Category: Education

The Limits of Memory

by James Wallace Harris, 3/3/25

It annoys me more and more that I can’t recall names and nouns. I don’t worry yet that it’s dementia because most of my friends have the same problem. But I’ve been thinking about my ability to remember and realized that I’ve never been good at remembering things.

I know I have aphantasia, which means I can’t visualize mental images in my head. I wonder if there’s a connection between not visualizing images and poor memory? People with astounding memory often use mental images as mnemonics.

The ability to remember is on a spectrum. On one end of this range, are rare individuals with photographic memories, while at the other end, are a tiny group with no short-term memories.

My new theory. One possible reason I have poor memory is my education. More precisely, how my personality approached learning as a kid. I considered K-12 a thirteen-year prison sentence. I paid just enough attention to pass tests. I mostly got Cs and Bs, with a rare A and D. I remembered things just long enough to pass a test.

I was never motivated to remember for the long haul.

I do like to learn. I’ve read thousands of books. Of course, most of them have been science fiction, but I also love nonfiction. However, information leaves me as fast as I consume it.

I’m starting to wonder if I would have a better memory if I had developed a different approach to school and learning. Primary and secondary education aim to give kids a well-rounded education. And in college, over half the courses are required.

The idea is we should learn as much as possible about the world. Is that a valid approach? After school and college, we specialize in whatever our work requires, and become selective about what we study for fun. Those subjects are what we remember best.

Reality is too big to know everything. What we need to learn is how to coexist with reality. We need the knowledge to fit in and survive. Would knowing more about fewer subjects help? Or would memorizing the deep dynamics of how things work better yet?

I do believe the more we know, the wiser we are. But there are limits to what we can understand and memorize.

I’m currently reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. In chapter 2, Harari shows how fiction drives our societies, not truth. We live by stories we want to believe. It’s much easier to vaguely understand fiction than to learn the details of reality. For example, more people accept The Bible than biology. That suggests a natural tendency to minimize how much we know.

That would be okay if the Earth were sparsely populated. But we live in dense, complex societies racing at the speed of computer networks and artificial intelligence. Living by fiction is fine if the year is 500 BCE, but we live in 2025. CE.

Let me give one example of what I mean by learning less to know more. I’ve been reading American history books to understand how our society got to now. That gives me a certain level of wisdom about our problems. However, I’m also reading about French history, especially the French Revolution and 19th century history. Seeing the parallels ups my level of understanding. But do I need to read the history of every country now and then? What I see is common dynamics. Reading more histories will give me more examples of the same dynamics.

The same is true of religion. I like studying the history of the Bible. I’ve also studied Buddhism and Hinduism. As I do, I see common dynamics at work. Harari’s new book Nexus points out the common dynamics of society and history.

The educational philosophy I experienced growing up pushed me to memorize a million details. What I needed to understand and remember is the fewer dynamics of reality.

People like to live by fiction because it’s easier. Politics is currently overwhelmed by fiction. Read Nexus to understand why I say that. The question we have to answer is if we can reject fiction.

Real information is seeing patterns in reality. Wisdom is seeing patterns in the patterns. The only real cognitive tool we’ve ever developed to understand reality is science. However, it’s statistical, and hard to learn and understand. We live in a time of simplex thinking. People see or are told about one pattern and they accept that as a complete explanation of reality. All too often, that pattern is based on a cherished story.

We can’t live by memes alone. Nor can we live by infinite piles of memorized details. The only way to understand is to observe consistent patterns. But it has to be more than two or three. That can lead to delusions. Even anecdotal evidence of ten occurrences could still deceive. How can this lead to learning more from less? It’s a paradox.

Last year, I read a three-volume world history. It provided hundreds of examples of strong man rule over thousands. of years. But how many kids, or citizens can we get to read a three-volume world history? Would a listing of these leaders, including the wars they started, and the numbers of people who died because of their leadership be just as effective? Would all the common traits they shared help too? Such as wanting to acquire more territory, or appeals to nationalism?

Could we create a better educational system with infographics and statistics? I don’t know. I do know I tried to process too much information. I also know that I only vaguely remember things. Memory has limits. As does wisdom.

JWH

Could You Give a One Hour Lecture On One of Your Favorite Subjects?

by James Wallace Harris, 2/19/25

I’ve read several books on Impressionism. I’ve completed a 24-lecture series on The Great Courses on the topic. I’ve seen several exhibits of paintings by Impressionists. Yet, if someone asked me about Impressionism at a party, all I could say was “Oh, I love their paintings.” I vaguely remember their struggles to be accepted into the annual Salon in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s. I can’t tell Manet from Monat, or Gauguin from Van Gogh. If I saw pictures of water lilies I’d guess Monat, and if I saw ballet dancers I’d guess Degas. I have a stack of books on Impressionism that I want to read, but I doubt if I’ll retain much from reading them.

I’m a lifelong bookworm who loves reading nonfiction, but the information in those books seldom sticks. That’s always been disappointing to me.

I could give a pretty good lecture on the history of science fiction. I could give a decent talk on Robert A. Heinlein, the man and his work. I could get up and give a half-ass talk on Philip K. Dick. But that’s about all.

But there are so many other subjects that fascinate me. Ones I regularly read about. I worked with computers for decades and had a serious computer book/magazine addiction, but I couldn’t teach anyone anything reliable about programming anymore.

Most of us believe we know far more than we do, but isn’t that a delusion? News and information are usually how we divert ourselves. We don’t learn, we consume.

I’ve been thinking about how I could remember more. One method would be to research a subject, condense the facts, and then write and memorize a lecture. Certain people can talk at length at parties on their favorite subjects. My guess is they’ve memorized their routines like memorizing jokes. I’m not sure you could extensively grill them on the depths of their subject. I might be wrong though.

Other people are trivia buffs. They’ve memorized a lot of details. I’ve wondered if I could store enough facts about the Impressionists to have a good conversation with another fan of that art movement?

Have you ever thought about all the information they stuffed into you while attending K-12 and college? And then consider how much you’ve forgotten? A good education has always been based on exposure to a wide range of knowledge. And then we specialized in learning what’s needed to make a living.

I’ve been thinking about another kind of education. Call it the know-it-all approach to learning. Most know-it-alls are usually full of bullshit. Often they are mansplainers who annoy women. However, there is nothing wrong with loving to know a lot about little. We need an accreditation body for every subject and a way to test and rank people who want to be know-it-alls in their favorite subjects. Something like chess rankings.

I’ve wondered if I would retain more knowledge of Impressionism if I took regular tests and quizzes on the subject. Let’s imagine that scholars at universities teaching about Impressionism designed a database system that covered everything they’ve ever learned about the topic. They could create an international body that ranked knowledge of Impressionism by giving standardized tests.

I picture them putting the exams online allowing anyone to take them as often as they liked for practice. But to get an official ranking score, you’d have to take a paid supervised test. People who wanted to be ranked in this subject would attend lectures, join study groups, read books, subscribe to online study programs, etc. Learning would be any way you like to learn. That’s the problem with schools, it’s one size fits all.

I believe that the act of competing for a ranking would inspire people to remember their subject. Right now, I have no incentive to remember what I read. Of course, this is just a theory. I do know when I realized I’d forgotten all my math knowledge, studying at the Khan Academy encouraged me to keep going. Even though I had Calculus in college, I had to start over with second-grade math. I worked my way back to the 5th grade. That felt good. I’ve been meaning to keep going.

JWH

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND by Elena Ferrante

by James Wallace Harris, 10/19/24

Technically, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is the first novel in a four-volume sequence that is collectively referred to as the Neapolitan Novels. Now that I’ve read all four books, I dislike that tagline for the whole story. The four books are really one whole novel, and even though Naples, Italy is very important to the story, it doesn’t properly describe the complete novel. Each volume picks up exactly where the last one stops. If they were published in one volume with no subdivisions, you wouldn’t notice any transitions.

For this review, I’m going to refer to the whole as My Brilliant Friend, and when needed, I’ll point to the individual titles as part of the story. The structure below uses the dates for the English translation. The books were originally published in Italian one year earlier.

  1. My Brilliant Friend (2012)
    • Prologue: Eliminating All the Traces
    • Childhood: The Story of Don Achille
    • Adolescence: The Story of the Shoes
  2. The Story of a New Name (2013)
  3. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014)
    • Middle Time
  4. The Story of the Lost Child (2015)
    • Maturity
    • Old Age: The Story of Bad Blood
    • Epilogue: Restitution

Circular Plot and Recursion

The complete story begins where it ends. And throughout this long story, it constantly refers to itself. It’s so recursive that it feels like two mirrors aimed at each other. It’s also cyclical because it’s about daughters and their mothers, who eventually become mothers of daughters. In so many ways, this story mirrors its parts.

The novel is about two women, Elena Greco and Raffaella Cerullo, who call each other Lenù and Lila. The story feels like an autobiography, and we have to remember that the author’s name is Elena too. Elena Ferrante hides behind a pseudonym, but this novel feels very autobiographical. Lenù and Lila react and respond to each other so intensely that it’s hard to tell who originates what traits. I even imagined that Elena Greco is writing about two versions of her own identity, the one who writes books, and her ordinary self. And it’s interesting that Ferrante hides behind her pseudonym, claiming she wants to remain anonymous while Lila also wants to remain anonymous throughout the story. So many reflections.

Literary Novels

I’ve always thought the greatest of literary novels feel biographical or autobiographical. They don’t need to be about real people, but they do need to feel like they are, and this novel offers two realistic portraits. Another trait of great literary novel is setting. We often think of London when we think of Dickens, or Russia when we think of Tolstoy, or Ireland when we think of Joyce. Ferrante has made her book about Naples and Italy.

If you’ve only read the first volume, My Brilliant Friend, you should tell yourself that you never finished the novel. The Neapolitan Novels boxed set runs 1,965 pages. On audio the four books run 78 hours and 52 minutes. To give perspective, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy averages about 60 hours in the various audio editions. Different translations of The Bible run 82-102 hours. The seven volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past runs 154 hours and 14 minutes. In other words, the whole My Brilliant Friend is a literary heavyweight.

Most novels that come out in a series are never artistically heavier than a single volume. That’s why when I finished reading the single volume entitled My Brilliant Friend, I couldn’t understand why the writers polled by The New York Times considered it the top book of the 21st century so far. It was good, but not that good. That’s because it’s only one-fourth of a whole. Now that I’ve read all four volumes, I can easily see why it was voted the top novel of this century.

Will it Become a Classic?

Whenever I read a highly respective modern novel I’ve wondered if it will someday be considered a classic. I’ve never felt sure about any modern novel to predict one before. However, for the whole of My Brilliant Friend I felt like it was at least an equal to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. That novel only runs 36-40 hours in audio, so it’s about half the size of the full version of My Brillian Friend. The Ferrante novel is far more ambitious, at least in being a biography of two women, so maybe it needs twice the space that Tolstoy used to tell us about Anna Karenina. However, Anna is never developed in such detail like Lenù and Lila.

We follow Lenù and Lila from being little girls to old women, and that makes a huge difference in storytelling ambition. This novel is primarily about friendship, even though it says almost as much about kinship. Men do not come across well in this story. This novel is feminist at a visceral level. I’d also say this book is an anti-chemistry book in the sexual sense. Time and time again, hormones overwhelm Lenù and Lila into making bad life-changing decisions. The great loves of their lives are the same evil Mr. Right. Nino Sarratore is no Mr. Darcy. Ferrante makes Nino one of the detestable bad guys of literary history. I can’t believe that Lenù and Lila didn’t immediately recognize that he was a clone of his father, Donato, the slimy seducer they knew from childhood.

The Prose

It’s hard to judge the writing of a translated novel. I do know that Ann Goldstein’s translation of Ferrante’s Italian prose is clear and precise, and the writing comes across as vivid and impactful, but the style is plain and unadorned. It lacks the colorful authorial voice of two recent novels where the prose enchanted me, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Nor does it have any the wonderful authorial commentary like old literary writers Dickens or Tolstoy since Ferrante’s story is told in the first person.

A lot of modern bestsellers have the highly refined writing style taught by MFA programs. Readability and clarity are valued over wordy digressions and colorations. This is one reason why I have a hard time predicting if a novel will become a classic a century from now. The classics we’ve crowned from the 19th century all have distinctive writer’s voices. Ferrante’s voice comes across through the characterizations of Lenù and Lila, and it’s confusing to distinguish Elena the author’s voice from Elena the character.

Final Judgment

I liked this story tremendously. It may have ruined me for reading lesser novels, especially for reading science fiction, which seldom achieves any kind of deep character development. The whole story of My Brilliant Friend reminds me of two other multi-novel sequences about characters as they age.

The first is A Dance to the Music of Time, a twelve-volume series by Anthony Powell which he wrote from 1951 to 1975 using his own life and friends for inspiration. I reviewed them here, here, and here.

And the other are books by Elizabeth Strout. Collectively, they follow the growth of two women too, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. I’ve reviewed them here.

This first reading of the entire My Brilliant Friend story will not be enough to truly appreciate this novel. Even though it’s told in a straightforward manner, it is quite complex in what it has to say. I listened to the books this time. Next time I’ll read them with my eyes. Luckily, I have a one-volume Kindle edition that includes all four books.

Ferrante made me think about my life as a whole. She also makes me think about aging. And she has quite a lot to say about the relationship between men and women. Her novel might be the perfect illustration as to why we don’t have free will. Whether or not it becomes a classic in future centuries, it is worth reading and contemplating now. It gives us lot to meditate on.

JWH

Precisely Expressing an Idea with Visual Tools

by James Wallace Harris, 8/19/24

Composing an essay makes me clarify my thoughts. We don’t think in sentences and paragraphs, but in vague words and images. It’s hard to write a sentence that says exactly what you mean the first time. The act of constructing a sentence helps us find out what we’re thinking.

Every day I watch videos on YouTube, and it’s become obvious that expressing an idea with both words and pictures can convey an idea more precisely. Have you noticed how infographics are being used more often in print and online?

I find this particularly true with the channel Useful Charts created by Matt Baker. Baker’s three videos explaining the types of atheists struct me as particularly clear and insightful. You should watch the series to see exactly what I mean, but I’m going to point out several things he did I thought were particularly good at making his ideas concrete.

I think the chart at the top of the page makes his point far better than if we were to just listen to the video or read the transcript. Of course, if he had written the information in an outline, it might have worked just as well.

  1. Implicit Atheists – A person who lacks a belief in God
    • Babies & very young children
    • Those who have never heard of the concept
    • Those who are truly undecided
    • Those who really don’t care
  2. Explicit Atheists – A person who firmly believes God does not exist
    • Those who have heard the concept, have seriously thought about it, and have concluded that they do not believe
    • What most people assume an atheist is.

But if you had to choose which form, words without graphics, or words with graphics, which helped you to see Baker’s points the easiest and fastest?

Later, Baker works to prove that people who think being an agnostic is different from being an atheist are wrong. Agnostic refers to a lack of knowledge, while atheist refers to a lack of belief. By Baker’s definition, most agnostics are atheists.

However, as the video progresses, Baker makes a good case that the term atheist isn’t especially useful because it doesn’t convey a worldview. That surprised me. I always tell people I’m an atheist, but Baker is right, the term doesn’t say much. The term atheist only says I’ve rejected the hypothesis that God created reality. It doesn’t say what I believe.

Baker claims that a worldview has three factors, ontology, epistemology, and axiology. From that I see my ontology is naturalism, my epistemology is science and reason, and my axiology is ethics. That particular combination is generally a humanistic worldview.

I should not tell people I’m an atheist but say I’m a humanist. But then, if people don’t understand the definitions Baker is presenting in his video, is that term any more informative? Baker goes into explain humanism and its history and says that humanists are naturalists aligned with science and reason interested in improving the world. That gives me a lot to think about.

The worldview image above is a mini lesson in philosophy, but the whole video is a mini lesson in how to classify your feelings about religion and philosophy.

In part 2 of the series, Baker goes into classifying atheists by personality types. For his dissertation he used the Meyers-Briggs classification system. Glancing through his dissertation, the information seems dense. It would take a bit of work to digest it. I bet the three videos explain his research far easier for most people to understand.

I’m left wondering if I should try to write my blog essays with more infographics. Or even try to write a whole essay in infographics.

Baker’s video on explaining atheists is minor compared to those where he explains larger subjects. Here’s his video on “37 Bible Characters Found Through Archaeology.” Don’t be put off that it’s about The Bible. It’s about how we know things. For example, most of the characters in The Bible that we can connect to history were from the Iron Age. And most of the characters that are considered myths come from the Bronze Age. Seeing that laid out graphically is very impressive.

I highly recommend spending some time watching the videos on Useful Charts. It’s making me rethink how to express ideas and concepts. Baker makes a wonderful video comparing commercial DNA tests people use for genealogy.

I was particularly impressed with his video on the “Western Esotericism Family Tree.” It explains a lot about people I’ve read about over the years.

JWH

If Ignorance is Bliss, is Knowing Suffering?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/27/24

This essay is about how keeping up with current events is hard on our mental health. Is there a point in becoming informed that turns self-destructive? Happiness seems to be a balance between knowing and not knowing, between learning and ignoring.

I’ve always been amazed by the amount of fiction we consume in our lives — the books, movies, television shows, plays, video games, role playing, comics, fantasizing, bullshitting, and so on. Is fiction our way of regulating our awareness of reality?

I’m trying to decide in this essay just how much news I should consume. I believe I have three basic choices:

  1. Ignorance really is bliss.
  2. Learn enough to maximize my own survival.
  3. Learn everything I can to answer why and maybe know what can be changed.

I also consider the first three lines of the Serenity Prayer practical advice:

God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, and
Wisdom to know the difference.

Mental health depends on knowing what can be changed and what cannot. I believe the old saying, “ignorance is bliss” is merely advising people not to try to change things. Eastern religion and philosophy are all about acceptance, and that might be one path to happiness, or at least contentment. Western religion and philosophy have always been about control, which often leads to frustration and unhappiness. However, Western religion and politics have always been delusional because they don’t know enough to wisely make changes. Too many people think they know, but don’t. And too many people pursuing ignorance follow the people who don’t know. In other words, even if you learn everything you probably won’t be able to do anything.

For most of my life I hoped humanity would evolve into a global humanistic society that was ecologically sustainable, maximizing freedom, and minimizing inequality. That’s obviously not going to happen. Instead, we’re returning to nationalism, xenophobia, and fascism. The growing consensus advocates: get all you can, protect what you have, and let the losers lose. Even Christians have become Darwinians.

The main message in the movies and television shows we consume is the good life is eating, screwing, buying, and travel. But hasn’t that made us the most invasive and destructive species on the planet?

I believe the fiction we consume, and the fantasies we chase, is our way of self-medicating a deep depression caused by seeing too much of reality. If I read or watch too many news programs, documentaries, or nonfiction books about what’s happening around the world I get bummed out and need to retreat. Is that the best thing to do? Or the only thing to do?

How much of learning about reality is educational, soul strengthening, and enlightening? Billions of people are suffering. How important is it to know that the majority of people on this planet spend a good deal of their lives in misery?

If you only watch NBC Nightly News, Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN, you’ll only end up worrying about problems in the United States. And that’s enough to depress most people. But if you take in news from around the world, it can deeply threaten your mental health.

I watch a lot of news from all over, and I’m convinced that our civilization is in decline. The number of failed nations grows every year. The number of weather catastrophes increases every year. Wars and famines are increasing. Life expectancies are declining. Economies are breaking down, and people are dying, becoming homeless or refugees, and suffering in ever-growing numbers. We’re lucky in the United States that we don’t suffer as much, but that’s why millions want to come here.

Decades ago, I stopped watching local news so I wouldn’t be depressed about crime. Even though I live in a high crime city, I seldom hear about it, and thus seldom worry. I could do the same thing with national and international news. That would be good for my mental wellbeing, but shouldn’t I do something?

Liberals believe society should alleviate suffering through laws. Conservatives want to solve the same problems by convincing everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The reality is liberals want to solve society’s problems by spending the conservative’s money, and the conservatives just want to ignore the problems and keep their money. And it seems the only problem politicians really want to solve is how to get reelected and feed their egos.

Civilization is coming undone. That’s all too obvious if you watch a lot of news and study local, state, federal, international, and world events. However, knowing, and even understanding the problems we face doesn’t empower us to solve them. We either solve them together, or not at all, and if you’re an ardent news watcher, you’ll know we’re living in an age where we don’t work together.

Here’s where I’d love to list and catalog all our problems and assess their chances of being solved. But that would take a book length bit of writing. I’m sure you see enough of the news to know about all the problems we face — or do you? Would knowing more help or hurt you?

I could construct a detailed taxonomy of all the problems we face. I could stop reading novels and watching television and study the heck out of current events. But other than finding enlightenment about why civilization is collapsing, are there any mental, spiritual, or psychological benefits to learning how and why we’re self-destructing?

The real question is: Can we do anything to stop our self-destruction if we all agreed to work together and knew the right solutions? Even if we banned all airplane travel, reduced car travel to a minimum, rebuilt the energy grid that maximized renewable energy, and we all became vegetarians, we’ve already put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to radically change the climate. We may have already destabilized the climate so it can’t be reversed.

And we don’t have to wait until the seas rise above New York and London before climate change will do us in. We’re about to see the collapse of the home insurance industry which will completely destabilize the economy around home ownership. Just that might bring about economic chaos.

I could go on. Aren’t we like cattle in a stockyard? Would knowing about the captive bolt pistol offer any personal benefit in our lives? Or is there a kind enlightenment to be achieved by figuring out how the system works?

JWH