User:Danohuiginn/memory

bl citations on memory

Per Hage: speculations on puluwatese mnemonic structure. Oceania 49:2 (1978:dec), p. 81-96

William Turner: mnemonic verses in a ninth century Ms., philosophical review 16 (1907), p. 519

still to look at
FC Bartlett, 1932: remembering (CUP)

GH Bower: a) organizational factors in memory, cognitive psychology 1:18-46 b) analysis of a mnemonic device, american scientist 58:496-510 c) narrative stories as mediators for social learning, psychonomic science 14:181-2 (1969)

r. horton and r. finnegan, eds, modes of thought, 1973 cole and gay, 1972: culture and memory, american anthropologist

haywood, f, 1976, myth, memory and the oral tradition: cicero in the trobriands, american anthropologist 78:783-96

d norman, 1976, memory and attention

havelock (1963) - on epic poem as a mnemonic device. no further details

Per Hage
Puluwatese vs. Iatmul, 2 micronesian groups

94: in Iatmul culture, 'the proliferation of names may operate not only as classificatory devices but as mnemonic markers as well'

PULUWATESE

Puluwat is one island group in the western carolines, micronesia. 'pelu' navigators memorise routes between islands based on star courses between islands. courses are made of points - which might be real, but are often imaginary. [doh: cf. 'doing the knowledge']. but these systems 'obviously do not function as devices to remember geographical relationships' (p. 85)

p. 86: ;The inference then is that these geographical schemata are mnemonic devices for the storage and retrieval of other kinds of cultural information - myths, spells, ceremonies, chants, recitations, etc. Each location in a sequence is a cue for an item of information and each sequence cointains some homogenous, ordered set of items'

'learning mats' used to help memory - 'special mats on which are placed rocks or shells to aid in the memorization of star positions' (p.90)

IATMUL

'Whereas the Puluwatese remember fixed sequences of locations to store and retrieve cultural information the Iatmul remember clusters of names to accomplish the same result'

men learn the names of many ancestors (including those of other clans), perhaps as many as 10-20,000 names, 'almost all of them compounds, each containing from four to six syllables, and they refer to details of esoteric mythology, so that each name has at least a leaven of meaning'

the meaning behind the names is the subject of debating contests between clans, where they fight over who has the right to a name - the clan that can remember the details of the mythology attached to a name has the right to claim it as an ancestor'

culture enhances these memories: - debating contests - frequent recitation of 'name songs', a feature of most Iatmul ceremony

in romantic poetry
Tucker, herbert F jr, memorabilia: mnemonic imagination in shelley and browning, studies in romanticism 19:3 (1980:Fall) file under: memory as creation

browning's Paracelsus is transfixed by the paradox of the creativity of memory

think of romantic texts reading 'there was a time...'

289: 'for browning as for the Romantic poets, the phrase signals the mind's capacity to memorialize and so to reappropriate what has been lost - often with a superflux of energy that leaves one wondering whether the speaker's memory has not more than half created the experience it pretends to be retrieving....Memory becomes a species of imagination'

surya-siddhanta
rev. ebenezer Burgess, 1858. 'translation of the sUrya-siddhAnta, a text-book of Hindu astronomy; with notes, and an appendex. available through JSTOR hmm...this is mostly irrelevent to the mnemonics, as far as I can see. shame.

lawrence schourup, 'japanese number mnemonics', journal of the association of teachers of japanese 34(2000) 131-158

account of how 'japanese telephone numbers are often printed in advertisments beneath a small-print linguistic mnemonic'

still to read
carlson et al, 1976. 'spontaneous use of mnemonics and grade point average'. journal of psychology, 92, 117-122

herrmann & searleman, 'memory from a broader perspective', 1994

art of memory reconceived
patrick h hutton, 1987, 'the art of memory reconceived: from rhetoric to psychoanalysis'. journal of the history of ideas

aleksandr luria studies the russian mnemonicist shereshevskii from a neurophsychological point of view.

372: 'the art of memory as it was understood in its classical formulation provided not only a useful skill but also a way of understanding the world. The power of the mnemonist lay in his ability to interpret the world through a paradigm that would provide its initiates with a clavis universalis, a master key to the workings of the universe'

look at: a) c18 naples giambattista vico 'who relates the power of memory to the poetic consciousness in which civilisation began' b) Freud

yates has ideas on the differences between platonic and aristotelian conceptions of the memory

to a platonist, the art of memory 'was a way of establishing correspondences between the microcosm of the mind's images and the macrocosm of the ideal universe'

380: 'Vico's New Science pointed toward a fundamental reorientation of thought about the uses of memory. Henceforth memory would be employed as a technique to uncover forgotten origins understood as lost poetic powers. The quest to touch the original, imaginative powers that make us creative would become the primary quest of the Romantic poets and philosophers of the early nineteenth century.

385: 'the cemetary was consciously redesigned as a field of memory for kin to visit and wherein they could reminisce'

see also folk traditions about the rise of nationalism.

now into freud, and his belief that the unconscious mind retains all memories (doh: look at how this has been bastardised and exaggerated over the decades since freud)

freud talks of 'screen memories', innocuous images that displace deeper, hidden memories - hence we have rose-tinted views of our childhood. how else to explain the fact that we remember so little of our childhood?

look up Eric A Havelock, 'the literate revolution in greece and its cultural consequences' (1982)

Ong, 'orality'

More Hutton
[watch patrick hutton - looks like he's on the same track I am]

Patrick H Hutton, 'mnemonic schemes in the new history of memory',history and theory 36:3, pp378-391, october 1997.

380: 'the problem of memory's relationship to history, therefore, became a leading field of historical investigation in the 1980s'. Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory, Pierra Nora 'inventoried the places of the French national memory'

mk matsuda, 1996: 'the memory of the modern' (OUP) simon schama, 'landscape and memory' (1995)

381: 'the classical art of memory was not about mere remembering. it was also about organizing knowledge'

machines to produce record-keeping for the modern era

Henri Bergson, matiere et memoire

Thomas Aquinas
peter m candler, jr, 'liturgically trained memory: a reading of summa theologica III.83', modern theology 20:3, july 2004

423: 'he illustrates how the ritual performance of and participation in the liturgy of the mass train the soul to remember well, in such a way as to guide one to the beatific vision. As such, it can be argued that, for Aquinas, the liturgy is the only proper art of memory'

mass is learning by doing - you stretch your arms out like christ, and 'the memory is trained to remember rightly' (426)

Sanskrit contexts
Jensine Andreson, vajrayAna art and iconography. Zygon 35:2 (2000), pp. 357ff uses the word 'melothesia' - not in OED, and I have no idea what it means. seems to be referring to similarity between macrocosm and microcosm

do 'mudra' gestures have a mnemonic function? with mudras, there are associations thumb/earth/smell forefinger/water/form middle finger/fire/taste fourth finger/wind/touch pinky/space/sound

364: 'concentration during mudrA practice may function to direct the reentrainment of conscious network in specific ways'

364: 'kAlacakra wields a bow and arrow, so practitioners assume the forms of bow and arrow, and so on' [doh: this seems like a case of mnemotechnics]

laughlin,mcmanus, d'aquili, 1990. brain, symbol and experience:toward a neurophenomenology of human consciousness

find things citing padoux

conservation of sacred objects
Chandra L Reedy, 'religious and ethical issues in the study and conservation of of [sic] Tibetan Sculpture'. Chandra L. Reedy, Journal of the American institute for Conservation 31.1 (1992)

42: 'The components of meditation are Asana (body posture), mudraA (symbolic hand gesture)(Saunders 1960), music and sound (Goldblatt 1982), mantra(sacred syllables)(alper 1989), deity images (paintings and sculptures) and visualization (creating a mental image of a deity and its associated colors, syllables and mudrAs in one's own mind)(Tulku 1984)" 42: 'visible images aid learning and memory of the important details of deity visualizations. The images are usually complex. Although many details are described in the meditation texts, it is difficult to remember them all without a visual model'

balAdhur
Gerrit Bos, 'balAdhur (marking-nut): a popular medieval drug for strengthening memory. bulletin of SOAS,1996 balAdhur, skt. ballAtaka Arab name 'h.abb al-fahm' (nut of apprehension), semecarpus anacardium, used for memory-improvement in al-risala al-shafiya fi adwiya al-nisyan

Pali similes as mnemonic
BG Gokhale, 'the image-world of the nikAyas', journal of the american oriental society 100:4, 1980

p. 446: 'The simile/metaphor played a vital part in the development of this tradition. For the bhANaka it served, in many instances, a mnemonic purpose, whereas for the dhammakathika it served as an instrument of expatiation and enunciation of a doctrinal point'

448: 'Finally, one of the most oft-repeated similes to illustrate the process of conversion from a non-Buddhistic view to the specifically Buddhist persuasion is indicated by the use of a simile of a pot that is upside down being turned right side up or lighting an oil lamp in darkness and revealing the shape of forms hitherto unseen. These similes are used almost as a matter of course where conversions are mentioned. Since these similes are used regardless of the time, place or person involved in these conversions one may reasonably conclude that they were a mnemonic device in the transmission of the text' [examples of the simile: DN I,74,95,107,126,149,167,182,212;II:34,35,36,103;MN II:480,497;III:66,286,397]

Brough, arapacana
arapacana is a sanskrit esoteric syllabary (named after first five characters) the 10th chapter of teh lalita-vistara, in the earlier chinese trnalsation by DharmarakSa (claled the P'u-yao ching) includes a syllabery in the arapacana order Brough suggests that this is because dharmarakSa's text of the chapter had not the syllables, but complete headwords:

'the most likely answer can only be that his manuscript of the Lalita-vistara itself had complete head-words, and not simply initial syllables. This idea leads to the further conjecture that such a list of head-words - which taken in series give no coherent sense - might have been in origin a mnemonic device to fix the order of the verses or the paragraphs of some important text, by taking the first word of each. Thereafter, the mnemonic would have been further reduced to initial syllables where possible'

David McMahon, 'orality, writing and authority in south asian buddhism: visionary literature and the struggle for legitimacy in the mahAyAna', 1998. history of religions

251: tradition of recitation was 'the way by which the saNgha established its claim to the buddha-vacana'

a niti verse: 'knowledge in books [is like] money in someone else's hands: when you need it, it's not there'

in mahayana, 'writing contributed to a restructuring of knowledge in such a way that vision, rather than hearing, became a significant mode of access to knowledge'

journal of the pali text society

mandala memory palace
zeff bjerken, 'on mandalas, monarchs, and mortuary magic: siting the sarvadurgatipariSHodhana Tantra in Tibet'. Journal of the American academy of religion 73:3 (sep 2005), pp 813-841. -p. 821 (following Fabio Rambelli on the 5 functions of a mandala: 'This meditative function fo the mandala overlaps with its use as (2) a scholastic schema and mnemonic device. As the cosmos represented in miniature, the mandala presupposes rules of correlation that can be applied by an exegete eager to incorporate all kinds of diverse phenomena' [e.g. a square could hint at relations between teh 4 directions, 4 elements, 4 colors, 4 kAyas, etc] 821: 'it is important to recognize how the mandala serves a didactic purpose here by organizing and encapsulating doctrines and practices, as it may be used to transmit esoteric knowledge. Such a feature would make it especially attractive as a portable "memory palace" for missionaries who spread the Dharma from India throughout Asia'

READ: Fabio Rambelli (1991). 're-inscribing mandala: semiotic operations on a word and its object', Studies in central and east asian religions 4:1-8

rondald davidson, 2002: 'indian esoteric buddhism: a social history of the tantric movement' m. kapstein, 2000: 'the tibetan assimilation of buddhism: conversion, contestation, and memory'. OUP

g. samuel, 1993: 'civilized shamans: buddhism in tibetan societies'

jz smith, 1987 'to take place: toward theory in ritual'

j strong, 1995, 'the moves mandalas make' j. of the int'l assoc. of buddhist studies 19:2, 301-312