60 | Lynne Kelly on Memory Palaces, Ancient and Modern

60 | Lynne Kelly on Memory Palaces, Ancient and Modern

Memory takes different forms. Memories can be encoded in the strength of neural connections in our brains, but there's a sense in which photographs and written records are memories as well. What did people do before such forms of memory even existed? Lynne Kelly is a science writer and researcher who specializes in forms of memory in the ancient world, as well as a competitive memory expert in her own right. She has theorized that ancient structures such as Stonehenge might have served as memory palaces, encoding social knowledge over extended periods of time. We talk about how to improve your own memory, the origin of religion, and how prehistoric cultures preserved their know-how.

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Lynne Kelly received her Ph.D. in English from La Trobe University. Originally trained as a computer scientist, she has worked as an educator before transitioning into science writing and memory research. She is an Honorary Research Associate at La Trobe University. She is the author of a number of books, including The Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal. Her work on memory methods and ancient societies was published as an academic book, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture, as well as in trade form as The Memory Code: The Traditional Aboriginal Memory Technique That Unlocks the Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Ancient Monuments the World Over. Her most recent book is Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory Using the Most Powerful Methods From Around the World.


Jaksot(416)

Holiday Message 2019: On Publishing Books

Holiday Message 2019: On Publishing Books

Welcome to the second annual Mindscape Holiday Message! No substantive content or deep ideas, just me talking a bit about the state of the podcast and what's on my mind. Since the big event for me in ...

22 Joulu 20191h 6min

77 | Azra Raza on The Way We Should Fight Cancer

77 | Azra Raza on The Way We Should Fight Cancer

In the United States, more than one in five deaths is caused by cancer. The medical community has put enormous resources into fighting this disease, yet its causes and best treatments continue to be a...

16 Joulu 20191h 22min

76 | Ned Hall on Possible Worlds and the Laws of Nature

76 | Ned Hall on Possible Worlds and the Laws of Nature

It's too easy to take laws of nature for granted. Sure, gravity is pulling us toward Earth today; but how do we know it won't be pushing us away tomorrow? We extrapolate from past experience to future...

9 Joulu 20191h 25min

75 | Max Tegmark on Reality, Simulation, and the Multiverse

75 | Max Tegmark on Reality, Simulation, and the Multiverse

We've talked a lot recently about the Many Worlds of quantum mechanics. That's one kind of multiverse that physicists often contemplate. There is also the cosmological multiverse, which we talked abou...

2 Joulu 20191h 11min

74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics

74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics

An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical...

25 Marras 20191h 6min

73 | Grimes (c) on Music, Creativity, and Digital Personae

73 | Grimes (c) on Music, Creativity, and Digital Personae

Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it easy for professional music to be widely disseminated...

18 Marras 20191h 18min

72 | César Hidalgo on Information in Societies, Economies, and the Universe

72 | César Hidalgo on Information in Societies, Economies, and the Universe

Maxwell's Demon is a famous thought experiment in which a mischievous imp uses knowledge of the velocities of gas molecules in a box to decrease the entropy of the gas, which could then be used to do ...

11 Marras 20191h 16min

71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere

71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere

The human brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons, wired together in an extraordinarily complex network of interconnected parts. It's hardly surprising that we don't understand the mind and how it w...

4 Marras 20191h 34min

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