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March 09, 2006
Memory Palash
Matt Webb and Ben Cerveny’s Playsh is an appealingly obscure project from two of the smartest people I’ve met. It’s a command-line program, a sort of MOO, that you can enter in and walk around, and there seem to be a whole set of other sorts of actions such as in-MOO card games (Ben’s influence, no doubt). Matt briefly writes that “an RSS feed manifests as a room with many doors, and the RSS items are written labels on the doors. An upcoming.org events feed is a room with a special verb that says what’s on right now.”
It sounds like what this is, then, is a command-line Memory Palace
The memory palace could…be any structure that can be imagined….On top of the foundation of the memory palace, the student must place distinctive objects in each room. The objects can be thought of as memory coat hooks: places where things to Memory Palace be remembered will be left. For example, in the great banquet hall, I might place a fish in a corner, a crystal on the stairs, and a spear in another corner.
While the palace never changes, the objects inside of a room certainly can change. The strategy, when presented with a large text to memorize, is to walk into the first room of your memory palace and place the first stanza of your address next to a distinctive object, the second stanza next to another object, and so on.
Posted by Andrew at March 9, 2006 03:33 PM