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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Not sure if this should be here - books and the written word as means of propagating knowledge.

Goodness Gracious Meme

17:53 / 07.04.02

Not sure if this should be here, feel free to move it. Here because the 'future of the book' thread got me to thinking about ways of passing on/sharing knowledge.

This for me is linked to a realisation that at the moment I can't personally read, retain and pass on information from books for shit. For various reasons, it's an aptitude I've had to a pretty high level in the past, and it's gone kaput.

Generally my concentration span and memory are not what they were, so written material isn't of much use to me, but conversely I'm finding that my ability to learn/recall/pass on things that I've discovered experientially isn't at all affected. That if I do something sevral times, it seems to 'sink in' in a way that it wouldn't if i'd gained the same insights/info from texts.

Sooo... I'm interested in other ways that people use, think might work to pass on and share (which I nkow is really vague, and I@ll try and come back to and sharpen it later. rather stream of conc. right now). Examples that come to mind are as above, experiential, knowledge through roleplay, movement and the body, use of other senses eg from the visual/aural...

Anyone still with me?

10:16 / 08.04.02

I am not sure if this is quite what you meant, but... I am still in the mindset (largely formed by places of traditional education) where, in order to remember something adequately enough to be able to talk about it coherently, I have to write it down, and then probably write it down again - I don't mean condensing it, just pretty much writing the whole thing out, especially if it is complicated. I find it very easy to remember useless trivia, and much harder to remember arguments (especially historical arguments with dates and historians and screeds of necessary evidence).

But my methods are probably like that because I deal primarily with information that I encounter in a written form to start with - it might well be different if it was visual information, for example. I think I store that in a visual way, but piecemeal - I can't remember a whole painting in detail, for example...

14:24 / 09.04.02

I drive a 20 minute commute everyday (u.s. -- no public transportation system), and having in the last few years become completely disenchanted with "public radio" in the us (increasingly corporate- controlled, all the news is "sponsored by GE" or ADM and any number of truly dispicable inc.s), I've taken to audio-books. And I believe I retain what they say better than traditional reading. Also, at night, if I start reading, it wakes me up, but listening to someone read to me is like a lullabye. [truth be told, it's vaguely erotic, the experience of being read to, for me... and yet so few real-life people will agree to read to me for an hour each day, alas....]

heh heh. So I've got a kind of audio fetish, I guess. But I do believe that I'm more of an aural learner, anyway... is that sort of what you mean, lmpb?

14:47 / 09.04.02

I'm often the opposite way round, i think, alas - if i hear something interesting that I'd like to remember or think more about, I want to see it written down.
And like Kit-Cat Club, I write things out again and again until they sink in. Especially studying languages, where it seems doubly odd, I think - I find it much easier to learn a word by writing it until it sticks in my head.
Is this what you're after, Plums? I can't think of any examples on the physical side. Even role play in learning languages doesn't really work for me, as I'm a bit of a hermit in my learning habits.

Goodness Gracious Meme

09:40 / 10.04.02

yeah, this was the kind of stuff I was thinking of.

I'm also interested I guess in the notion that 'bodies remember things long after the mind has forgotten them' eg riding a bike, playing an instrument.

I've had experience with the second of these and was pretty sure I'd forgotten how to play the violin until I picked it up. Really did feel like my body knew what to do, and just got on with it, at which point my 'mental' memory caught up. Physical memory is something that I think works for me in this way much better, I find it pretty easy to remember how to do things I associate primarily with physical activity, like music, dance etc...

10:57 / 10.04.02

I got on a bike, nervously, last weekend and for the first three yards or so I really thought I'd forgotten how to balance properly. And then, click, I was like a 7 year old again. Well, a very unfit and scaredy-cat 7 year old but you're right - my body just remembered how to do it.
Do you think speaking a language is similar? I thought I'd forgotten most of the German I'd learned until I was in Germany and just spoke, without thinking too much. I wasn't exactly fluent but it was still there.

11:52 / 10.04.02

Physical memory is something that I think works for me in this way much better, I find it pretty easy to remember how to do things I associate primarily with physical activity, like music, dance etc...

Ah, I see! Yes, then. Physical things I cannot learn out of a book at all, in fact it helps to switch off the rational layer of my brain as well. E.g., ice skating and knitting. Especially ice-skating, which was a real eye-opener for me --a mind-opener. There's so much involved, you can't reduce it to words in any useful way. So it was out with a books and notes, and just try to pay attention and remember how you got your body to do this or that.

Mental things, if it's right to divide things up in this way, I have to learn out of a book. Maybe the better way to say it is, if it's verbal (symbol-based?) I need a book to learn.

I guess my experience with dance is sort of halfway between. When I've been in shows, I generally have to write down the steps linked to the lyrics... you know what, the reason this is a halfway thing is because I've only danced to songs with words. Hm. Anyway for this, I write things down in shorthand to set the moves in my head & then I have to forget what I've written for it to get smooth & look anything like dance.