Memory
thanks to the power of posterior information. (In a remarkable insight, the nineteenth-century Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire compared our memory to a palimpsest, a type of parchment on which old texts can be erased and new ones written over them.) Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you
... See moreNassim Nicholas Taleb • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2)
we realize that each time we revisit memories, real or imagined, the distinction between the two becomes less clear; the truth, or “something close to it,” becomes as mutable as our memories. Those memories, ambiguity-prone, recalcitrant, teasingly labile, are the unreliable scaffolding upon which we build our complex and unique story. Our one
... See moreSally Mann • Art Work: On the Creative Life
The method of loci is an early recorded instance of such protocolization. Its origins trace back to Hellenic lyric poet Simonides around 500 B.C.E. The tale begins with Simonides reciting an epic poem at a banquet, and upon stepping outside shortly thereafter, the banquet hall collapsed, leaving the crushed guests unrecognizable. Simonides was able
... See moreThis shift from inscription to prediction is not merely quantitative but qualitative: memory no longer stabilizes the past but generates probabilistic futures, projecting actions before they occur. The architecture of cognition itself has been refitted to anticipate rather than to recollect.
The Digital Assemblage: The Emergence of biomechanical
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But as the digital age drowns us in exponentially increasing rates of new content—most of which is trivial and ephemeral—it is becoming clear that almost everything more than a few years old gets buried by incoming content. This is a serious problem for the continuity of any civilization if most writing and ideas propagate laterally (from
... See moreHistory often presents itself as grand, sweeping narratives—wars, revolutions, prominent figures that reshaped the world. But the tiny, easily missed fragments of peoples everyday life holds a different truth than what we’re used to seeing. In some ways, the search for these details feels like reaching back in time and keeping those voices from
... See morethedigitalmeadow.substack.com • Why Do We Crave Useless Knowledge?
Social remembering: Our own recollection is tied to others with whom we have shared our life.
L. M. Sacasas • The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self
We are all, to one degree or another, made of what we call “memory,” not only the bits and pieces of time visible to us in pictures that have hardened with our repeated stories, but also the memories we embody and don’t understand—the smell that carries with it something lost or the gesture or touch of a person who reminds us of another person, or
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