Abstract
But the results of one’s hypothetical internet search will also yield, interspersed among these predominant findings, a smaller number of old-fashioned resources: personal memory aids. One can easily access in cyberspace a variety of organizations boasting improved memory skills for a diversity of personal applications, from college students studying for exams to elderly people hoping to offset the cognitive effects of aging. Such resources of personal memory training represent contemporary self-help equivalents to the classical ars memoriae, the art of memory with which students in the Greco-Roman and later European traditions acquired copious knowledge of the arts, humanities, and sciences by acquiring habits of powerful mental recall. A simple internet search thus provides a suggestive juxtaposition between contemporary technologies of memory and the classical art of memory, between impersonal media of instant data retrieval and the personal discipline of rigorously honing one’s capacities for memorization and cognitive agility over the course of a lifetime.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form |
Subtitle of host publication | Sighting Memory |
Publisher | Taylor and Francis |
Pages | 1-12 |
Number of pages | 12 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781136633546 |
ISBN (Print) | 9780415895538 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 1 2012 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- General Arts and Humanities
- General Social Sciences