jk70-arin

Reflections of Memory and Web Page Design Memory, is it only the retention of data? We are not machines. I recently saw an episode of Scientific American Frontiers that explored memory. An experimenter found that memory was enhanced when pain followed an experience. This would make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Remembering the actions just before a traumatic incident can help prevent a repetition of the traumatic event. If in a few cases that memory is the difference between survival and death and the survivors later reproduce, then the ability to remember things just before a trauma becomes reinforced by natural selection. It is a hard to reach out from a computer and inflict pain. Yet someplace in the common consciousness pain and trauma can be invoked. Memory is reinforced by order and harmony. Repetition also is a means of reinforcing memory. The size and color of text can be invocative. In our western culture we have come to associate red with fire, fire departments and...

A victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure. Commentary on “The Phaedrus” The Phaedrus plops the reader into a dialog between and Phaedrus on the outskirts of Athens. We are thrust into a dialog unaware of the greater context. At stake is love and rhetoric. How does one express depth of passion, the telling of the idea, the crafting of the concept? Memory is the key to the craft of rhetoric. Imprecise memory cannot do justice to a complex work. Is memory exercised at the expense of others? Can souls recall the holy things they saw, or have the lost the memory of the holy things. Memory lingers on scenes that have passed away. Can a memory be memory carried to true the true beauty? Is rhetoric an invocative exercise in finding the sacred truth? Is rhetoric memory? Do we craft form within ourselves a vision of reality, perfect or flawed, and then commit this to words? The dialog is a commitment to finding truth. Words are expressions of deeper truths. When words touch us, we fo...

The storage of images, and the emotional coloring of images. Color, in and of itself, is an image provoking similes. Creative spins ar altered by subconscious shading of emotions. The antithesis of order is purely emotive sequences of imagery. Imaging of memory spaces that is emotive, creates a deeper mapping of relationships. -Jake and Joe

Categorization is the spacial sorting of contents. This creates order. Establishing individuality of objects. How they are contained or indexed creates the cognitive schema for access. Information is stored in places, how the schema is constructed affects our access and ordering of our memories. Albertus established the mapping of objects. This structure is imposed upon random memories. - Jake and Joe

Impressions from reading Chapter 1 of Mary Carruthers’s book, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 . Memory is a rich and textured placed filled with localities, emotions and tones. Mary Carruthers draws upon the richness of the western historical tradition to give the reader a sense of memory was thought of in the Middle Ages. The text draws heavily from classical references, weaving within it Augustine and Cicero, Latin and Greek. She incorporates a historical framework constructed out of a modern classical education. Though the time frame she writes about had lost much of its knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman works, the functional society of the had created a Christian narrative overlay remapped from the classical forms. Middle Ages understanding of memory is explored in a variety of forms. Even the written style seems reflective of the ancient rhetorical form. Associative links are made between historical schools of though and definition...

Keith A. Basso finds embedded in the the language of the Western Plains' Native Americans a memory code of place tied to stories. Human memory is often organized in associative patters. Different cultures have different depths of association based on their interactions with their environment and their means of producing food, shelter, and clothing. The Inuits, who live in the Arctic have many words for snow; modern technical fields have their own complex jargon; language morphs to reflect the underlying complexity of the daily interaction of the individual with his or her environment. Basso illustrates how the traditional hunter gatherers of North America formed a rich linguistic bond between their culture and the spaces they occupied. What perhaps is most surprising in Basso's telling is the incredible detail and richness of the prescriptive association. His research into the the rich linguistic depths of the Western Apache reveals a form of thought that seems alien to the we...