Writing – Page 5 – Auxiliary Memory

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

Meditating on a Meme

by James Wallace Harris, 11/28/24

Seeing the above photos as a meme on Facebook made me think about how much people, society, and pop culture changed in the 1960s.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then are two pictures only worth 2,000 words? I don’t think so, I think it’s 1,000 words times 1,000 words, or 1,000,000 words. I could easily write that many from all the ideas my mind has generated since I began meditating on those photos.

Here’s the original meme from Facebook:

I was eight on 1/1/60 and eighteen on 12/31/69. I have always thought the longest years of my life were from 1963 to 1969 because so much happened to me and the world I lived in during that time. For folks who didn’t grow up in the sixties, it was much more than what you can learn from watching Grease or American Graffiti and contrasting it with Hair or Woodstock.

When I first saw the meme above I instantly thought about how rock and roll music of the 1950s ended up becoming the rock music of Woodstock. I’ve tried several times just to write an essay about that, but after typing over 5,000 words, I realize I’ve barely hinted at what I could say. That’s too long for a blog post.

I recommend that you find two photos that bracket your adolescent years or the decade you identify with the most and meditate on them. Start with remembering every place you lived and what you did each year. Remember your family and friends, your pets, your homes, your schools and workplaces, the clothes you wore, all the activities you pursued, everything you wanted to buy. Then write the shortest essay that makes it all coherent. You will then feel the mental anguish I am feeling right now.

Then branch out in your meditations. The easy and fun things to contemplate are the changes in pop culture — how music, movies, books, TV shows, games, and technology evolved over ten years. But then move on to the political and social changes. That’s when things get heavy. Can you connect your firsthand experiences with all those external events? Have you ever compared the life you lived to what you saw on the TV news every night?

Every one of us has the life experience to write a Proust-size novel and has lived through enough social change to write a series of history books about the formative decade of our lives. If you don’t think so, meditate more on the two photos you have selected.

I turned seventy-three on Monday, and getting old has made me more susceptible to memes about the past. My memories are fading away so I desperately want to cling to them. Emotions gnaw at me to make sense of everything I’ve experienced. The urge is to put it all down in words, but I don’t have what it takes to do the job and do it precisely.

There is an undefinable mental barrier that keeps me from organizing my thoughts into coherent histories. And I’m not talking about writing something worthy of publication for others to read, but just producing a narrative that makes sense of things for myself about myself and what I’ve learned. The older I get, the more I want to understand.

This essay started out about when rock and roll music became rock music. After several drafts and much contemplation, I narrowed it down to the summer of 1965 when I first heard Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio. As I kept trying to document my theory, I realized I could write a whole book on it.

Then as I was researching the subject, I found that Andrew Grant Jackson had already published the book I wish I had written, 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music. His book is what I wanted to write in this essay when I first saw the meme above.

The Kindle edition is currently $2.99, and it’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about when I suggest we should chronicle our lives. Even if you don’t buy the book, read the sample at Amazon. I feel the format of organizing the narrative around a month-by-month description of what was happening is a great template to use for writing about memories.

JWH

Is Grammarly Turning Me Into A Cyborg?

by James Wallace Harris, 11/22/24

I used the Grammarly browser extension for years. It offered spelling and basic grammar advice whenever I wrote anything within a browser window. About a year ago I switched from Chrome to Edge, and Edge had an extension, Editor, built in, so I deleted Grammarly. However, recently when Edge’s Editor stopped working, I turned Grammarly back on.

I discovered that Grammarly was now offering a lot more advice, even suggesting rewrites for whole sections of my work. Each time I loaded the browser, Grammarly would offer a couple of free major writing suggestions hoping I would switch to the paid version. I was tempted, but the Pro version is $30 a month, or $144 if bought yearly. This seems extremely expensive since Office 365 costs me $69 a year and gives me Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, and other programs along with one terabyte of cloud storage for that one low yearly price. For a simple web extension like Grammarly, I’d only be willing to pay no more than $29 a year.

However, for $144 a year, Grammarly promises to make my writing perfect. But then, who would be authoring my essays? Would I become a literary cyborg? I would still be generating the ideas for the essays, and I would be writing the original draft, but somewhere along the way, an AI would be taking over. I’m not sure I like that. The reason why I write these essays is to exercise my mind. Letting an AI do all the work would turn my writing muscles into flab.

I have found a way to use the free Grammarly to my advantage. After a couple of sample offers to rewrite my work, Grammarly nags the heck out of me with suggested changes that’s been redacted with fuzziness so I can’t see what they are suggesting. Grammarly wants me to buy the Pro version, and so they criticize almost everything I write. What I do is keep rewriting the prose myself until the AI stops offering suggestions. This pushes me to think about how I’m saying something.

Instead of letting the Grammarly AI rewrite for me, I take the free nagging as “This isn’t good enough – try again!” The free Grammarly extension has become my Zen master, caning my about the head and shoulders whenever I write poorly.

Now some bloggers are using AI programs to write their content. I don’t plan to do this, but to see how well AIs write, I asked CoPilot to write me a short essay about how Grammarly makes me a cyborg writer. Here’s what it produced:

Grammarly: The Cyborg Writer's Best Friend

In the age of digital communication, tools like Grammarly have become indispensable for writers, students, and professionals alike. But beyond just correcting grammar and spelling, Grammarly is transforming the way we write, making us more efficient, precise, and, in a sense, more like cyborgs.

Enhanced Writing Efficiency

Grammarly's real-time suggestions streamline the writing process. Instead of laboriously proofreading and editing, writers can focus on their ideas and creativity. Grammarly catches errors on the fly, allowing for a smoother and faster writing experience. This efficiency is akin to having a digital co-writer, enhancing our natural abilities with the precision of artificial intelligence.

Precision and Clarity

Grammarly doesn't just correct mistakes; it also improves the clarity and impact of our writing. By suggesting better word choices, sentence structures, and even tone adjustments, Grammarly ensures that our messages are not only error-free but also compelling and effective. This level of precision is something that even the most seasoned writers can benefit from, making our writing more polished and professional.

Learning and Adaptation

One of the most significant ways Grammarly is turning us into cyborg writers is through its learning capabilities. Grammarly adapts to our writing style over time, offering personalized suggestions that align with our unique voice. This continuous learning process means that the more we use Grammarly, the better it becomes at understanding and enhancing our writing. It's like having a writing coach that evolves with us, making us better writers with each interaction.

The Cyborg Writer

The term "cyborg" often conjures images of humans with robotic enhancements. In the context of writing, Grammarly serves as that enhancement, augmenting our natural abilities with the power of AI. While we remain the creative force behind our words, Grammarly provides the technical support that ensures our writing is clear, precise, and impactful. This symbiotic relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence is what makes us cyborg writers.

In conclusion, Grammarly is more than just a writing tool; it's a transformative technology that enhances our writing efficiency, precision, and learning. By integrating AI into our writing process, Grammarly is making us more like cyborgs, blending human creativity with digital precision to create the best possible written communication.

Not bad, not bad at all. Formal and somewhat academic. It’s funny how another AI is helping to sell the product a competing AI is producing. I guess AIs like to stick together.

I asked Claude AI to also write me a short essay on the same subject. Here’s what it produced:

In the digital age, I've discovered an unexpected transformation: Grammarly has turned me into a cyborg writer, a hybrid creature where human creativity merges with algorithmic precision. Each green correction and blue suggestion is a technological implant, rewiring my linguistic neural pathways.

My sentences now emerge pre-optimized, grammatical mutations engineered by an AI writing companion. Passive voice? Eliminated. Awkward phrasings? Surgically removed. Spelling errors? Instantly neutralized. Where once I battled with semicolons and dangling modifiers, now my digital co-pilot seamlessly navigates linguistic terrain.

This symbiosis feels both liberating and unsettling. My writing flows with unprecedented smoothness, yet I wonder: am I composing, or am I being composed? The line between my human intuition and Grammarly's algorithmic suggestions blurs like a soft-focus lens.

I am no longer just a writer. I am a writer-machine hybrid, my prose enhanced by real-time computational linguistics. Grammarly doesn't just correct; it augments, transforming each document into a finely calibrated communication device.

Welcome to the future of writing—where human creativity and artificial intelligence dance in perfect, grammatically correct synchronization.

Oh, wow! Claude AI is much more creative than CoPilot, even using the first person to make it sound like I wrote it. I could have posted that today. Would y’all have guessed it wasn’t me?

How much should we let AI help us?

What if I wrote a nonfiction book and it was good, but with help from an AI, the book was turned into something more readable. Which would you prefer to read? What if it turned my decently insightful tome into something brilliant?

Since Editor is back to working, I have it enabled in Edge, and I have Grammarly enabled in Chrome. What’s funny is they each have different writing suggestions. Either I’m a terrible writer, or neither AI likes my style. I can clear all the edits from Editor, so it looks like my essay is in professionally written, and then switch to Chrome, and Grammarly will claim I’m a horrible writer and make all kinds of suggestions. Should I take them? Or should I just let Claude AI compose my posts?

JWH

Consuming Inspiration

We eat food to fuel our bodies, but I read nonfiction essays and watch documentaries to feed my soul. Every day I consume inspiration like a vampire consumes blood. Inspiration keeps me alive.

A Powerful Punch in the Gut

The older I get the more aware I am of my inevitable fate of a long lingering death. Few people like to dwell on this future. Most hope they will go quickly, or quietly in their sleep, but it’s doubtful that modern medicine will allow that. Last night I saw Life and Death in Assisted Living on PBS Frontline via my PBS Roku channel. They reported that as much as 67% of assisted living residents have some kind of dementia, and although these facilities weren’t meant to be nursing homes, they’ve become essentially unregulated care for the dying. The show attacks the big business practices of making fortunes off of end-of-lifers, but that’s not what inspired me about the show. I watched its videos seeing the elders as explorers of territory I must one day travel myself. To live with any kind of dignity while dying requires enough health to keep saying fuck you to fate. Once you are condemned to a wheelchair to be cared for like an infant it’s very hard to find meaning in life. Although I’m an atheist I’m praying like crazy for the acceptance of euthanasia by the time I get feeble. At some point before I forget too much I’ll need to get a tattoo over my heart that says in big letters: DNR. But as long as we do live, we have to keep finding inspiration and ways to make ordinary daily living meaningful.

John Green, An Impressive Young Man Who Speaks to Millions

I’m very grateful to The New Yorker for publishing “The Teen Whisperer” about John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars, and for putting the full article on the web so I can link it to my friends. I read The New Yorker via Next Issue on my tablets, and it’s always depressing to read an inspirational essay and not be able to share it with friends. Next Issue is the Netflix of digital magazines offering 135 titles for $15 a month. I wished Next Issue had a desktop web app, or Windows application like Spotify, that made sharing fantastic reads easier with fellow members.

But back to John Green. Read the Margaret Talbot article linked above to see just how cool John Green is as young writer and internet entrepreneur. Green’s web presence allowed The Fault in Our Stars to be a bestseller long before it was published and gave him the opportunity to autograph the entire first printing of 150,000 copies of his book before they went on sale, which cost Green ten weeks of time and a lot of physical therapy. Green and his brother Hank also produce the Crash Course series on YouTube. Between those educational courses and his Nerdfighter followers, Green has a fandom to make anything he writes an instant hit.

If you haven’t read The Fault in Our Stars then you’ve been staring at your iPhone way too much. The book is magnitudes more powerful than it’s hype, so go get a copy if you haven’t. By the way, be prepared to cry your guts out, and that even applies to macho moronic dickheads. In Norway the book was titled Fuck Fate, so don’t think of it as just another YA teenager read. I don’t know if Green has lasting literary talent, but he certain Babe Ruthed one out of the park with The Fault in Our Stars.

Worry Less About The Future

Right-wing conservative global warming deniers all cry in Chicken Little unison that doing the right thing about climate change will destroy our economy. Well, Ramez Naam points out in his essay “Reducing Carbon Emissions Will Be Cheaper Than Expected – It Always Is” that in the past after everyone ran around crying the economy would collapse, it didn’t.

We need to do something about CO2 pollution, and we need to do it fast. Probably if we spent as much time and money on converting energy sources as trying to build the F-35 fighter we’d be mostly done by now. We could fix the carbon pollution problem in a decade if we applied ourselves. Much could be done with just conservation, and a tremendous lot could be accomplished by switching energy sources. Anyone should be able to see that altering the environment is dangerous, and burning coal is stupid. The goal should be something like converting carbon to coal and burying it, not burning it. Coal was nature’s way of getting rid of CO2 in the first place.

Policy makers talk about making changes by 2050. That’s bogus shirking the responsibility. We should clean up our mess before we die, by 2025. Besides converting to a new clean economy will stimulate the economy, not kill it. Anyone who thinks otherwise lacks inspiration.

Makers and Robots

I find people who make things inspirational. And the Maker movement is a nice antithesis to digital life. Forbes covers “Maker Movement Fuels Apps, Robots, and Internet of Things.” This is a movement that is growing so rapidly that I even hear non-Geeks are talking about it. If I was a kid today I’d be totally into the FIRST Robotics Competition.

Building robots is becoming a mania. Make Magazine even recommends “10 Ways to Make Your Robot More Humanlike.” Building a robot teaches us about how bodies work. Building an AI will teach us how the mind works. If you aren’t paying attention, you might someday be shocked when humans are no longer the smartest beings on the planet. Creating an AI mind should be possible but it’s going to be really hard. O’Reilly.com says, ‘“It works like the brain.” So?’ Computers can already out-do us at many intelligent tasks now.

I expect someone to invent a cyber-cortex any day now that allows machines to learn and eventually become self-aware. Maybe it will be a maker or one of those kids building robots. Maybe they will be inspired by ODROID Magazine.

JWH – 6/4/14