Memory Palaces

Sebastian Faulks writes in his novel Charlotte Gray: "When you reach the age 40 there is no cell in your body that you had when you were 18." You are the same person, and yet a new person, and yet an older person. And thus there are limited slots to be filled by new data in your short-term memory; there's always the need for things like a smart phone scheduler and directory and Post-its. Only the most significant or the most-repeated bits of data find a place in long-term memory as you grow. Memory and learning require will, and we are the architects of that process.

In the last couple of months I read a couple of books that mention the term "memory palace" - Daniel J. Boorstin's history book The Discoverers (a personal favorite), and Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence. What an evocative, romantic term, I thought. Also called "method of loci", a memory palace is a mnemonic technique that involves assigning data to virtual place-holders in an imaginary structure in one's head. It's a mental map, a prompt. Associating a memory with an item located in a specific area in that map makes it easier to return to it and retrieve it, among the plethora of other related memories.

I believe high school students in the US who join geographic contests create memory palaces based on National Geographic maps they've studied. Even people who quote the Bible, chapter and verse, have a version. Teachers, students taking exams, craftsmen, professionals and performing artists need them too. I remember singer Christian Bautista being so nervous at Manny Pacquiao's boxing match that he forgot the entire second stanza of our national anthem and just repeated the first! Would you need a teleprompter just to sing the national anthem? We're human, surely we only need help when our senses are so bombarded and we are overwhelmed by information.

In Rushdie's fable the protagonist "Il Machia" (the erstwhile Niccolo Machiavelli) regularly visits a courtesan's salon in Florence to see an exotic noble-born beauty, recently freed from the Turks. He is curious about her identity, and why she knows a story from his childhood, and stories from the genealogies of the Mughal emperor Akbar. He coaxes the stories out of her, because he wants to solve a mystery to his potential benefit. She plucks them out of her prodigious memory like Scheherezade in The Thousand and One Nights. I suppose if you were a prisoner of war you'd rely on some type of mental discipline to keep going until you've achieved your purpose.

Lately I've been dreaming again of the house I grew up in, in UP Campus. I can remember the floor plan, even every significant tree that grew on the property, and I would remember details from when I was a kid. When I dream of "home", it's always of that house, not where I currently live. The stories and the personal details from 1970-1989 remain in my long-term memory. Beyond that period, I'm pretty selective. So yes, I've used the floor plan and furniture location of the UP house for my personal memory palace. It becomes helpful when I write.

Memory palace? Priceless. For everything else, there's Google... and possibly Facebook.

TED: The Power Of Time Off

NY designer Stefan Sagmeister talks about the value of taking a periodic sabbatical. After every seven years he closes his studio for an entire year and takes off in search of inspiration, a new paradigm and life lessons to bring into the next succeeding years of work.

You think: "Of course he can afford to do it. I can't." Well, standing away from your own work for an hour out of every four pays homage to the idea. In a world where everything seems to be due yesterday, rest and resting the brain still makes sense, only some people make better use of those "free" hours to think of ways to do quality work that only takes two hours instead of four. There are days I am the latter, and there are days I wish I was.

Check out the dog humor - particularly the "walking dog lamp" - and see how a seemingly innocuous image creeps into surreal, self-indulgent projects that in themselves initially don't seem to have commercial value, but are actually a thought process at work.

Life Lessons Through Tinkering

Click on the image to view Gever Tulley's excellent talk on TED.com. This amazing website was introduced to me by my Plurk friend, myepinoy.

I love the idea that at the Tinkering School children have opportunities to build things without fear. I wish the Philippines had something like this. A Tinkering camp, a mini Maker Faire.

Imagine what the future would be like!

My Kind Of Good News

My friends may notice that I have been posting entries on a lot of Philippine-centric and sociological topics lately, particularly if they're forward-looking. Reading about economic recession levels, celebrity sex scandals, endless senate inquiries or political ambitions of various presidentiables gets old. It's really not the sort of thing you'd like to read with your morning cuppa on slow days when you need a sign that the day will turn out better than you expect.

It would be nicer to read, for example, about how the regular Pepe and Pilar achieve good things for others with their limited resources. Or how big business makes things work for our next door neighbors. Stuff like that make a good springboard for ideas. My kind of good news.

Here's a sampler of recent articles:

Wanggo Gallaga writes about how young entrepreneurs from Ateneo de Manila University win an international challenge, with their environment-friendly coco tableware. Team Philippines - Karl Santinitigan and Timothy Huelva - were commended for having a green approach (creating products from what was essentially waste material) , and a practical working business model. Their biodegradeable product, Areka! Leaf Tableware, is made from coconut palm leaves. The original product that inspired the modification was developed in India from the leaves of the Areca palm, and looks like this.

Tina Arceo-Dumlao writes about Text2Teach, a program developed to help teachers deliver information to students through familiar technology inexpensively: by connecting mobile phones (which function as media storage) to television monitors. School attendance increased! This program, supported by the Ayala Foundation and Globe Telecom, was a finalist at a recent Stockhom Challenge.

Geeky Conversations

My friend Benjie dela Pena turned me on to this interesting site that he posted on Facebook, the Sputnik Observatory for the Study of Contemporary Culture. (Link, and above screen capture, show theoretical physicist Michio Kaku discuss interplanetary life. There are other thinkers on the panel.) Yes, geeky, but SO interesting. It's nice to listen to people's ideas in a conversational manner, and to see how they relate things to real life.

Don't worry, it won't give you too much of a nosebleed. It just puts you into a certain perspective.

Benj recommended that I mouse over the site banner, and so I did - Hahaha! How VERY COOL! You go and do it yourself, and find out more.

Did You Know 3.0 (2008)

Did You Know 3.0 (2008) was seen on Facebook, originally posted by my friend BenC. I love it when I learn something new (again).