R. Jean Mathieu's Innerspace

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Tag: roscoe learns to think (Page 2 of 2)

Roscoe Learns to Think – Petit Perception

31 December, 2010 /

For those of you in the audience who don’t speak French, learn. Until then, the rough translation of petit perception would be “keen sensing.” Think of Sherlock Holmes, able to spot, notice, and interpret the nature of a man’s hat or a bit of callus on his left hand. Think of James Bond, who can taste the finest distinctions of vermouth in a martini. Think of the Bene Gesserit from Dune, able to read lies into body language from a hundred paces (1).

These are fictional examples, but real men and women (such as Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin and Dr. Joseph Bell) have developed such abilities. Petit perception is a skill, and, like any other, it can be learned.

I’ve always been the absent-minded professor. Harry Lorayne, in one of his books, talks about “the man who knows the ascension dates of all the Kings and Queens of England, and forgets his wife’s birthday.” Normally, I’m not that bad, but I tend to forget about phone calls I was going to make, fail to notice turns, or miss regular-size print and have to start over again.

It got driven home to me way back in high school. My then-girlfriend was (and is) very into Western mysticism. She got frustrated at my obliviousness one day, and led me into my own room and had me close my eyes. She then asked me to name the objects in the room without looking.

Go ahead and try it. Amazing, eh? What did you get, maybe seven, eight objects in the room? Most of them in the wrong place? Don’t feel bad, pretty much everyone’s there with you.

She originally got it from a book by Joseph J. Weed, called Wisdom of the Mystic Masters. In my opinion, about two thirds of chapter four are the only reasons to buy the book, but they’re reason enough. Chapter four details a set of exercises, developing what Weed calls the powers of Observation, the powers of Concentration, and the powers of Meditation. In Learning to Think, we’ll be focusing on the first two.

Three exercises are included under each heading, and the general note that “you’ll probably think of many more.” For observation, Weed suggests the room game outlined above, remembering how many steps you just climbed on a staircase, and focusing on the ten minutes after you got up in the morning sometime in the evening. For concentration, he has us memorizing a few lines of poetry, doing some mental arithmetic, and focusing on a person’s face for about a minute every day. To these, I would add Kim’s Game (if you have a friend willing to help you with this), Robert-Houdin’s shopfront memory, layered listening, and ‘clocks’ whenever you have a spare moment. Don’t worry, they’re all outlined in the PDF.

I will do two videos for this one. The first one will be my trying to name the objects visible behind me with my eyes shut. Feel free to give me snark for any I miss. The second set of videos will be a little more fun: I will do math, in my head, while being assaulted by loud, annoying music, flashing lights, and scantily-clad women. China helpfully provides all three in institutions they call ‘nightclubs.’

For those of you playing the Home Game, you may want to try turning the camera to your bedroom, shutting your eyes, and naming the objects in the room on camera. I still suggest mental math in the nightclub, though, for the lawlz.

A full PDF of my expanded Petit Perception plan is available here.

1 – for those of you who think I got the phrase from Dune, like simulflow, I didn’t. I stole it from Robert-Houdin, same as Herbert did.

Roscoe Learns to Think – Mnemonics

29 December, 2010 /

When it comes to Harry Kahne, there’s almost no information at all. With mnemonics, there’s almost too much. And why not? The ars memorativa (the Art of Memory) is almost three thousand years old, with a history that touches names like Napoleon III, Aristotle, and that Greek, Simonides. Cicero wrote of it in De oratore, St. Thomas Aquinas recommended it for meditation purposes, and the Puritans banned it for “promoting sensuous and lewd thoughts.” (I am not making this up.)

So why have you never heard of it?

Well, to start with, you have. Most of you remember Roy G. Biv from physics class, and almost all of you remember Every Good Boy Does Fine. Some of us could probably still sing along to this. Or this. Or, for the med students, this one.

The other reason you haven’t heard of it is twofold: First, cheap notebooks and writing supplies are available. Second, for mnemonics to actually pay off (besides one-offs like Roy G. Biv), you have to put a lot of work into it. Like, say, at least three months’ worth.

But why bother, really? We have calculators to free us from arithmetic, Outlook to free us from remembering our appointments, and as to anything non-smartphone-related, there’s an app for that. According to James from the Thoughtscream, a Stross/Doctorow-style augmented reality is just around the corner, rendering most kinds of present information-sharing and -storage moot. Well, I can think of at least five good reasons:

Reasons to Practice Mnemonics
1) I don’t have a smartphone (it’s true).
2) They haven’t invented an app for finding my damn keys.
3) Some of us need to learn a foreign language, for business, pleasure, or because the alternative is starving to death on the streets of China.
4) Facial recognition software is still primitive and flawed.
5) Every so often, in the rustic information-sharing confines known as a university, there are these things called “tests.”

(If you have more, feel free to add them to the comments section! Snark encouraged!)

And even when we’re all wearing contacts that link us to the Facebook profile of everyone we meet (and offer us discount prices on their fine leather jackets), being able to remember jokes, speeches, and the particular words the locals use to insult you will remain viable skills(1).

So how does it work and why can’t we just come up with funny acronyms or songs about everything? Well, we kind of can. Funny acronyms are easy to remember, because they’re either funny, or weird, or politically incorrect, or sexy, or something. One of my favorites involves Sarah Palin waking up naked in the Arizona desert next to an (equally buck naked) Bill Clinton (2). And that’s the key. Hook it up to something easy to remember. All mnemonic systems work on this basic principle.

For Learning to Think, I’m going to be working through the Memory Master course, at about two lessons a week. I’m also going to be liberally borrowing from, referencing, and discussing Harry Lorayne, Tony Buzan, Dominic O’Brien, the Rhetorica ad Herrenium, ludism.org, and whatever else I come across that’s relevant. A lot of the mnemonics literature is very similar, and the principles don’t change much.

In addition, as with simulflow, I’m going to establish a testing procedure and put a video up of me making an ass of myself. At the beginning, first month mark, second month mark, and end, I’m going to do a slightly-modified version of Harry Lorayne’s test. That is, I’m going to see and try to remember:

1.) An unordered list (just a list of objects)
2.) A list in order (the Presidents of the United States)
3.) A set of names and faces
4.) Ten words in an unfamiliar language (in my case, Spanish)
5.) A short but intricate joke
6.) A long number (the Golden Mean)
7.) A set of names and phone numbers

Home Game players! Same rules apply. I want to see you stumbling over who came after Lincoln or being unable to recite your boy/girlfriend’s phone number. Each video wins a no-prize.

A full PDF of Memory Master is available here.

1 – that last one in particular never goes out of style.
2 – I’m never forgetting “Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas.” No matter how hard I try.

Roscoe Learns to Think – Simulflow

28 December, 2010 /

The backbone of my Learning to Think is Harry Kahne’s “Multiple Mentality” course. Kahne was a vaudeville performer, you can see one of his performances here. Life before the Internet came along, huh? Speaking of pre-4chanic life, Kahne was also listed in Jay’s Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women. A historical footnote, next to that horse that counted by tapping its foot.

This is not, of course, where most of the Google searches lead to. Most of the Google searches lead here, to rexresearch’s on-hand copy of Kahne’s 1925 Strand Magazine interview and Multiple Mentality Course. Over the course of twelve exercises, each lasting about a week, Kahne will take you from three-pound mental weakling to a state where “YOU CAN MAKE YOUR MIND DO ANYTHING YOU WANT IT TO DO!” Throughout the course, Kahne (and his annotator, Mel Saunders) tell you that the simplest problems will become child’s play, unseen opportunities will be clear as day, and your mind will be restored to a youthful vigour and pep.

I’m not completely sold on all that, but I started the exercises back in 2007, in the halcyon days of Yangshuo, China. I would sit at the café, sipping my milkshake and dutifully putting in my hour a day. Often, friends would come by, or new acquaintances, and offer to play Chinese chess with me. I did much, much better at chess after an hour of Kahne’s exercises than before, and much better at the end of the month than at the beginning. In addition, I felt …something going on in my head. The best way to put it is it felt like my brain separated into two parallel parts and followed separate, but synchronized, tracks.

Other than that experience, I once found, many years ago, a commenter on a message board mentioning that he’d done Kahne’s exercises. The thread, alas, now seems to be lost in the depths of the Internet, but I still have the email correspondence. He wrote:

Roscoe,
I like the course very much. I didn’t find the course difficult mainly because it builds on it’s self. Starts semi-easy and then gets progressively harder. I did have the stiffness he refers to, probably because of using parts of the brain that I haven’t used since school. What I have noticed is that I can think much faster than before I started. I can come up with answers to problems easier and faster. I am at VII right now because of work and going back to college. There is other things I have been doing along the same lines that I think have also affected the results I have gotten.
Let me know how you do.

Vlad Dolezol, over at vladdolezal.com, tried a modified course of Kahne’s exercises for the month of September, 2010. He played fast and loose with Kahne’s recommendations to maintain interest, and reported a lot of interesting effects (he could recite poetry while writing something else, but not write down poetry while saying anything). Vlad’s ‘wiped-out’ feeling is pretty close to the ‘stiffness’ that Kahne and my correspondent described (1).

Of course, all three of these are subjective experiences, anecdotes, hardly the stuff empiricism is made of. So, in addition to the course itself, I’m going to include regular tests, at the beginning, at the four- and eight-week marks, and after the course is completed. This test is going to be a fairly straightforward one: I’ll choose two sums and multiply them, while singing a song of your choice. The video evidence will be made available, yes.

If you’re playing the Home Game, put up the videos of your tests, too! An internets is yours for each video!

So, that’s about all the information I’ve been able to gather about Harry Kahne and his mentality course. As to the course itself, it’s no great trouble. An hour a day, once a day, for three months, spent doodling the alphabet or simple words in a notebook. The first part of the course is playing around with the alphabet in new ways, to limber up your head. The second part turns around and inside out short (three- and four-letter words), sometimes while spelling entirely different words aloud. From there, it progresses to other basic tasks done simultaneously and emphasizing seeing everything you’re working with inside out and backwards at the same time as forwards.

Kahne called his course multiple mentality, most overcaffeinated observers today call it multitasking (which, as Vlad points out, is paying limited attention to multiple things), but I think a more appropriate term could be borrowed from literature: simulflow.

A full PDF of Kahne’s program is available here.

1 – I didn’t feel it because, at the time, I was living in Paradise!

Roscoe Learns to Think – Introduction

27 December, 2010 /

Like almost everyone else, I make New Year’s resolutions.

Like almost everyone else, I break them.

Not this year.

When I came to China the first time, back in 2006, I became obsessed with human potential. Not the woo-woo stuff about telepathy and astral projections, but something more like the Mentats or the Bene Gesserit of my beloved Dune, a kind of ultimate flowering of human powers. I explored strange alleys of the internet and obscure sects of Chinese religion and practice, made a couple of hacking attempts at practicing what I’d found. I learned names like Kahne, and Weed, and Lorayne and LeShan, names you’ll soon be familiar with.

This year, I put it into practice.

I’ve collected all my old notes, and sorted them out. Of the wishful fantasy of becoming a Bene Gesserit, I’ve harrowed four abilities that I believe are skills, and which, like any skill, can be learned by dint of practice. These four I call simulflow, mnemonics, meditation, and petit perception.

Simulflow is similar to, but distinct from, multitasking. Multitasking involves giving partial (mental) attention to many things at once. Simulflow is the art of giving your full (mental) attention to several things at once.

Mnemonics is the ars memorativa, the Art of Memory. It involves training oneself in a few brain hacks or mental cheats to assist natural memory in normal tasks, like remembering where you set your glasses.

Meditation, as I’m doing it, is mindfulness meditation, paying attention to one thing at a time. This is harder than it sounds.

Petit perception is clocking the details. You would be amazed at the things you miss. Try closing your eyes and naming the objects on your desk. Then open your eyes and see how much you missed.

I’ve put together a plan that lasts twelve weeks, or three months. I call it Roscoe Learns to Think, and I’m starting on January 1st. By April 1st, I will have concluded this experiment, one way or the other. Either I’ll have finished, and accomplished what I set out to do, or I’ll have finished, and fallen short, or I’ll have given up. Only the latter is failure, as far as I’m concerned.

But this is only partly about me. Mostly, this is about you.

I’m including all this detail as an invitation. You can come along, if you like, and take part in the experiment, see if this stuff really works. If it does, you’ll be able to remember everything at a glance, and rattle it off casually a week later while you’re composing an email and reading one of my stories. And you’ll know where your keys are. If it doesn’t work, and this is the awesome bit, you’ll still be ahead of where you are now.

It’s gonna be tough going. We’re going to need practice, and discipline, and mastery(1) to get to April. I’m going to note my progress, and add snarky commentary, and put up suggestions for application (I’m pretty sure “How to have better sex by sitting around and doing nothing” is going to be fairly popular), and I suggest you do, too. Join me, and we’re in for the long haul. But we’re gonna Learn to Think.

Sound good?

Sign up here in the comments, and I’ll put your name up to the right. Yeah, right there at the top. A long list of men and women, willing to work for their bread and pay their dues, and willing to participate in a grand experiment, to find out what a human mind can do.

This year, I’m going to the stars. I’m going to Learn to Think.

Who’s with me?

————
1 – George Leonard’s Mastery is going to come up a lot, and it’s a great book anyway. You should read it.

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