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.


Episoder(416)

23 | Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy

23 | Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy

Brains are important things; they're where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as a...

19 Nov 20181h 7min

22 | Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth

22 | Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth

There's no question that human activity is causing enormous changes on our planet's environment, from deforestation to mass extinction to climate change. But perhaps there is a tiny cause for optimism...

12 Nov 20181h 28min

21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently serious, we label this activity "history." Part of getting history right is simply ...

5 Nov 20181h 20min

20 | Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery

20 | Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery

Special Halloween edition? Scott Derrickson is a film-lover first and a director second, but he's been quite successful at the latter -- you may know him as the director and co-writer of Marvel's Doct...

29 Okt 20181h 23min

19 | Tyler Cowen on Maximizing Growth and Thinking for the Future

19 | Tyler Cowen on Maximizing Growth and Thinking for the Future

Economics, like other sciences (social and otherwise), is about what the world does; but it's natural for economists to occasionally wander out into the question of what we should do as we live in the...

22 Okt 201859min

18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory

18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory

String theory is a speculative and highly technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a single quantum-mechanical framework. This doesn't seem like a recipe for...

15 Okt 20181h 12min

17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis

17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis

The job of science fiction isn't to predict the future; it's to tell interesting stories in an imaginative setting, exploring the implications of different ways the world could be different from our a...

8 Okt 20181h 11min

16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

Aging -- everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundwo...

1 Okt 20181h 4min

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