Some thoughts in the memory palace

Here are some interesting things that I have found in some extracurricular reading. Lynda Sexson lovingly gave me a book by cultural anthropologist Jack Goody called The Technology of the Intellect. Here is what I thought was interesting in terms of how orality and literacy affect me.

He says, "What the individual remembers tends to be what is of critical importance in his experience of the main social relationships. In each generation, therefore, the individual memory will mediate the cultural heritage." Goody here is basically saying that in an oral culture, people remember what is most important to their individual lives, and as time passes those individuals mediate their heritage through only a selection of images.

But was is most interesting is the ultimatum he poses several pages later, which he relates to Nietzche's idea that we are "wandering encyclopedias", it goes, "literate society, merely by having no system of elimination, no 'structural amnesia' prevents the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition to anything like the extent possible in non-literate society...it becomes apparent that the situation fosters the alienation that has characterized so many writers...The literate individual has in practice so large a field of personal selection from the total cultural repertoire that the odds are strongly against his experiencing the cultural tradition as any sort of patterened whol...THE CHOICE IS BETWEEN THE CULTURAL TRADITION--OR SOLITUDE."

I relate this to the way I feel when I walk into a Barnes & Noble. I feel lost, stranded, given the feeling that there is more information in these books than can be leared in 100 life times. Where do I start. I know I'm going to leave out something important, something intresting. If I were in an oral culture, however, there would not be such astronomical amounts of information because only so much can be passed orally and through memory. Isn't this interesting stuff? Ong says on page 106 "Into it [grapholect] has been hammered a massive vocabulary of an order of magnitude impossible for an oral tongue. Websters Third New International Dictionary states in its Preface that it could have included 'many times' more than the 450,000 words it does include.

Also. I built my memory palace this weekend. Its the current house I live in. Its primary rooms are the garage, laundry, entrance, bedroom, office, living room, kitchent, bathroom, bedroom. I have found that the technique really does work! I'd like to do an infomercial about buying your very own memory palace at a great introductory price. Anyways, here is a video that explains how you can build you memory palace. It's very modern and very brief and very helpful (click the video link). My little brother, who is not so little any more, as a toddler had an interesting time with the letter "B". Instead of saying "because" he would say "b", so a typical sentence of his might sound like, "We gave the dog away b he taked big poops!" He said "b" so frequently that it caught on with my dad without him ever knowing it. We also liked to play the "Obserbe" game. You can play it anywhere you like. First tell someone to "obserbe". Give them a few seconds (10 seconds max if its a kitschy room) and then tell them to shut their eyes. Once shut, ask them a particular question like "What color are the flower near the fountain?" If they get it wrong it proves that they are unobserbant and need some obserbe skills.