On Discovery and Experience
Making memories by living life
Table of Contents
Intention Based Mnemonics
One of the key differences in my approach to mnemonics to other mnemonists is that I centre intentions or reactions at the heart of my practice.
I cover a bit of what I mean by intentions in this essay, which you’ll want to read to make sense of what I’ll be covering today. The gist is that reactions form the core of our actual memories, and these are stored implicitly and automatically, without much effort on our part.
When you try to deliberately remember something, you have to harness an automatic process that is difficult to approach directly. You can tell your blood to circulate to your hand, but unless you’ve practiced autogenics, that won’t work. Instead, your blood will just keep on doing what it natually does.
In the same way, reactions are formed naturally without conscious effort on our part, and it requires practice to bring some level of deliberation to this process. Even then, like with autogenics, our conscious effort will never be anything but a shadow of our unconscious mastery.
Reactions are Evoked by Forms and Symbols
Our treasury of reactions are evoked by forms and symbols. A form can be considered the deeper truth of what a symbol points towards.
Broad categories (like dogs), and their individual instances (like Lassie) are what i’m talking about when I mention forms, while symbols (the word dog or an illustration like 🐕) evoke reactions to these forms. Forms are impossible to fully capture using symbols, which only ever offer us a partial glimpse of what they reference.
Intentions are our reactions to the forms and symbols we engage with throughout our lives. I use both intentions and reactions interchangeably, since most people aren’t quite familiar with the ancient scholastic meaning of intention.
Conjuring Reactions With Mnemonics
Everyone who uses mnemonics does so in an attempt to have their mental paintings conjure up stored reactions. The reactions themselves, however, are not a product of these mental paintings. They are something else entirely, and it’s important to understand the distinction between mnemonics themselves and your reactions to those mnemonics.
The reactions are your memory. The mnemonics are just a tool that can help you find those memories.
In my approach, mental paintings are used for organizing memories, not making them.
Memories are stored naturally through experience, much like your blood circulates without having to think about it. If you want to make specific memories, you should work to have specific experiences, and if you want to bind specific intentions or reactions to particular symbols, then you’ll want to structure your experiences so that this occurs naturally.
Experience Makes Memory
Mnemonics is not the art of “storing” memories, but the art of finding memories you’ve already stored. The mere act of attending to the world and being present and engaging it is all it takes to form reactions. Reactions, in my use, are basically synonymous with memories.
Finding those reactions? That’s where mnemonics shines. You use mnemonics to find your memories, not to memorize your experiences. Your experiences have already been stored somewhere inside your mind, you just don’t know how to find it yet.
Most people when they talk about having poor memories are really talking about two things: not being able to find their memories (which is different than not having a memory), and failing to attend to the present.
You can’t remember what you haven’t fully experienced.
That’s where discovery comes in. Discovery is the art of attending the present, of discerning forms from each other and noticing our reactions to those forms and their symbols.
On Discovering Reactions
Discovery is the act of seeing the world and noticing your reactions to it. Once you know that encountering X elicits the desired Y reaction, the memory is stored, at which point you can create a mnemonic to help find it.
When I think about a book chapter for one of the books I’ve “memorized”, a bunch of arguments and ideas from those chapters bubbles up naturally. I’ve “binded” the desired reactions (the arguments of a chapter) to a symbol (chapter titles or numbers). Thinking “Chapter X” elicits its arguments.
It really is that simple.
I read a book, I attend to its pages, I form a relationship between the pages and their arguments as well as the pages with their chapter, and then the chapter with the book itself. In some ways, you can think of the chapters as properties of the book, and the pages as properties of the chapters. The pages belong to the chapters in the same way that a tail might belong to a dog. Thinking about your pet dog’s tail will naturally conjure up the rest of its body in your mind. You don’t need to memorize your dog’s “tail”, “paw”, and “fur” on individual flashcards, studying them in order to remember that they belong to your dog. One part conjures up the whole.
That’s reaction at work.
Integrating Parts
Discovery is the art of attending to “parts” and their relationship to the environment they are embedded within. It’s discerning the boundaries of forms, or the relationship that symbols have to their referents.
This might seem very heady, but it’s quite simple in practice. In order to remember something, all you have to do is pay attention and notice your reactions to whatever it is you are observing. A weak reaction is a weak memory. Simple as. Remember, reaction in this case is whatever is naturally evoked by whatever it is you’re observing.
Four Ways of Improving Memory
I think there are four major ways to improve your “memory”:
1: Experience the right thing.
2: Attend to your experience in the right way.
3: Be physically prepared for the experience (i.e: diet, exercise, sleep, stress, and so on)
4: Order your reactions to experiences so you can find them
Mnemonics is chiefly concerned with the fourth option. In mnemonics, you translate forms into symbols, and you use heuristics to organize those symbols so you can easily access them whenever you want.
Discovery is mostly concerned with the second option. In discovery, you want to apprehend your experiences and integrate them so that you fully feel your responses to to the forms and symbols you encounter.
Schools generally ignore the third and fourth options, focusing mostly on the first two with varying degrees of success.
On Binding Intentions
I sometimes say that mnemonics is the art of binding intentions using mental imagery. What this means is that you use the mental images you paint to evoke specific reactions which you then organize in a way that allows you to consult those reactions when needed.
A reaction isn’t just an emotional response, it’s a mind-and-body response to a symbol or form. Our understanding of the world is a reaction, not a deliberate process. You don’t sit on your couch and then logically parse every detail of your environment. Instead, it all just makes “sense”.
That’s what I’m getting at when I’m talking about reactions or intentions. It’s the map of meaning that you automatically generate of your environment.
The act of “memorizing” is really just the act of building a better map of your environment, which involves discovery (filling in details on the map) and experience (growing the size of the map). Your health impacts how you experience things (if you’re underslept or malnourished, your map will reflect that fact), and mnemonics helps you find things.
Mnemonics can also help “bind” intentions by translating non-sensed properties of forms and symbols into sensible representations. This is one way mnemonics can be used in the exploratory process, by elaborating abstractions to make them more concrete or evocative. Again, intentions or reactions are automatic, so these translations only work if they effortlessly evoke their desired meaning.
I do not rely on mnemonics for binding intentions, since the simple act of attending and integrating experience is usually enough. Integration is basically just piecing the parts of an argument together, like a jigsaw puzzle.
Instead, I chiefly use mnemonics to organize my memories. As I said, my approach to mnemonics is different than most since I don’t use mnemonics to memorize things but to organize things I’ve already “remembered”. Instead, I rely on experience and discovery for binding reactions, and mnemonics for organizing those reactions.
Mnemonics can help in the discovery process, but they are not necessary. Mnemonics, however, are absolutely fundamental to organizing your memories if you want to be able to consult them the way you might consult Google or a library.