About
David Romano
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2007 Aug 25 (Sat)
The author describes the Major System, which works by associating letter (sounds) with a certain number, and is useful for remembering sequences of numbers. The author mentions that the number/letter associations are arbitrary (although he does give reasons for the associations he lists), but the choice of letters is not: they are all consonants. Specifically, the letters that are associated with a specific number all share a certain articulatory (phonetic) features.
This makes sense, because you would probably get confused if you associated B and F with a certain number, and then P and V with a different number. (The list of associations in this hack have B and P associated with 9, and F and V associated with 8.) Why is that? Well, P and B share the "bilabial" feature, i.e., both are produced primarily by using both the both ("bi") lip("labial"). Likewise, F and V share the "labiodental" feature, which means they are both produced by using a combination of the lips ("labio") and teeth ("dental"). By associating sounds that are articulatorily similar, it helps guard against mapping the wrong letter (and hence the wrong number) when trying to "sound out" whatever you're trying to memorize.
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TMS, which stands for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, is explained as a procedure that can be used along with EEG and fMRI. What TMS essentially does is short-circuit parts of the brain, so that those parts are no longer functioning for set duration (usually on the scale of minutes). At the end of the hack, there was a reference to an article that mentions the connection between TMS and savants, showing that shutting off parts of the brain can make the subject experience savantism. Autistic savants are autistic, yet are peculiar in that they exhibit extreme talent in memory, artistic ability, etc.
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2007 Aug 24 (Fri)
This hack extends the previous one by partitioning each room into different areas which you can then assign information to. For instance, if each room is the title of a comedy of Shakespeare, you can assign the left-wall to the protagonist, the floor to the number of acts or scenes, and so on. The book gives 11 distinct areas within a room that you can use for assigning information to, but for some rooms (like bathrooms) there are automatically other distinguishable objects that can be associated with information.
So this type of memorization seems good for data that forms some kind of hierarchy. Starting up student teaching in a few days, I think this can be a very useful concept for lesson and unit planning.
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The fourth hack explains what fMRI is and what it's used for. fMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging and is a technique to map brain activity. It gives a very clear 3-D image of brain activity by 'push[ing] the hydrogen atoms in your brain into a state in which they all "line up" and spin and the same frequency.' That just doesn't sound good for your brain, even tho' this technology has been around for a couple decades. Basically, anything that greatly changes the way your body function at the elemental level makes me very wary.
On the flip-side, it seems that the technology is progressing even further and being integrated with other technologies to make of for some of its failings. The Wikipedia article has a good overview.
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Today's hack again was merely descriptive. PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography and is used to gauge brain usage by inserting a radioactive element in the subject's blood stream:
The level of radioactivity is not dangerous, but this technique should not be used on the same purpose on a regular basis.So what they're really saying is that it is dangerous, and that it is harmful, but that your body can recover from the treatment if it gets some time off. Putting anything radioactive in my blood stream never sounded good, anyway.
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2007 Aug 23 (Thu)
Today's hack described what's called "memory journeys", and is another mnemonic system useful for memorizing information. Basically, you imagine walking through different places (e.g., start at your bedroom, then go to the bathroom, then the kitchen, etc.) and associate each location with the information you want to remember. The author gives an example of how he used it to memorize the 10 tragedies of Shakespeare.
Besides that, I learned that coriander and cilantro refer to the same plant, Coriandrum sativum. Coriander is usually the term for the seeds (used as a spice) while cilantro is the term for the leaves. Good to know :-)
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2007 Aug 22 (Wed)
The second performance hack continues where the first left off, and explains another system for memorizing tasks to do (the number-shape system). The subtitle for the hack is "Associate numbers with shapes and use the hunting and gathering faculties of your primitive ancestors to remember 21st-century data." In the "How it Works" section, the author states:
Our ancestors used their senses to learn more about the world, find food, escape predators, and perform many other essential tasks. These tasks were vital to our survival in an evolutionary sense, so the faculties involved in processing sensory information were well developed, and today our brains still process this kind of information thoroughly and efficiently.The phrase that bothered me is in an evolutionary sense, because it is superfluous, and might be incorrect. For instance, the passage without the phrase is just as accurate, and might be more precise:
Our ancestors used their senses to learn more about the world, find food, escape predators, and perform many other essential tasks. These tasks were vital to our survival, so the faculties involved in processing sensory information were well developed, and today our brains still process this kind of information thoroughly and efficiently."Look ma! No evolution needed!" I really don't see the point of basing our use of senses on the view that they are inextricably tied with an evolutionary process, rather than an innate process that never underwent evolution. Our faculties, surely, can become better developed, but I'm not sure it is an evolutionary imperative that they ought to be. But about the hack: useful. :-)
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This day's hack described what an electroencephalograph (EEG) was, how it was used, why it was used, and the pros and cons of using it. It also mentioned a project called OpenEEG that tries to provide instructions, hardware, and software for hobbyists to fool around with EEGs. The project has separate hardware and software mailing lists, and (unfortunately) the wiki link gives me an error page. (The correct address to the wiki is http://wiki.asiaquake.org/openeeg/published/HomePage). Besides that, there are a quite a few links on the main home page, which will get someone started if they are truly interested.
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2007 Aug 21 (Tue)
The first hack in Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain is for using a mnemonic to remember what to bring when you go out, and mentions a few mnemonic methods to help. In the See Also section, the author mentions that he carries a man-purse to help him with all the stuff he likes to bring when he leaves the house. While I haven't made it far enough to get a man-purse, I regularly carry a backpack around, and when I don't have that, I usually make sure I have cargo shorts so that I can stuff things in my pocket. But reflecting a bit more and what I usually like to carry (i.e., a couple books), the backpack is often too large and the pockets often too small. So I think I'm going to break down and buy me a man-purse. Or just start using the tote bag I got from YAPC::NA 2007 that I've neglected to use.
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I'm going to try to go through a hack a day in Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain. The first hack just gives some background on cognitive psychology and science, and this sentence stuck out to me:
Another problem with trying to guess how the mind works is that you can't trust people when they offer their opinion on why they did something or how they did it.
I think this sentence was poorly worded because it's not necessarily true that you can't trust people when they offer their opinion about something they did. The way that the author wrote the sentence seemed (to me, at least) to assert you can never trust what someone says about why or how they did something. In light of everyday experience and logic, you can trust people to offer why or how they did something, it's just not a rule. The simple reason being ego (making yourself look like what you are not). But just because you can't always trust everyone doesn't mean that you can't trust someone in certain situations. Two simple examples:
- I can trust my mom telling me that she gave me a car because I am her son and she loves me.
- I can trust my friend who is out of the country when he writes e-mails to me because he misses me.
Other than that, the first hack wasn't that interesting, but just briefly implicitly mentioned that the mind and brain are not distinct, and that's what should be kept in mind when reading the book.
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