Tim Fawns's List: Memory

• You see people paralysed in supermarkets looking at twenty rows of near identical products trying to choose. You have a question assault course presented to you when you try to buy a coffee.
• a small amount of disinformation will undermine the confidence in decisions based on it. In computing there used to be a 50-2 rule. A 2% error in data resulted in a 50% loss of confidence.
• Then there's the latency of the data. If things change fast, data stored goes out of date - but it still persists. So either it gets refreshed and updated, or else it becomes more and more questionable. Imagine a database of medical risks that was out of date...
• When folks are all equally capable of getting access to information, they may be empowered to make decisions but the quality of the decisions will depend on understanding the data and their implications.
• 1. Data: symbols
  
  2. Information: data that is processed to be useful; provides answers to "who", "what", "where", and "when" questions
  
  3. Knowledge: application of data and information; answers "how" questions
  
  4. Understanding: appreciation of "why"
  
  5. Wisdom: evaluated understanding.
  
  I would suggest that the ideas discussed would put everyone on a level playing field at 2, or possibly 3 - but certainly no further.
  
  How you interpret and apply information is key to everything.
  
  An absolute moron given comprehensive encyclopedias and all the time in the world is not going to be able to do anything.
• experience is far more important than theoretical knowledge.
  

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• In the  Cultural Memory  view, the CMS refers to  those processes and structures by which personal subjective memory material is exchanged between individuals and across generations and made available on an intersubjective basis
• From the subjective viewpoint, it is that faculty by which one individual can {reference to / learn from / participate in} the memory content of (an)other individual(s), even without direct personal contact, e.g. when they live in a distant place, or in the distant past.
• Somatic Factors  are those concerning CM as an affair of the human memory, and the human body and its facilities, the nervous system, the brain, the sense organs and  sensory modalities , etc
• Extrasomatic Factors  are those of the intersubjective domain, or of the external media
• In the most general sense, the  Cultural Memory  Media  CMM is that aspect of the CMS that can in any way be observed from the intersubjective position, the  extrasomatic aspect of the CMS
• The concept of medium is further treated in Böhme-dürr (1997), Posner (1997: 228-229). More references with many types of CMM in semiotic categories: Posner (1997), and Noeth (1985).

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• We know of activities going on in the next room, like the washing  machine just entering the spin cycle for example. We know what things look like  more or less at a friends house or our work place. We can visualize the past and  the future - in our mind - by piecing together bits of information we take for  truth and constructing this larger view of our world. All of it is conjecture. A  mere approximation of how things might be with little or no proof available to  confirm our construct at the instant that we perceive it.    

• i’ve always been reluctant to depend on my own frail, subjective, and perpetually fallible memory, so all my life i’ve been finding myself storing my thoughts and experiences away in forms of extrasomatic memory, such as diaries, photo albums, and this blog. it’s surprising how with the mere presence of a physical object, a whole collection of vivid memories and sensations can be evoked. i think that is why i feel so distressed when people i love move away, or when my favourite places are knocked down and turned into a parking lot. i am afraid that if the reminder is gone, so is the memory.

  • What is the effect of having so many detached memories with no physical stimulus?

• Not that useful for me, just one bit on extrasomatic memory. - Tim Fawns on 2008-07-23

• If speech alone was able to meet the needs of humans, why was writing even invented? What incentives would exist to motivate our ancestors to invent new ways of communicating? The answer lies in the need for extrasomatic memory, which allowed humans to build and maintain a mass of knowledge outside the body. Allowing knowledge to be transferred from the human

  mind to any given physical medium permitted others to gain said knowledge without co-existing in time and space with the original “author”.
• While this innovation was prone to abuse by lying politicians and fraudulent recordings, speech could have been abused just as easily.

  • While digital memory is capable of creating discrepancies between the real and the remembered, so is miscommunication.
• Radio, television and the Internet are but a few of the technological innovations which emphasize speech over written text, resulting in the age of secondary orality.

  • Is this really about individual learning preferences - ie auditory over written?
• The use of writing to create extrasomatic memory is another issue in the debate over efficiency, and one that does not necessarily favor writing in today’s society. While the expense, in terms of time and effort, to congregate around a single person in order to receive knowledge was much greater prior to the turn of the 20^th century, the use of secondary orality devices has cut writing’s advantage significantly. However, while radio and television make it possible for people around the world to hear speech in real-time, the information conveyed by such devices is lost when they are turned off, just how sound ceases to convey information when speech stops. Television, radio and the Internet allow information to be transmitted over long distances similar to letters and email, but the way data is stored still favors writing as text requires less memory in terms of digital storage. Unless a major innovation in compression techniques renders audio files smaller than text files, using speech to convey messages will always generate more waste and greater expense than writing.

  • Sometimes writing is better, sometimes speech is. Preferably, the reader / listener can choose. Voice-to-text and text-to-voice may allow us to provide both.

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• Aren't writing and speech appropriate to different situations and don't really need to be compared as "which one is better"? - Tim Fawns on 2008-07-23

• recent single case reports and results obtained with the positron emission tomographic subtraction method indicate the likely existence of a dissociation: regions of the limbic system are primarily engaged in the encoding of autobiographical and semantic information, while cortical areas in the orbitofrontal and anterolateral temporo-polar regions are principally engaged in information retrieval. Within this retrieval system the right hemisphere may subserve episodic memory retrieval, and the left retrieval from the knowledge system (semantic memory).

• Declarative memory involves representations of facts and events that are subject to conscious recollection, verbal reflection, and explicit expression.
• despite these major breakthroughs in identifying declarative memory, our understanding of its mechanisms is really quite superficial.
• procedural memory is characterized by its inaccessibility to conscious recall and by expression only through implicit measures of performance, typically an increase in speed or a shift in choice bias during repetition of a mental procedure

  • Does this mean it is not possible for procedural memory to be stored digitally?
• different kinds of memory can be distinguished in amnesia
• In addition, even within new learning, HM has a broad set of distinctly preserved learning capacities. His acquisition of motor skills (Corkin 1968, Milner 1962) and perceptual “priming” (Warrington & Weiskrantz 1968) remained intact.
• At the other extreme is the position taken here that memory is not an entity at all, but rather a reflection of the plasticity properties that characterize each functional circuit of the brain.

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• Some may argue that it is an attractive thing for every Tom, Dick or Harry to be able to snap photos wherever they may go. But it does bring certain problems. Tom, for example, might be an illegal immigrant seeking welfare, Dick a terrorist, and Harry an elderly alcoholic with latent paedophile tendencies.
• In any event, taking photos in public places is largely unnecessary now. That first kiss, the child’s first iced lolly, the reunion - all these moments are bound to be captured on our increasingly effective and universal network of closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems.
• This is why the ACPO, fully supported by the Home Office and my own CCPSADaSOJUC (Cross-Cutting Public Service Agreement and Departmental Strategic Objective Joining-Up Committee), has decided to clamp down on unauthorised photography in public places. This isn’t a legislative matter, but simply a cultural one. The world has changed and it’s no longer appropriate for the public to take unauthorised photos in public places.

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• Farcical rants about photographing in public - Tim Fawns on 2008-08-01

• Though one cannot have direct knowledge of one’s own amnesia, there may be ways to infer it: from the expressions on people’s faces when one has repeated something half a dozen times; when one looks down at one’s coffee cup and finds that it is empty; when one looks at one’s diary and sees entries in one’s own handwriting. Lacking memory, lacking direct experiential knowledge, amnesiacs have to make hypotheses and inferences, and they usually make plausible ones.
• Clive once said to Deborah, “I am completely incapable of thinking.”

  • Of course he needed to think to realise this, but the fact that he would then never get the chance to discuss or reflect upon this thought means he may as well never have had it.
• To imagine the future was no more possible for Clive than to remember the past—both were engulfed by the onslaught of amnesia. Yet, at some level, Clive could not be unaware of the sort of place he was in, and the likelihood that he would spend the rest of his life, his endless night, in such a place.
• Clive and Deborah are still very much in love with each other, despite his amnesia. (Indeed, Deborah’s book is subtitled “A Memoir of Love and Amnesia.”)
• I suspected he had some damage to his frontal lobes, too—such jokiness (neurologists speak of Witzelsucht, joking disease), like his impulsiveness and chattiness, could go with a weakening of the usual social frontal-lobe inhibitions.
• As we drove to the restaurant, Clive, with great speed and fluency, invented words for the letters on the license plates of passing cars: “JCK” was Japanese Clever Kid; “NKR” was New King of Russia; and “BDH” (Deborah’s car) was British Daft Hospital, then Blessed Dutch Hospital. “Forever Today,” Deborah’s book, immediately became “Three-Ever Today,” “Two-Ever Today,” “One-Ever Today.” This incontinent punning and rhyming and clanging was virtually instantaneous, occurring with a speed no normal person could match. It resembled Tourettic or savantlike speed, the speed of the preconscious, undelayed by reflection.
• These all sounded like genuine memories. But they could equally have reflected his knowing about these events, rather than actual memories of them—expressions of “semantic” memory rather than “event” or “episodic” memory.
• “Oh, aren’t people stupid! Do you know the average IQ is only 100? That’s terribly low, isn’t it? One hundred. It’s no wonder the world’s in such a mess.”

  • I thought this was funny when I wrote this :)
• He said that he had never played any of them before, but then he began to play Prelude 9 in E Major and said, “I remember this one.” He remembers almost nothing unless he is actually doing it; then it may come to him. He inserted a tiny, charming improvisation at one point, and did a sort of Chico Marx ending, with a huge downward scale. With his great musicality and his playfulness, he can easily improvise, joke, play with any piece of music.
• I asked him about Prime Ministers. Tony Blair? Never heard of him. John Major? No. Margaret Thatcher? Vaguely familiar. Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson: ditto. (But earlier in the day he had seen a car with “JMV” plates and instantly said, “John Major Vehicle”—showing that he had an implicit memory of Major’s name.) Deborah wrote of how he could not remember her name, “but one day someone asked him to say his full name, and he said, ‘Clive David Deborah Wearing—funny name that. I don’t know why my parents called me that.’ ” He has gained other implicit memories, too, slowly picking up new knowledge, like the layout of his residence. He can go alone now to the bathroom, the dining room, the kitchen—but if he stops and thinks en route he is lost. Though he could not describe his residence, Deborah tells me that he unclasps his seat belt as they draw near and offers to get out and open the gate. Later, when he makes her coffee, he knows where the cups, the milk, and the sugar are kept. He cannot say where they are, but he can go to them; he has actions, but few facts, at his disposal.

  • This is interesting. So the procedural memory continues to learn but the declarative cannot make new connections.
• Clive “stuck to subjects he knew something about” and used these islands of knowledge as “stepping stones” in his conversation. Clearly, Clive’s general knowledge, or semantic memory, was greatly affected, too—though not as catastrophically as his episodic memory.

• Yet semantic memory of this sort, even if completely intact, is not of much use in the absence of explicit, episodic memory. Clive is safe enough in the confines of his residence, for instance, but he would be hopelessly lost if he were to go out alone. Lawrence Weiskrantz comments on the need for both sorts of memory in his 1997 book “Consciousness Lost and Found”:

   
  
  The amnesic patient can think about material in the immediate present. . . . He can also think about items in his semantic memory, his general knowledge. . . . But thinking for successful everyday adaptation requires not only factual knowledge, but the ability to recall it on the right occasion, to relate it to other occasions, indeed the ability to reminisce.
   
  

  This uselessness of semantic memory unaccompanied by episodic memory is also brought out by Umberto Eco in his novel “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,” in which the narrator, an antiquarian bookseller and polymath, is a man of Eco-like intelligence and erudition. Though amnesic from a stroke, he retains the poetry he has read, the many languages he knows, his encyclopedic memory of facts; but he is nonetheless helpless and disoriented (and recovers from this only because the effects of his stroke are transient).
• It is similar, in a way, with Clive. His semantic memory, while of little help in organizing his life, does have a crucial social role: it allows him to engage in conversation (though it is occasionally more monologue than conversation). Thus, Deborah wrote, “he would string all his subjects together in a row, and the other person simply needed to nod or mumble.” By moving rapidly from one thought to another, Clive managed to secure a sort of continuity, to hold the thread of consciousness and attention intact—albeit precariously, for the thoughts were held together, on the whole, by superficial associations.
• Proust’s description of Swann waking from a deep sleep, not knowing at first where he was, who he was, what he was. He had only “the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness,” until memory came back to him, “like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself.”

  • Memory is central to the sense of one's self and of being alive.
• How, why, when he recognized no one else with any consistency, did Clive recognize Deborah? There are clearly many sorts of memory, and emotional memory is one of the deepest and least understood.

• The neuroscientist Neal J. Cohen recounts the famous story of Édouard Claparède, a Swiss physician who, upon shaking hands with a severely amnesic woman,

   
  
  pricked her finger with a pin hidden in his hand. Subsequently, whenever he again attempted to shake the patient’s hand, she promptly withdrew it. When he questioned her about this behavior, she replied, “Isn’t it allowed to withdraw one’s hand?” and “Perhaps there is a pin hidden in your hand,” and finally, “Sometimes pins are hidden in hands.” Thus the patient learned the appropriate response based on previous experience, but she never seemed to attribute her behavior to the personal memory of some previously experienced event.
   
• It seems certain, likewise, that in the first two years of life, even though one retains no explicit memories (Freud called this infantile amnesia), deep emotional memories or associations are nevertheless being made in the limbic system and other regions of the brain where emotions are represented—and these emotional memories may determine one’s behavior for a lifetime.
• A recent paper by Oliver Turnbull, Evangelos Zois, et al., in the journal Neuro-Psychoanalysis, has shown that patients with amnesia can form emotional transferences to an analyst, even though they retain no explicit memory of the analyst or their previous meetings. Nonetheless, a strong emotional bond begins to develop. Clive and Deborah were newly married at the time of his encephalitis, and deeply in love for a few years before that. His passionate relationship with her, a relationship that began before his encephalitis, and one that centers in part on their shared love for music, has engraved itself in him—in areas of his brain unaffected by the encephalitis—so deeply that his amnesia, the most severe amnesia ever recorded, cannot eradicate it.
• H.M., a famous and unfortunate patient described by Scoville and Milner in 1957, was rendered amnesic by the surgical removal of both hippocampi, along with adjacent structures of the medial temporal lobes. (This was a desperate attempt at treating his intractable seizures; it was not yet realized that autobiographical memory and the ability to form new memories of events depended on these structures.) Yet H.M., though he lost many memories of his former life, did not lose any of the skills he had acquired, and indeed he could learn and perfect new skills with training and practice, even though he would retain no memory of the practice sessions.
• Yet H.M.’s case and subsequent work made it clear that two very different sorts of memory could exist: a conscious memory of events (episodic memory) and an unconscious memory for procedures—and that such procedural memory is unimpaired in amnesia.
• But can Clive’s beautiful playing and singing, his masterly conducting, his powers of improvisation be adequately characterized as “skills” or “procedures”? For his playing is infused with intelligence and feeling, with a sensitive attunement to the musical structure, the composer’s style and mind. Can any artistic or creative performance of this calibre be adequately explained by “procedural memory”? Episodic or explicit memory, we know, develops relatively late in childhood and is dependent on a complex brain system involving the hippocampi and medial temporal-lobe structures, the system that is compromised in severe amnesiacs and all but obliterated in Clive. The basis of procedural or implicit memory is less easy to define, but it certainly involves larger and more primitive parts of the brain—subcortical structures like the basal ganglia and cerebellum and their many connections to each other and to the cerebral cortex. The size and variety of these systems guarantee the robustness of procedural memory and the fact that, unlike episodic memory, procedural memory can remain largely intact even in the face of extensive damage to the hippocampi and medial temporal-lobe structures.
• Episodic memory depends on the perception of particular and often unique events, and one’s memories of such events, like one’s original perception of them, are not only highly individual (colored by one’s interests, concerns, and values) but prone to be revised or recategorized every time they are recalled. This is in fundamental contrast to procedural memory, where it is all-important that the remembering be literal, exact, and reproducible. Repetition and rehearsal, timing and sequence are of the essence here. Rodolfo Llinás, the neuroscientist, uses the term “fixed action pattern” (FAP) for such procedural memories. Some of these may be present even before birth (fetal horses, for example, may gallop in the womb). Much of the early motor development of the child depends on learning and refining such procedures, through play, imitation, trial and error, and incessant rehearsal. All of these start to develop long before the child can call on any explicit or episodic memorie

  • If episodic memories are reinforced by exact, identical recall (through the viewing of digital video clips, for example) will this produce robust episodic memories like our procedural ones?
• Without intact explicit memory, Jascha Heifetz would not remember from day to day which piece he had chosen to work on previously, or that he had ever worked on that piece before. Nor would he recall what he had accomplished the day before or by analysis of past experience what particular problems in execution should be a focus of today’s practice session. In fact, it would not occur to him to have a practice session at all; without close direction from someone else he would be effectively incapable of undertaking the process of learning any new piece, irrespective of his considerable technical skills.
  

  • So declarative memory is essential to focused learning because we need to know what it is that we need to know. Reminds me of the conversation with Nuno about knowing that a baby shouldn't have a candy because it might choke.
• This, too, is very much the case with Clive, who, for all his musical powers, needs “close direction” from others. He needs someone to put the music before him, to get him into action, and to make sure that he learns and practices new pieces.
• Practice involves conscious application, monitoring what one is doing, bringing all one’s intelligence and sensibility and values to bear—even though what is so painfully and consciously acquired may then become automatic, coded in motor patterns at a subcortical level. Each time Clive sings or plays the piano or conducts a choir, automatism comes to his aid. But what happens in an artistic or creative performance, though it depends on automatisms, is anything but automatic. The actual performance reanimates him, engages him as a creative person; it becomes fresh and perhaps contains new improvisations or innovations.

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• The first of Schacter’s “sins” of memory is transience, which covers both rapid and long-term forgetting, as well as problems at the time of encoding that may contribute to transience. There are several problems with this account, not least of which is the fact that the next sin, absent-mindedness, would seem to be a cause of transience. Which, then, is the “original” sin?
• Although Schacter tries to argue that information can simply be “lost” from long-term storage, it seems more likely that this loss results from a failure to specify the correct search cues.
• I have combined short-term forgetting and absent-mindedness into a single type of memory system failure, failures of maintenance. Failures of this memory system frequently result from lapses of attention (such as may occur in divided attention tasks).

  • Relates to the dangers of the trend of continuous partial awareness.
• it seems unlikely that we are constantly maintaining all our future plans in working memory; although prospective memory failures would likely be less common if this were the case, it seems like another aspect of memory may be at fault here.
• The second possibility is that you failed to search your memory for "driving home," or some other search cue that may have prompted you to remember your plan to stop for milk. This, however, is not a symptom of maintenance failure. Instead, this is a failure of what I call "memory search," in which the relevant information is accessible in memory, but is not retrieved. As it turns out, this type of memory problem is by far the most common.

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• A particular memory inaccuracy is likely to involve monitoring failure if a memory search has returned results, but these are taken to be valid results of the search cues when in fact they should not. Schacter categorizes this type of failure in three different ways: suggestibility, misattribution, and bias. It is not clear that these are fundamentally different. In fact, as discussed below, all of the evidence Schacter used to exemplify these “sins” can be more parsimoniously interpreted as failure to correctly evaluate the validity of results from a memory search.
• Although Schacter classifies these misattribution inaccuracies as distinct from suggestibility, this distinction may not be necessary. In a strict sense, errors resulting from suggestibility (for example, the subtle influences of question phrasing on the retelling of traffic accidents) can be viewed as misattribution errors, where the emphasis that originates from the question is instead falsely monitored as originating from the content of the memory itself.
• The aforementioned grouping of bias, suggestibility, and misattribution under the umbrella of “monitoring failure” has additional advantages. For example, “faulty monitoring” might also be at work in other phenomena, such as confabulation. This refers to the phenomenon where some patients with frontal damage will unintentionally fabricate stories about their past. This is not a failure of memory search, because it is clear that the patients know the kind of information they should be looking for – autobiographical facts. However, the results of this search are mistakenly regarded as accurate, as opposed to being correctly monitored (and discarded) as inaccurate.

  • Rat?
• even if correct and precise cues are used to probe memory content, closely related items may be mistakenly retrieved first. These incorrect search results may be discarded, and memory will be probed again, perhaps with updated search cues. If incorrect items are retrieved again, this process will repeat; eventually, the target item still residing in memory may actually become suppressed because so many related items have been previously identified as incorrect.
• this iterative memory failure is what is known as the Tip-of-the-Tongue phenomenon
• retrieval induced forgetting. This robust effect has been succinctly characterized as when “remembering makes subjects forget related memories” (Levy & Anderson, 2002)
• a witness who is asked to describe certain features of a crime scene will be significantly more likely to forget those features of the scene that were not asked about. This suppression-related failure of memory search roughly maps on to Schacter’s sin of blocking.
• subsequent presentations of a primed item will show the usual priming-induced facilitation of neural processing (in terms of reaction time, and other measures), but paradoxically a reduction in neural activity. This may happen because the neural circuits representing these concepts essentially become "tuned" to produce this memory trace, as a result of small weight changes after the prime. This results both in faster reaction times and less overall activity.

  • Will this happen with repeated viewings of a digital memory?
• this makes it highly unlikely that related items will become active
• these phenomena had been seen by Schacter (author of the "seven sins of memory") as an instance of the sin of transience, but there are subtle problems with this account. Under normal circumstances, information is probably not ever actually “lost” from storage. Instead, I argue that all memory search failure results from two distinct causes: information is either inaccessible because the proper “search parameters” are not being used as cues for the memory system, or the search mechanism itself is suppressing certain “search results.”
• the AB-AC task. In this case, the recall of one list of word pairs is impaired by the subsequent studying of a second list of word pairs when both lists share a cue. In this case, the “A” cue is ambiguous in a memory search, and thus results in the appearance of forgetting for the first list, in addition to slowed learning for the second list of words.

  • Does this relate to new memories overwriting old ones? NOTE: Who said that?
• cue specification failure may underlie some aspects of infantile amnesia. Although there is reason to think that encoding failures are also involved (Bauer, 2004), one interpretation of infantile amnesia is that waves of neural pruning during childhood make it essentially impossible to provide memory search cues that are sufficiently similar to the state of neural activity at the time of encoding. Hippocampus is already well developed by 1 year of age (Bauer, 2004), and although prefrontal cortex undergoes development well into the teens, most people would probably report fairly good memory before that age. Therefore, I argue that infantile amnesia results primarily from a failure to reinstantiate the neural context that was present during encoding in infancy – in other words, to provide sufficiently precise memory cues.

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• Consider a man at a party. There he is chatting away quite happily, when he thinks to himself – ‘Did I lock the front door before I left for this party?’ He cannot seem to remember whether he did or he didn’t. Now let us assume that the man did lock his front door. The problem is that he just cannot seem to remember doing it.

  • You won't be able to Google it either...
• For example in the above case of the man at the party, who was unsure as to whether or not he had locked his front door. All that he would need to do, in order to prevent all that needless worry, would be get into the habit of whenever he locks his door, taking the time to pause for a couple of seconds to think to himself. ‘I have locked the door.’ Now because he has made a conscious effort to observe himself doing this, he should not forget the event.

  • Hmmm...?

• That's why recent events are easy to remember: The environment is still loaded with cues and the chain of links is short.
• 1. Pay attention. You can't remember what you never knew, so don't be multitasking when you're trying to learn or memorize something: Give it the spotlight of your full attention at least once.
  
• 2. Understand. The more completely you get it, the less likely you are to forget it. (If you don't understand football, you're not likely to remember the scores.)
• 3. Repeat and apply. Directly after learning something, repeat it, preferably out loud. Even better, use it in your own way. If you want to remember a joke, for example, tell it to someone and try to make them laugh.
• 4. Chunk. Although short-term memory can deal with only about seven items at a time, you can finesse this limit by grouping items together and thinking of each group as a unit. Later, you can unpack those units. Remembering the numbers 5, 4, 6, 1, 9, 8, 6, 5 and 8 is harder than remembering the numbers 546, 198 and 658.
  
• 5. Make meaning. Nonsense is hard to remember.
• 6. Look for patterns. Stanford researchers have found that forgetting is a key aspect of good remembering, but not because you have to clear out space; rather, it's because forgetting the less relevant details reveals the more meaningful underlying structure.
• 7. Visualize. Search the information for some element you can turn into an image.
• 8. Hook it to something funny. Stalagmites or stalactites -- which ones go up? Well, it's like ants in your pants: The 'mites go up, the 'tites come down.
• 9. Hook it to a melody, chant, rhyme or rhythmic motion. Remember singing A-B-C-D-E-F-G to the tune of "Baa Baa Black Sheep"?
• 10. Associate new with old. Greek and Roman orators had a trick for remembering a speech. They would create a striking image for each topic they meant to cover (see step 7), mentally put these images in the rooms of their home, and then, while giving the speech, picture strolling through their home. Each next room would remind them of their next topic, and in the proper order.
• 11. Link learning to environment. The memory tends to associate information with the environment in which one learns it. If you're going to be tested on something and you know where the test will occur, study the material in the same sort of place. If you don't know anything about the test site, study in a variety of locations so the memories won't get locked into cues from one environment.
• 12. Let 'er drift. If a memory is staying out of reach, stop fishing for it, the experts say. Instead, let your mind drift to the general area: to friends you knew then, to the school you went to, the car you drove ... with luck, you'll happen into the end piece of a chain of links leading to the memory you're after.

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• he posited that the mind is in the world (as opposed to the world being in the mind)