This Sciam article discusses a recent experiment with memory, that illustrates some of the complex detail that our memory can store. The experiment demonstrated that with a visual image to trigger memory recall, ordinary humans were able to quickly match and compare a really large number of details.

I thought a boingboing’s poster’s take on this was clever – managing long term memory may be a “search problem”.

Since I’m interested in memory, and the memory and association training systems from the underground esoteric culture like qabalah, art of memory, and mantrayama, I found this new study interesting, especially the visual cueing.

In the past several decades, cognitive psychologists have determined that there are two primary memory systems in the human mind: a short-term, or “working,” memory that temporarily holds information about just a few things that we are currently thinking about; and a long-lasting memory that can hold massive amounts of information gained through a lifetime of thoughts and experiences. These two memory systems are also thought to differ in the level of detail they provide: working memory provides sharp detail about the few things we are presently thinking about, whereas long-term memory provides a much fuzzier picture about lots of different things we have seen or experienced. That is, although we can hold lots of things in long-term memory, the details of the memory aren’t always crystal-clear

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-forget-things

A recently published study by Timothy F. Brady, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues suggests that these long-term memories may not be nearly as fuzzy as once thought, however. In their work, the researchers asked subjects to try to remember 3,000 pictures of common objects—including items such as backpacks, remote controls and toasters—that were presented one at a time for just a few seconds each. At the end of this viewing phase, the researchers tested subjects’ memory for each object by showing them two objects and asking which one they had seen before. Not surprisingly, subjects were exceptionally good (more than 90 percent correct) even though there were thousands of objects to remember. This high success rate attests to the massive storage ability of long-term memory. What was most surprising, however, was the amazing level of detail that the subjects had for all of these memories. The subjects were just as good at telling the difference between two pictures of the same object even when the objects differed in an extremely subtle manner, such as a pair of toasters with slightly different slices of bread.

If It’s Not Fuzzy, Why Do We Still Forget Things?
This new work provides compelling evidence that the enormous amount of information we hold in long-term memory is not so uncertain after all. It seems that we actually hold representations of things we’ve seen in a fairly detailed and precise form.

Of course, this finding raises the obvious question: if our memories aren’t all that fuzzy, then why do we often forget the details of things we want to remember? One explanation is that, although the brain contains detailed representations of lots of different events and objects, we can’t always find that information when we want it. As this study reveals, if we’re shown an object, we can often be very accurate and precise at being able to say whether we’ve seen it before. If we’re in a toy store and trying to remember what it was that our son wanted for his birthday, however, we need to be able to voluntarily search our memory for the right answer—without being prompted by a visual reminder. It seems that it is this voluntary searching mechanism that’s prone to interference and forgetfulness.

And it is this voluntary searching mechanism that is trained and developed with associative tools like qabalah.

A post in metafilter about AO Spare was interesting – in case you missed it – things rip by fast on metafilter – I archived it here. Basically a bunch of links to Spare art…

http://www.metafilter.com/76360/AOS

The Flag of Earth is a public domain design that can be used freely by everyone. It shows the blue “sphere” of the earth against the larger yellow arc of the sun, orbited by a white moon, against the black field of space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:CadleFlagEarth.svg

http://www.flagofearth.com/history.html

I always think a good review can be as useful to read and absorb as a book, in this modern age of information compression, sorting, and filtering. If you are interested in the history and character of Giordanao Bruno, this page is worth visiting.

I find the emphasis on Bruno’s involvement with the renaissance re-creation of the Art of Memory particularly interesting – I’ve written a bit about how important I think the art of memory is within the traditions of western consciousness exploration.

Giordano Bruno has been called a martyr to science and an occultist, but a new book argues that the brilliant philosopher’s unconventional behavior did him in.

the hooded and manacled effigy of Bruno, with its haunted stare, immediately catches the eye, and the gruesome story attached to it — Bruno was burned at the stake in that very spot, for the crime of heresy — cements him in memory. Practically every tourist who comes to Rome tromps through the Campo and hears that story, even if they’ve never heard of Bruno before. The students who commissioned the statue in the 1880s, as an emblem for freedom of thought and the division of church from state, really got their money’s worth.

But who was Giordano Bruno, and why was he executed in the Campo de’ Fiori in 1600? A common misperception mixes him up with Galileo, who ran into trouble with the church 16 years later for embracing the Copernican model of the solar system instead of endorsing the Aristotelian belief that the sun revolves around the Earth. (In fact, the two men shared an Inquisitor, the implacable Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, canonized by the Catholic Church in 1930.) Bruno, too, thought that the Earth circled the sun, and subscribed to many other than heterodox ideas as well: that the universe is infinite and that everything in it is made up of tiny particles (i.e., atoms), and that it is immeasurably old. But as Ingrid Rowland demonstrates in her new biography of the renegade thinker, “Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic,” Bruno was no martyr for science. What got him killed was a murky mixture of spiritual transgression and personal foibles, combined with a large dose of bad luck.

The Mineral of the Day

Because I think these have a real beauty to them.

Much of human history, and the power of himans, comes from our relationship to minerals. Using stones as colors, hammers, grinders, scrapers, and eventually sophisticated flint blade technology, the paleo and neolithic cultures. Clay and ceramcs, the chalcolithic cultures. Then metals, gold, silver, copper, bronze, iron, and steel. Then the fossil carbon cultures, coal, and now oil – our root culture. And now the new silicon and rare elements technology of the digital culture.

Humans are what we are, because we have mined the earth and transformed minerals into new forms and into energy.

And, they’re beautiful, too

When I first started this website I included a link to the website of Jan Cox, not because I knew the fellow, but because he seemed like a more interesting than average teacher, influenced by the Gurdjieff materials, but with a style of his own. And he had one of the few websites of a actively working teacher type, in a form and with a message in the same vein as my own ideas and writing.

I was touched when I heard that he had died fairly young, at the age of 67, from an unspecified form of cancer. He died long ago, 2005, I just heard about it recently. Oh well.

I’ve heard some people thought he was a petty, arrogant ass. That’s certainly possible. I wouldn’t know. I thought some of his writing was interesting enough, especially when compared to other “mostly unknown” thinkers and writers and teachers. Perhaps I judge too gently. But, mostly, I figure people should be judged gently.

Here’s an obituary notice:

http://www.jancox.com/obit.htm

And his website, not the prettiest. It was always kind of chaotic:

http://www.jancox.com/

And some youtube videos:

More Jan Cox videos at youtube

A Tribe thread about Jan Cox, with some opinions and stories.

We’re all gonna die, soon enough. ;-}

I thought this was an interesting little article. I have a great deal of hope and anticipation about what this kind of brain imaging can tell us about brain and mind.

Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works

“If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.

Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain’s emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”

Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don’t know why it works.

UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment.

They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces making emotional expressions….”.

…

“In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how “mindful” they are.

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions. ”

An interesting short article – interesting to me mostly because it is a conversion and disillusionment story, and I think conversion and disillusionment are extremely important and understudied topics in the field of self-development.

Does it say anything new about Ken Wilber? No, I don’t think so, it merely expresses a common arc in the various paths of the student. The attraction to a guru figure, and the inevitable subsequent disillusionment and seperation as the emotional glamour of the original attraction is unfulfilled, as it almost inevitably must be, because the original attraction to a teacher figure and parental figure is part of the nature of the “young mind”, and individuation and seperation is part of the self’s (inherent?) growth patterns.

I thought you might enjoy this fellows story.

“What interests me, personally… is what were the psychological reasons that I was so strongly drawn to Wilber’s work and is my present skepticism of Wilber due strictly to shortcomings in his work or also to a deeper skepticism of comprehensive worldviews in general, discomforting as it may be to wonder?”

“…the primary lesson should be methodological: that it will no longer do for a didactic celebrity to dictate Integral as dogma. It is because everyone is flawed, Wilber and his critics, that the appropriate method for philosophy is dialogue. Dialogue is what separates philosophy from dogma. This is what keeps our beliefs open for debate and reconsideration.”

“WINNING THE INTEGRAL GAME?”

I have a long standing iunterest in the self-help movement and it’s materials, ideas, and authors. In the self-help philosophies we can see how the occult and esoteric ideas of earlier centuries have evolved to become a new toolset. It’s a curious toolset, a strange mix of the useful and practical and the patently ridiculous and exploitative. But, for people interested in self-development, studying the ideas and language of the self-helpers can be fairly important.

Some of the practical applications can also be directly useful – for instance, I liked some of the attitudes in this article – yes, they apply to the ordinary persson who just wants to be a better salesman, but they also apply to the student of self-development.

So I thought you folks might enjoy reading this:

Number 1 – They Think, Say, & Do Negative Things.

Number 2 – They Act Before They Think.

Number 3 – They Talk Much More Than They Listen

Number 4 – They Give Up Easily

Number 5 – They Try to Bring Others Down To Their Level

Number 6 – They Waste Their Time

Number 7 – They Take the Easy Way Out

The 7 Destructive Habits of Incompetent People, from Mind Power News

Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians from the 16th and 17th Centuries – from Bibliodyssey