August 2022

This was my first time reciting 3-4 pages of notes from memory, i.e. without external cues. The video recording is here on the left, but it's unbelievably boring and solely archival. Its purpose is as a signal that, at one point, I had these ideas top of mind enough to be able to recite them from memory in one sitting. It'd be near impossible to recite the ideas from memory without ruminating on them.

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During college I learned about Ebbinghaus' self-experimentation with nonsense syllables. Here, rather than cue retrieval or forgetting curves, I was interested in how a finite set of episodes of experience "generates" the worldview compositionally. By closing my eyes and ruminating on a set of ideas, can I expand the span of what I am able to see? Also, I wanted to suggest that, for elaborative encoding, handling abstract content depends on prior familiarity with the content rather than the content itself, which somewhat counters Nielsen, Foer, and others in the mnemonics community. ​​I later added some writing to this video, here​​, which goes into further detail. ​​