebears in terms of sheer brain power. Genius exists in all eras and among all peoples.

The idea for this informal test of the usefulness of an art print comes from the chapter on art as a memory device. You can find the link to the book and other resources by Dr. Kelly here: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/memory-craft/

Here’s how I did this:

The Quasi-Experiment Setup:

I employed daily episodes of Massimo Pigliucci’s podcast, Stoic Meditations, from June 8 to July 15 of 2020, with an average length of a couple of minutes each on an art print of one of my fractal pieces. Without tactile cues on the print, it’s important to bring the visual cues to bear, to attend to the meat of each episode while tracing out the path of that sequence with my eyes and in my mind, making use of memory’s tie to visuo-spatial information.

The aim here is similar to the use of a mandala, and at each location I store in memory the most important content of the relevant podcast episode before moving on to the next, where I memorise the contents of a further episode, and so on, until the sequence along the figure ends.

At the publishing time for this piece, those episodes may still be found in the feed for the current season of Massimo’s show. I’m including an annotated photo of the print with the path the sequence takes from one side of the print from the left to its far side on the right. I didn’t utilize the original image file of the fractal for this, as there are differences in aspect ratio between original file and printed hanging that would cause discrepancies in the locations chosen. Also, even with my computer’s current monitor, a large printed wall hanging makes it much easier to make out small details in the image with my aging eyes as well as serve merely to decorate an otherwise sparse wall. The image below has been marked up with blue lines for the sequence, each memory/marker location marked with a blue one-to-four dotted circle.

Click below to embiggen:

Note that the fuzzy repeated spiral sea shell-looking things, aptly called nautili, are memory locations with the mini-Mandelbrots and their opposed double spirals as special marker locations in the sequence; the fourth location preceded and followed by three nautili, so there is a repeated sequence of similar objects in groups of three followed a fourth in seven distinct regions of the print from left to right in a wavy pattern.

While each of the three nautili in a sequence are very similar, they are of differing sizes, orientations, and locations on the print, as are the mini-Mandelbrots. There are, of course, no layered paints, no 3-D printing involved, no fabric canvas, nor any other significant tactile feature on the print.

So there are no touch cues I can attend to well enough to aid memory, not even the feel of fingertips on the stucco of the wall behind and through the print. Haptic sensation is here quite unhelpful.

The Quasi-Experiment’s Outcome:

So, after following the path sequence, I was able to reinforce recall of each episode’s essential content in enough detail, going through and replaying each episode to verify my recall by the time the quasi-experiment concluded.

Despite my relative inexperience with this technique, the results were fairly easy to achieve, as I utilized each episode’s content to tell a story embodied by a fictional, or in my case, fictionalized character, what Dr. Kelly has termed a Rapscallion, though I favor the term Prodigal for mine, after the profligately empowered super-beings from my Gods of Terra superhero/SF setting.

My Prodigals for this go included Socrates, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, four major figures in Stoic philosophical history (Yes, I know that Socrates was not technically a Stoic, but some of his contributions to philosophy were incorporated into Stoic thought. Bite me.), they and others acting out in ways which I needn’t detail here. I’ve no real idea what they actually looked like, and surviving depictions have their own problems in accuracy, so I imagined unique and comical caricatures of them, as per popular American-style cartoon animation. The more comical, the better.

All in all, this turned out extremely well, and was a fun exploration of a useful memory method, even given my own considerable wants in the memory department! 

Tf. Tk. Tts.

On the YouTube page:

“Mass protests in the US over the killing by police of George Floyd, have been swelled by the presence of people of all races in numbers not seen before.

But whether it’s on the streets or online, what does true allyship look like? “You’re walking down the street and you see a child and a big dog charging towards it. Do you let the dog eat the child or save the child?” writer and activist Feminista Jones told The Stream. “If you observe something, and you know something is going to happen, do you do everything you can to stop it, or do you think of self-preservation?”

Activists say it’s vital that being an ally is an ongoing process of both education and action. Manuals on allyship are circulating on social media to help people take steps in that direction.

Some of the suggestions are: educating yourself, researching, listening and not talking. Showing up at protests, observing and protecting people who are more vulnerable to police action. Donating to organisations on the frontline, centering and amplifying the voices of Black people.

In this episode of The Stream we’ll take a closer look at those ideas and ask how they can bring about substantive change. “

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/AJStream

FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/AJStream

Subscribe to our channel: http://bit.ly/AJSubscribe

The universe is vast, both wondrous and dangerous, and filled with alien beings and forces ranging from benign to dangerously indifferent to the human condition. Here, great interstellar empires vie for power and the wavetouched, Childer of the Shard, struggle for survival and acceptance, while forces beyond human sanity gnaw at reality in the dark between the stars. Here there are worlds with cities made of scents, people with the powers of demigods, and ancient, monstrous beings with hearts of gold. Yet here, even those with mundane limits, skills, and talents can make their mark and change the universe forever. Here, even gods can die.

In this series as a whole, I’ll offer a detailed picture of what GoTa is all about, and in future, posts detailing the basic precepts on which everything runs, aliens and space-gods, creatures, superhuman abilities, exotic locations, and others.

A list of topics includes: 

• Setting precepts; what assumptions, laws, and logics operate, and what do they entail?
• False assumptions; what claims, what myths and mistakes are generally accepted as true within the setting; where and how these claims go astray from the truth, and what are actually the case.
  
• Supernormal abilities and powers, and the limits therein.
  
• Aliens and other species, such as wave-touched or Prodigals, the Kaisiri, the Rj’lt’ar, and their effect on everyone else.
  
• Empires, worlds, and the cultures that dwell within and on them.
  
• History and momentous events, including the Galactic Ripple, the Great Fear, and the Shutter, and these as influences on the setting.
  
• Iconic characters and monstrous beings, including the Nine Who are One, the first four Gods of Terra, their foes, and those who followed after them in the wake of the Shutter.
  

Tf. Tk. Tts. 

~ Troythulu

Got a call from a contact of mine, GK. Saru. No idea what their location or even species is, but they’ve been reliable in the past, never gave me a bad lead, and enabled me to see some pretty strange ***t along the way in this crazy but fantastic job. My name’s Meenakshi. Meenakshi Sukhavati. I was born in the rebuilt and now almost utopian Sri Lanka to Singaporean Tamil parents.

Oddly, they didn’t insist on getting me married off despite my looks, but always respected my preferences and never gave a peep when I joined the Agency instead of home life or Academia. My parents are weird. Both are religious nonbelievers and raised me as such. My father has been a politician, a pairasiriyar – a professor – and in his youth, an actor and activist. My mother is a planetary engineer, and her family was directly involved in part of the reconstruction of the Indian Subcontinent and thereabouts after the Broogh bombarded Terra in -200, leaving tens of crores dead and rendering much of the region uninhabitable for decades.

I work out of my office in Chennai, in rebuilt Tamil Nadu, India district, today a major shipping hub for the Tellusine Majesterium, the second great and bountiful human empire in the Local Galaxy, centered in the Sol system. This assignment, my cover is as a tour guide for some Kai’Siri celebrity, Than’yidre Dunori thaan Vuul kron Vokka, a performance artist for a popular show involving some pretty gladiatorial content by Tellusine standards. Kai’Siri are nuts, but they produce many of the finest soldiers in the Local Galaxy and their plasma-sculptures are a thing to behold.

So today I must head out after downloading the needed files and apps to my wetware drive. I’m to meet Than’yidre and plan our move in this investigation and show her the finer points of some of Terra’s oldest surviving cultures. I select the perfect sari for the occasion, a bit formal, even for me, but strictly for business. I make sure at my mirror that neither the sari nor the bindi I wear are too ostentatious, appropriating my own culture, “too Tamil for Thou.” Excellent. Satisfied, I step outside to take advantage of the morning air and walk to the local teleport terminal connecting to the spaceport.

If the information from GK. is correct, then the Solar System is in big trouble – trouble that needs stopping before it starts.

To be continued…

I’m aware of a psychological phenomenon whereby going public with long-term goals actually impairs completing those goals, whatever the short-term feeling of satisfaction from the telling, indeed because of it. That’s dangerous, so it’s mum from here on, as it’s better to underpromise and overperform rather than the opposite.

I can say that this site’s not going completely dead for those three years, There’ll be updates, though not at regular intervals.

Love you guys a bunch, and I hope to see you here in 2023, maybe a brighter time for all of us. Thanks for subscribing to this blog, and for your valuable support over the years.

So, in my amateurish grasp of Thamizh,

நான் போயிட்டு வரேங – naan pooyittu varaenga (I shall go and return)