the timboucher experience

I’ve been sleeping with my ham radio textbook underneath my pillow the past few nights. Osmosis, they call it. I’ve never heard of anybody who had it work. But I figure why not? I mean, I’m already downloading the future…

Anyway, through my finely-tuned twitter frequencies, I managed to find some more practical help in the form of a referral from a ham under the callsign AB9RF to a piece of memory software called Mnemosyne, after the Greek goddess of memory. Mnemosyne the software app seems to function according to a randomized flashcard system. You can use XML to input data sets. In this case, AB9RF hooked me up with all three decks for the technician, general and amateur FCC examinations.

I’m interested in taking the project a step farther. I’ve learned that the best way to learn large sets of information isn’t necessarily through wrote repetition. Total immersion and transmodal mixing tend to go a hell of a lot farther. Something about the extra work your brain has to do to translate from visual to auditor to linguistic to physical, etc in the encoding of memory through sequences of associations.

My thoughts turn to the Roman Room technique and the Method of Loci which ancient philosophers and rhetoricians used to memorize enormously long speeches and classical poetry. My thoughts are, there’s no reason similar techniques native to the Human NervOSys™ can’t be directly correlated to external technological tools like Mnemosyne to create easily replicable feats of memory across a diverse user base.

The experiment I’m going to try builds on how Mnemosyne is organized: data points that can be associated together. 1, 2 combinations. If this question or term or character, then this response. But I want to first of all pass all the data solidly through my sensorium: by recording myself reading through each question and correct answer pair. I figure I’ll leave out the wrong answers, cause why bother remembering something I don’t need?

Except then I’m thinking of hooking it into something else I may not technically “need”, but for which I already have existing personal associations. There’s something called the “peg” method in memorization techniques:

“It works by pre-memorizing a list of words that are easy to associate with the numbers they represent (1 to 10, 1-100, 1-1000, etc). Those objects form the “pegs” of the system. Then in the future, to rapidly memorize a list of arbitrary objects, each one is associated with the appropriate peg.”

I figured I would just use images selected from my website as my pre-existing “memory pegs” and then create a video for each question-answer pair, bonding the audio over the video of images I’m already familiar with.

I feel like I’ll have to work out the kinks, but I plan to share my results here. I consider this direct research into one of the central components of the Mandala OS, an intelligent aid to the personalized learning of massive information, knowledge and wisdom sets.

I will also, at the end, be publishing an actual product, probably a set of videos and audio of tools for rapid preparation for the Ham FCC licensing test, so stay “tuned” for that!

• Hold Your Breath Until You Pass Out
• Super Century
• “Super Delegates”
• Transformative methods
• Google Censoring Cryptogon