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Another low-sleep post-chemo night...
Sep. 10th, 2017 04:41 amI hit the rack around 11 pm and don't recall any major difficulties falling asleep. I then woke up around an hour ago, and after about 40 minutes of tossing and turning, decided to let nature take its course. If I get sleepy later in the day, so be it.
It occurs to me that the really nasty thing about bad advice is that it's taken, in many cases. As an example, it is, I believe, what turned me from being a "mnemonist" to an "occasional mnemonist."
I started with memorization the way a lot of young people do. My "gateway" drug was The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas. I picked it up too late to help with my engineering studies, but in plenty of time to help with my close-up magic career at the Forks Hotel in Buffalo, New York.
And then, well... I started running into a stream of bad advice, in the context of memorization, and more specifically, of why I did not assiduously pursue mastery of memorization techniques—getting really good at them—instead, remaining content to use them here and there throughout most of my adult life.
The bad advice I received was rooted in this strange hostility to memorization that pervades society, ranging from folks thinking I did my little memory routine at the Forks Hotel using something other than memorization, to folks who tried—perhaps with good intentions of which I could not help but be skeptical—to warn me of the dangers of using memorization techniques as a "crutch."
Regarding the former, I still remember how, after one performance, some half-drunk sourpuss sitting at the table announced that, without a doubt, I had an assistant in the wings, who had written down everything folks had said to compile the list I had memorized and was now prompting me from the next room via some kind of in-ear receiver that I was supposedly wearing.
As this fellow sat back in his chair with a smug grin after having "revealed" my secret, I could not help but think, "Dude, anyone who believes that explanation is really going to be impressed with what they just saw!" And while this series of incidents with people who simply could not believe the simplest explanation, i.e., that I memorized stuff, is not "advice" in the traditional sense, it served as a intermittent stream of negative comments that, basically, relegated memorization to the dustbin of useful skills.
As regards the "crutch" argument, if I was in the mood to engage my interlocutor, I'd usually say something like "A crutch is something you use while a part of you get's stronger, so I guess you may have a point." More often than not, I'd smile and say nothing, thinking "It's not my job this week to correct your misconceptions." Whether I chose to respond or not, the argument never did impress me, though it again could not help but reinforce the low esteem in which memorization is held among folks out in the world.
However, later in life, after I started working 9-to-5 for a living, one supervisor did come up with a more vigorous argument against memorization (at least I thought so at the time, to my disadvantage).
His point was that he did not want me to memorize company information, ostensibly because doing so—as opposed to simply writing it down immediately in a notebook and focusing back on work—put the company at risk. He justified this position by rhetorically asking, "Where would the company be if, say, you memorized all this information and then went out and got hit by a truck?"
Now, the fact was that I did regularly commit things I had memorized in the course of business to a notebook, so at the time, I simply my boss's remark to be yet another data point supporting the idea that memorization was frowned upon as being a useful skill to have. (As an aside, I was not experienced enough to mentally change the question to something like: "Where would the company be if, say, I memorized all this information and then went out and decided to quit and apply this knowledge in a way not covered by my nondisclosure agreement?")
In the end, I stopped trying to systematically memorize useful information.
The question in my mind today is: Why?
I suppose the negativity I encountered was a factor, but the fact is, I've never been strongly influenced by the opinions of others (if you're thinking I was never the most popular guy in the crowd...you'd be right). Yet I may have let said negativity play just enough of a role in my mind for me to largely abandon memorization, embracing in its stead the ability to write lots and lots of stuff down, but also to save information on my computer.
And I mean massive amounts of information, including documents that subsequently, might very well have saved me some work time, but for the fact that the files containing the information were (a) poorly organized and (b) I could not remember what was where. (I believe this is part of a phenomenon that Anthony has called "Digital Amnesia," that I learned about recently.)
Back in 2013, Tim Ferriss sponsored a contest at memrise.com, offering a prize of $10,000 to the first person to be able to successfully memorize a shuffled deck of cards in under a minutes. (I believe the world record at the time was somewhere well above two minutes.) I joined(and wrote about it here) not with the intention of winning the prize, but simply to have successfully memorized a shuffled deck of cards!
I did so, and several times, to boot (with my best run coming in at less than 3 minutes).
This reawakened an interest in memorization, but I really did not have any kind of road map to guide me in a systematic manner, so as to maximize the bang obtained for the invested buck (nor did I have the time to do the research and develop a systematic approach on my own).
The key word in the last sentence is "systematic." With what I did have on hand, I felt like a kid who had just been given a pile of parts from various construction sets (LEGO, Erector, e\Lincoln Logs, etc.), but who lacked the knowledge to make best use of the parts, leaving only the option to make small, inconsequential structures in which interest is lost quickly.
That's gonna change, now, methinks. :^)
It occurs to me that the really nasty thing about bad advice is that it's taken, in many cases. As an example, it is, I believe, what turned me from being a "mnemonist" to an "occasional mnemonist."
I started with memorization the way a lot of young people do. My "gateway" drug was The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas. I picked it up too late to help with my engineering studies, but in plenty of time to help with my close-up magic career at the Forks Hotel in Buffalo, New York.
And then, well... I started running into a stream of bad advice, in the context of memorization, and more specifically, of why I did not assiduously pursue mastery of memorization techniques—getting really good at them—instead, remaining content to use them here and there throughout most of my adult life.
The bad advice I received was rooted in this strange hostility to memorization that pervades society, ranging from folks thinking I did my little memory routine at the Forks Hotel using something other than memorization, to folks who tried—perhaps with good intentions of which I could not help but be skeptical—to warn me of the dangers of using memorization techniques as a "crutch."
Regarding the former, I still remember how, after one performance, some half-drunk sourpuss sitting at the table announced that, without a doubt, I had an assistant in the wings, who had written down everything folks had said to compile the list I had memorized and was now prompting me from the next room via some kind of in-ear receiver that I was supposedly wearing.
As this fellow sat back in his chair with a smug grin after having "revealed" my secret, I could not help but think, "Dude, anyone who believes that explanation is really going to be impressed with what they just saw!" And while this series of incidents with people who simply could not believe the simplest explanation, i.e., that I memorized stuff, is not "advice" in the traditional sense, it served as a intermittent stream of negative comments that, basically, relegated memorization to the dustbin of useful skills.
As regards the "crutch" argument, if I was in the mood to engage my interlocutor, I'd usually say something like "A crutch is something you use while a part of you get's stronger, so I guess you may have a point." More often than not, I'd smile and say nothing, thinking "It's not my job this week to correct your misconceptions." Whether I chose to respond or not, the argument never did impress me, though it again could not help but reinforce the low esteem in which memorization is held among folks out in the world.
However, later in life, after I started working 9-to-5 for a living, one supervisor did come up with a more vigorous argument against memorization (at least I thought so at the time, to my disadvantage).
His point was that he did not want me to memorize company information, ostensibly because doing so—as opposed to simply writing it down immediately in a notebook and focusing back on work—put the company at risk. He justified this position by rhetorically asking, "Where would the company be if, say, you memorized all this information and then went out and got hit by a truck?"
Now, the fact was that I did regularly commit things I had memorized in the course of business to a notebook, so at the time, I simply my boss's remark to be yet another data point supporting the idea that memorization was frowned upon as being a useful skill to have. (As an aside, I was not experienced enough to mentally change the question to something like: "Where would the company be if, say, I memorized all this information and then went out and decided to quit and apply this knowledge in a way not covered by my nondisclosure agreement?")
In the end, I stopped trying to systematically memorize useful information.
The question in my mind today is: Why?
I suppose the negativity I encountered was a factor, but the fact is, I've never been strongly influenced by the opinions of others (if you're thinking I was never the most popular guy in the crowd...you'd be right). Yet I may have let said negativity play just enough of a role in my mind for me to largely abandon memorization, embracing in its stead the ability to write lots and lots of stuff down, but also to save information on my computer.
And I mean massive amounts of information, including documents that subsequently, might very well have saved me some work time, but for the fact that the files containing the information were (a) poorly organized and (b) I could not remember what was where. (I believe this is part of a phenomenon that Anthony has called "Digital Amnesia," that I learned about recently.)
Back in 2013, Tim Ferriss sponsored a contest at memrise.com, offering a prize of $10,000 to the first person to be able to successfully memorize a shuffled deck of cards in under a minutes. (I believe the world record at the time was somewhere well above two minutes.) I joined(and wrote about it here) not with the intention of winning the prize, but simply to have successfully memorized a shuffled deck of cards!
I did so, and several times, to boot (with my best run coming in at less than 3 minutes).
This reawakened an interest in memorization, but I really did not have any kind of road map to guide me in a systematic manner, so as to maximize the bang obtained for the invested buck (nor did I have the time to do the research and develop a systematic approach on my own).
The key word in the last sentence is "systematic." With what I did have on hand, I felt like a kid who had just been given a pile of parts from various construction sets (LEGO, Erector, e\Lincoln Logs, etc.), but who lacked the knowledge to make best use of the parts, leaving only the option to make small, inconsequential structures in which interest is lost quickly.
That's gonna change, now, methinks. :^)
