5 ms·

This is a very interesting subject! 1) We know that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well-documented feats of memory/computation that peo

by Jun8 7y ago

This is a very interesting subject! 1) We know that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well-documented feats of memory/computation that people have been capable of. This is like seeing a fellow human run a mile in less than two minutes. 2) Question is: Why cannot these levels be attained by more people? My hypothesis is the way our brains are trained in childhood. Baby Mozart, etc. toys aside, the way baby brains gather information and are trained are limited by their bodily abilities, which are puny. 3) The answer seems to be to devise a way to feed information-reach, highly non-normal stimulus to young brains, e.g. using heads up displays. This is the method described in Mimsy Were the Borogoves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves) This sounds nightmarish and we also don't have the technology currently. But in the intense competition for colleges/high-schools and even middle schools who knows what can happen? P.S. Also wanted to mention Hinton's models/toys with which he claimed to have learned to intuitively think about 4th dimensional objects, they are described in his book https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/10/28/notes-on-the-fourth-dimension/ https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/10/28/notes-on-the-fourt....

xamuel 7y ago
Particularly interesting to think about the memory feats of the ancients--who didn't even have computers. It really makes you wonder what kind of secret techniques ancient bards and philosophers used.
- pretendscholar 7y ago
  Memory palace
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein The techniques aren’t secret. You can buy books about them on amazon. It’s like memorizing the Iliad, Odyssey or the Koran, completely doable for a human of normal intelligence but a lot of work.
- 1propionyl 7y ago
  There's a few factors at play. To name a couple: 1) A lack of ability to outsource memory to the written word. I forget who it was, but either Plato or Aristotle was famously against writing because they said it would degrade human's capacity for memory (and "learning" if I recall correctly, though this was arguably wrong). 2) Perhaps even more importantly, the content of the time was shaped to the available medium. It's no accident that epic poetry from the oral tradition universally contains huge amounts of redundancy and pattern: meter, repeated adjectival phrases, character epitaphs or titles, etc.
  - kylek 7y ago
    I don't know if it's the same thing as (not only the philosophers, but also many great orators of ancient Greece/etc) the capacity to recite e.g. entire epic poems from memory, but have always found Vedic Chanting (Pathas) fascinating- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant
- chromeaway 7y ago
  In the ancient near east people did not refer to literary works by means of a dedicated title, but by the first line of the composition, which is taken as an indication of origins in an oral tradition, esp. for the earliest works that were written down. When large portions of text have been committed to memory, reciting the first sentence is often enough to trigger a flow, a small but useful "technique" applied by e.g. hiphop lyricists.
  - kuu 7y ago
    This is still done today even if not with the same intention. When we don't remember a name of a song we repeat part of it "do you know this song? the one that says X..." It's natural
- emilga 7y ago
  The ancient Romans and Greeks were known to use the Memory Palace technique, as other commenters here have mentioned. (It's mentioned by Cicero, in Ad Herrenium (of unknown authorship), and St. Augustine, among others.) This was continued into the middle ages, by e.g. Christian monks, see Mary Carruthers' work [0], and the Rennaisance (e.g. Matteo Ricci), see e.g. Frances Yates. For non-western uses of the memory arts, I'd recommend Lynne Kelly. She writes about aboriginal Australians' use of songlines, the African Luba people's use of lukasas, etc. (Lynne Kelly has done multiple podcast interviews that make for fascinating listen, as she's both an accomplished practitioner of the memory arts as well the history behind them.) For a modern, practical introduction, Alex Mullen has some great youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2_Zsm4K3xE&list=PL5fi_YS6Tf7iHzkxMVKoQQfgYlF3wIY0u&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2_Zsm4K3xE&list=PL5fi_YS6Tf... [0] Thomas Bradwardine's 14th century essay: https://books.google.no/books?id=sFxuCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT210&lpg=PT210&dq=thomas+bradwardine+on+acquiring+a+trained+memory&source=bl&ots=Q9fs7QB7Ei&sig=ACfU3U2itvjUbc0_bt1rXe2ElY2k3iahqg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjgzsKOkoLlAhXqy6YKHfpnDgEQ6AEwA3oECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=thomas%20bradwardine%20on%20acquiring%20a%20trained%20memory&f=false https://books.google.no/books?id=sFxuCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT210&lpg=P...
- VvR-Ox 7y ago
  It's called "remembering things" and we all used to know how it works before we outsourced that to computers ;-p Back in school we needed to rehearse latin vocabulary and lyrics of ancient stuff that I sometimes still remember today though I'm used to outsource this kind of data to computers. I think the skills for this are still in us - it's just about the proper techniques to persist the information- and access it fast.
codeulike 7y ago
We know that our minds can do so much more. I don't agree with this. One-off savants who can do some random task like remember the order of a deck of cards after seeing it once are just optimising all their energy towards something arbitrary but not actually that useful. i.e. Feats of memory are a waste of effort when you can just write things down.
DennisP 7y ago
From the Hinton link: "Letters submitted to mathematical journals of the time indicate more than one person achieved a disastrous success and found the process of visualising the fourth dimension profoundly disturbing or dangerously addictive." I wonder whether anyone in modern times has tried it, and how it turned out.
epiphanitus 7y ago
RE: Item 2, I think that unfortunately genetics has a strong, though not absolute role. But on an more optimistic note I think the ability of technology to accommodate different learning styles will help unlock the potential of many people. I'm looking forward to seeing what innovations come from people who think in ways that are truly unconventional. However, I think a very important underlying question is "what kind of intelligence are we actually going to need in the future?" I think it depends on who you ask. Most Americans would probably say 'logical reasoning for working with computers so you won't have to worry about automation'. But if Kai-Fu Lee was here I bet he would say 'creativity and artistic talent' since art is a human activity that is harder for a machine to grasp. Either way, the capacity of the internet to proliferate bullshit means that everyone is going to have to learn epistemology whether they want to or not.

by Jun8 7y ago

xamuel 7y ago

Particularly interesting to think about the memory feats of the ancients--who didn't even have computers. It really makes you wonder what kind of secret techniques ancient bards and philosophers used.

pretendscholar 7y ago
Memory palace
barry-cotter 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein The techniques aren’t secret. You can buy books about them on amazon. It’s like memorizing the Iliad, Odyssey or the Koran, completely doable for a human of normal intelligence but a lot of work.
1propionyl 7y ago
There's a few factors at play. To name a couple: 1) A lack of ability to outsource memory to the written word. I forget who it was, but either Plato or Aristotle was famously against writing because they said it would degrade human's capacity for memory (and "learning" if I recall correctly, though this was arguably wrong). 2) Perhaps even more importantly, the content of the time was shaped to the available medium. It's no accident that epic poetry from the oral tradition universally contains huge amounts of redundancy and pattern: meter, repeated adjectival phrases, character epitaphs or titles, etc.
- kylek 7y ago
  I don't know if it's the same thing as (not only the philosophers, but also many great orators of ancient Greece/etc) the capacity to recite e.g. entire epic poems from memory, but have always found Vedic Chanting (Pathas) fascinating- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant
chromeaway 7y ago
In the ancient near east people did not refer to literary works by means of a dedicated title, but by the first line of the composition, which is taken as an indication of origins in an oral tradition, esp. for the earliest works that were written down. When large portions of text have been committed to memory, reciting the first sentence is often enough to trigger a flow, a small but useful "technique" applied by e.g. hiphop lyricists.
- kuu 7y ago
  This is still done today even if not with the same intention. When we don't remember a name of a song we repeat part of it "do you know this song? the one that says X..." It's natural
emilga 7y ago
The ancient Romans and Greeks were known to use the Memory Palace technique, as other commenters here have mentioned. (It's mentioned by Cicero, in Ad Herrenium (of unknown authorship), and St. Augustine, among others.) This was continued into the middle ages, by e.g. Christian monks, see Mary Carruthers' work [0], and the Rennaisance (e.g. Matteo Ricci), see e.g. Frances Yates. For non-western uses of the memory arts, I'd recommend Lynne Kelly. She writes about aboriginal Australians' use of songlines, the African Luba people's use of lukasas, etc. (Lynne Kelly has done multiple podcast interviews that make for fascinating listen, as she's both an accomplished practitioner of the memory arts as well the history behind them.) For a modern, practical introduction, Alex Mullen has some great youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2_Zsm4K3xE&list=PL5fi_YS6Tf7iHzkxMVKoQQfgYlF3wIY0u&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2_Zsm4K3xE&list=PL5fi_YS6Tf... [0] Thomas Bradwardine's 14th century essay: https://books.google.no/books?id=sFxuCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT210&lpg=PT210&dq=thomas+bradwardine+on+acquiring+a+trained+memory&source=bl&ots=Q9fs7QB7Ei&sig=ACfU3U2itvjUbc0_bt1rXe2ElY2k3iahqg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjgzsKOkoLlAhXqy6YKHfpnDgEQ6AEwA3oECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=thomas%20bradwardine%20on%20acquiring%20a%20trained%20memory&f=false https://books.google.no/books?id=sFxuCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT210&lpg=P...
VvR-Ox 7y ago
It's called "remembering things" and we all used to know how it works before we outsourced that to computers ;-p Back in school we needed to rehearse latin vocabulary and lyrics of ancient stuff that I sometimes still remember today though I'm used to outsource this kind of data to computers. I think the skills for this are still in us - it's just about the proper techniques to persist the information- and access it fast.

codeulike 7y ago

We know that our minds can do so much more. I don't agree with this. One-off savants who can do some random task like remember the order of a deck of cards after seeing it once are just optimising all their energy towards something arbitrary but not actually that useful. i.e. Feats of memory are a waste of effort when you can just write things down.

DennisP 7y ago

From the Hinton link: "Letters submitted to mathematical journals of the time indicate more than one person achieved a disastrous success and found the process of visualising the fourth dimension profoundly disturbing or dangerously addictive." I wonder whether anyone in modern times has tried it, and how it turned out.

epiphanitus 7y ago

RE: Item 2, I think that unfortunately genetics has a strong, though not absolute role. But on an more optimistic note I think the ability of technology to accommodate different learning styles will help unlock the potential of many people. I'm looking forward to seeing what innovations come from people who think in ways that are truly unconventional. However, I think a very important underlying question is "what kind of intelligence are we actually going to need in the future?" I think it depends on who you ask. Most Americans would probably say 'logical reasoning for working with computers so you won't have to worry about automation'. But if Kai-Fu Lee was here I bet he would say 'creativity and artistic talent' since art is a human activity that is harder for a machine to grasp. Either way, the capacity of the internet to proliferate bullshit means that everyone is going to have to learn epistemology whether they want to or not.