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This ancient mnemonic technique builds a palace of memory - Lynne Kelly | Aeon Ideas
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Aboriginal Memory Palaces
Australian Aboriginal memory palaces are associated with the land, structured by sung pathways called songlines. A songline is a sequence of locations that orientate or contain valuable resources. At each location, a song or ritual is performed that will always be associated with that particular location, physically and in memory. Thus, a songline provides a table of contents to the entire knowledge system.
Some cultures mix the skyscape with the landscape as a memory device; associating knowledge such as seasonal variations, navigation, timekeeping and the ethics of their culture with stories about the heavenly locations. Typically, only fully initiated elders would know and understand the entire knowledge system of the community. This secrecy and sacredness of critical information protects it from corruption.
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Indigenous Portable Memory Aids
Rock art and decorated posts are famous aids to indigenous memory, but far less known are the portable memory devices. Incised stones and boards, tools, collections of objects in bags, bark paintings, birchbark scrolls, decorations on skins and knotted cords have all been used to aid the recall of memorised information.
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Memory Palace
A memory palace, or a method of loci, is an imagined physical palace where one piece of information is placed in each site, allowing one to mentally stroll through their memory palace drawing out information in the required order without missing an element.
There is ample circumstantial evidence that many indigenous cultures around the world have been using it for at least 40,000 years to store, in modern terms, absurdly large amounts of knowledge. But our dependence on writing has eroded this skill.
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The Memory Skills Of Indigenous Elders
Cultures without writing are called ‘non-literate’, instead their identity should be associated with what they do in the absence of writing to record their knowledge.
They employ a range of memory technologies linked under the term ‘primary orality’, including song, dance, story and physical memory devices. The sky or landscape itself, are the most universal of these and they provide highly effective memory storage across many societies
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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The Science of Memory
- Encoding - the stage when the brain consciously acknowledges information based on our senses. When we attach meaning or factual knowledge to any of this sensory input, that'...
Lifestyle Changes That Can Improve Memory
- Get a good night's sleep or take a power nap after learning something new, to help retain and retrieve memories better. Sleep deprivation and acquisition of too much information will not help you save those memories.
- Get moving, to improve the flow of oxygen-rich blood in your brain and to trigger neuron growth and new connections in the brain - critical for memory.
- Improve your diet. Fats from food can build up the brain, resulting to poor blood flow.
Mnemonics
Any system or device designed to aid memory:
- patterns of letters or words (common mnemonics)
- ideas (memory palace)
- associations (chunking)
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Vitamin D and sunshine
Vitamin D is essential for calcium absorption and many other biological processes. Lower levels of Vitamin D increase the rates of almost every disease like cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, cognitiv...
Vitamin D supplementation
Getting vitamin D through supplementation shows zero benefits. A study over a period of 5 years found supplementing with Vitamin D had no impact on cancer, heart disease, or stroke.
A number of researchers now argue that people with high vitamin D levels are healthy not because of the vitamin, but because they get plenty of exposure to the sun. Vitamin D is just a marker of that fact.
Sunlight is good for you
A dermatologist discovered our skin uses sunlight to make nitric oxide, a molecule in the body that dilates blood vessels and lowers blood pressure.
He exposed volunteers to the equivalent of 30 minutes of summer sunlight without sunscreen. The result? The nitric oxide levels in the volunteers went up, and their blood pressure lowered. Because of the connection of high blood pressure to heart disease and strokes, this discovery can prevent millions of deaths globally.
The Error in Isolating Events
- Many studies have been conducted regarding the psychological impact of a one particular event, like the trauma associated with the ongoing health crisis, or sudden job loss....
Good News, Bad News
A comprehensive study on Australian households, measuring the quality of wellbeing over 16 years found the following results:
- The biggest emotional scars come from deaths, divorce, and heavy financial losses.
- Negative events linger in the mind for much longer than the positive ones.
- The emotional costs involved with separation (like from a spouse) can be significant, and should be avoided unless completely necessary.
- Problems rarely come all at once, and most people recover, showing resilience and adaptability.
You Remain What You Are
Our level of wellbeing does not change much, with each event, even a catastrophic one, impacting us for a length of time, say a year or two, and then becoming normal to our minds, returning us to our previous levels of wellbeing.
This applies to boosts as well as the plunges.