my birthday is in 11 days, someone buy me this?

“The modern sciences of memory emerged when newly developed sciences of mind coincided with the proliferation of new media: technologies for recording, transmitting, and recreating sounds and images. Photography, the phonograph, and the moving image all developed between 1850 and 1900. They became identified with memory process in a series of associations that shaped both how those processes were understood and how the technologies themselves would be used. Throughout the twentieth century, memory researchers continued to look to the most recent, cutting-edge recording technologies for insights into the nature of remembering.

[…]

There was never just one way to use recording technologies to think about memory. At one extreme, researchers suggested that they were models for memory itself. Perhaps, they reflected, memory was an internal recording that could be replayed at will… But on the other extreme, researchers also used recording devices to define precisely what memory was not. For a number of scientists, the idea that memory is a recording device rests on an unrealistic fantasy of accuracy and permanence. Instead of practices that facilitated ‘reliving’ a permanent record, they sought out ways to reveal an ineradicable role of interpretation… in the construction of knowledge and memory.”

Alison Winter: Memory

in looking at the photographic image, what we are doing is, in a sense – or, if you will, in the manifold senses of sense qua the sensational – beholding by way of our eyes (that is to say, receiving visual information through ocular means that could be construed [if we are, for a moment, to put aside Wittgenstein’s reluctance to define his own position – though not withstanding his extant ((that is to say, documented)) definitions – regarding the ((as opposed to [[though also aligned perpendicular with]] ‘a’)) phenomenological] by our brains as what I venture to hereby term as ‘seeing’) a document-of-the-world-that-is-not-the-actual-thing-but-looks-really-realistic-almost-as-if-you-had-been-there.

…In fact, our brain appears to be wired to nag about unfinished to-do list items as uncompleted tasks and unmet goals continue to pop up into our minds. This is called the Zeigarnik effect and explains phenomena like earworms — when you hear only a portion of song, the song is likely to run through your mind at odd intervals as your brain struggles to finish it. Originally, the Zeigarnik effect was believed to be the brain’s way of ensuring goals are eventually accomplished, by prodding you into urgency until they are. But recent research has shed new light on the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in our cognitive to-do lists.

[It] turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind tomake a plan. The unconscious mind apparently can’t do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.”

“These odd times find many of us sitting alone in front of a screen, searching for connection. Strangely, the experience is so virtually accurate, that it seems to work, at least somewhat. However, one big problem is when it comes to love, which pretty much requires face-time. That is, of course, unless we fall in love with our machines themselves.”

housingworksbookstore:

PARTY TONIGHT, here, for this book! It’s free! There’s going to be music! And poetry, duh.

booksmatter:

The distinguishing feature of this poetry collection is not, in fact, the poems—though they are good—but the book’s genesis. As Tishon and Meissner explain in the introduction: “…we’ve…