The Powerful, Unexpected Impact of Memory Notes Dec 4, 2023

 On Mon, Dec 4, 2023 at 12:57 PM, Frederick Vogt wrote:

Essay I am making an effort to recall new stuff

My memory is getting better, but still very weak in that not everything is recalled.  Last night at supper, Amanda taught me that we were eating “Zucchini.”  I was calling it “Zen” because I could not recall the actual name for the vegetable.

Due to bad memory I am writing notes, and as of Wednesday memory cards, to hold onto things that I want to recall.  Today I have written about the philosophical (?) sense of “I" as done by Lawerence LaShan and in 1993 by Tom Peters.

My notes are not as dense as my steno pads listing what I was doing every few minutes.  The last couple of days my short term memory has been much better so I don’t need to make the steno pads as full of details as I have been doing the past two months.  The notes and memory cards carry ideas and facts that I want to know and recall.

The powerful, unexpected impact of my memory notes is that as I review them during the day and evening I develop a much better understanding of what they say.  The first example of this is the memorization of the first three definitions in my math book.  They seemed trivial, and what was their real purpose?  I had the idea because our math instructor in 1975 said we would skip them because they were obvious and should have been acquired as part of our abstract algebra course, so he would not waste his time by going over them with his advanced calculus class.

What I discovered as I read my current memorization notes in pencil on scratch paper was that these three definitions at the start of the book covered three concepts that could be well expressed with Venn diagrams.  They also presented an obvious, now that I knew them, layout of sets.

1. Venn diagram one is nothing: Math definition is the empty set.
2. Venn diagram two is overlap of two circles: Math definition is that part of one set is part of another set, complements.
3. Venn diagram three is one circle inside of another: Math definition is for subsets.