Genius Dojo is—a book, a series of memory and creativity training games, and a multi-decade research and experimentation project.
Terms for this type of sketching: Visual thinking, Napkin sketching, sketch notes. These different teachers each have different backgrounds and orientations. Spark-sketches are somewhat unique in being specifically for mnemonic purposes and making lightning cards—note taking, invention, thinking on paper, are all secondary byproduct of practicing spark sketching. That distinction made, spark-sketches are essentially the same thing as these other types of graphic representation—except that thier main function is the specific encoding of information mnemonically.
And specifically for spark sketching, The book Genius Dojo: Games for increasing your Memory, Learning and Creativity. For more information and live training online geniusdojo.art
The beginning of wisdom, is the definition of terms.
Genius: is exalted mental ability—to go beyond yourself, transcend your limits—to invoke your genius. A genius is something greater than your self—the genius is outside and beyond yourself. Really, genius is not a person but a process, a mode of activity. Not a person, but an activity in the exograph.Dojo: is a room or training place to practice a formal system of martial arts, but Dojo is also a temple for training in Zen meditation, and for practicing ways of using the mind that transcend thought. The Dojo is symbolic for new perhaps unfamiliar ideas and ways of thinking. It is a place of simple moral practice with other people: a culture of respect, gratitude, perseverance, tolerance, compassion, cooperation, and transcending limits.
Dojo core principles: equanimity, beginners mind, consideration, acceptance of imperfect mortality, radiant feeling, and epiphany.
The Art of Memory: is closely related to art, semiology, visualization, learning, and language. In Western Civilization the art of memory originated in the larger discipline of Classical Greco-Roman Rhetoric. The practice of visual-perceptual mnemonics was an integral part of education in the Ancient Greco-Roman world, and many other ancient civilizations. During the Middle Ages, and particularly the Renaissance, this discipline was practiced and evolved—then it was suppressed in the late sixteenth century—so it is generally not taught in our modern educational institutions. The training of memory is at the foundation of all cognitive functions. The training of memory is the key to enhancing other faculties such as imagination, creativity, logic and critical thinking.
Association: is a pair of nodes. A node is a primitive chunk of information, analogous to a morpheme. An association is two nodes that are connected via perceptual attributes, so that the recall of one node invokes the recall of the other node. Clusters and chains are built from individual associations two by two, so that an entire cluster can then be recalled from one node of that cluster. Associations are made unintentionally and also intentionally, as a function of memory and creativity.
Associative recall: One memory node stimulates another by connection. Perception is based on one thing being recognizable in context or relative to another. Two thoughts are linked by association—like a cluster of grapes, if one grape is grasped all the other grapes will come with it.
Attention: is the mental faculty of outward awareness of a perceptual object with the senses (precept), or inward awareness of a mental object (concept). It can move rapidly, and people imagine that they can focus two things at a time. Oscillating rapidly between multiple threads diminishes the force of attention. Really, attention is serial and can only focus on one thing at a time with full capacity. The practice for memory and creativity is to manifest full force of attention, being presently perceptually aware—open, focused, stable, free attention, attentional stability. The tendency of attention is to instability– either foggy, unfocused, unsteady sluggishness, or unsteady frenetic over-activity. This creates a moment by moment, “background of unawareness.” Attention can become more free and stable through training.
Arrow of memory: Memory unconsciously and unintentionally functions backward in time, but with conscious intention, memory functions forward in time, we call this: memorization or learning. The arrow of memory is intentional and forward in time. It is to render an association, to memorize for recall in the future. The arrow of memory is mnemonically crafted and spaced repetition stabilized. It is like skipping a stone on the surface of the water—below the surface of the water is the decay of forgetting.
Brainstorming: is a formal discipline with specific techniques that rolls through possible scenarios or solutions to something specific. It can be practiced in a group or as a solitary activity. The primary principle is to suspend critical intelligence to allow free association of a broad range of possibilities, and to use the attitude and even literal technique of “yes-and” like an improve theater artist, or “riffing off your mistakes” like a jazz musician. Brainstorming is typically followed by a period of critical selection of one possible solution or scenario.
Brute-force repetition: The most common strategy for memorizing. A relatively inefficient and primitive technique, it is essentially just repeated readings, listenings or exposure to the source-information.
Repetition rightly used, is only for stabilizing, and the source-information must be first be mnemonically encoded, and actively expressed as recall (testing effect) at incremental and greater intervals over time (spaced repetition).
Chunking: “chunks” “working-memory”, the “the Seven Plus or Minus Rule”, “diviso” (Medieval Latin), and “subitizing” these are essentially equivalent terms—they are describing the same phenomenon. This is an essential part of how memory and perception work with their samples from the environment. It is also an intentional technique, intentionally applied, in disciplines such as memorization, learning and design.
All the senses encode impressions through "sampling"—working-memory can hold limited sets of these samples or nodes. The rule is: that clusters are made in sets of five or less nodes, but up to ten (7 + or – rule)—two being the basic structure (association). This rule defines the very real functional limits of working-memory relative to number of items or sets that can be held in working memory at one time.
The caveat to understand this is that each unit (node) can be composed of other units (clusters). Each node can also be a cluster. In this way, complex hierarchies of information can be managed within this limitation. For example, a small child just learning to read would see the letters: B I C Y C L E and recognize the letters as separate items to be remembered—an adult that has learned to read, seeing the same thing, would retrieve the word “bicycle”, as one unit, from long-term memory and recognize it as one item. This principle informs all the techniques of perceptual mnemonics.
Cluster: A geometric arrangement of nodes, an assembly of images, like a cluster of grapes. Each node is an encoded bit of information. The cluster is a single discrete unit of information or message. The cluster may include about two to five, or up to ten nodes (7+- rule). One cluster is one “chunk” of information—for example, a text sentence, historical date, or a phone number. Each cluster then becomes a node itself, represented by the base-node of the cluster. The cluster-glyph is seen in traditional art and logographic writing systems like Mayan and Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
Cluster diagrams: (mind maps, flow charts, network Diagrams) are commonly used in many disciplines, called by many names, and have slight variations in purpose. They are used for brainstorming new ideas, mapping processes, organizing ideas, or remembering information.
Cognitive Science is a general term for a number of related disciplines, about the brain-mind, perception, and psychophysics. Cognitive pertains to the action or process of knowing. It is a highly interdisciplinary inquiry and body of knowledge stretching across the fields of: systems thinking, information theory, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, education, and memory. It employs the scientific method, and also all the tools and methods of these diverse disciplines.
1) Computational Theory People describe the mind as if it were a computer, and as an act of power over the mind, and as if it is a damning proof of materialism, proof of a merely material world with no spiritual force or profundity. The term “computer” first applied to actual people who performed mathematical calculations, and then machines were designed to perform those calculations more efficiently and then also called computers. The very architecture of the machine we call computer was modeled after our limited understanding about certain processes of the human brain-mind. Then we turn around and use the machine as a model of the brain-mind. Is it any mystery that the machine modeled after the human brain-mind reflects some of its workings? This does not mean the brain-mind can be reduced to merely computation. Life is the opposite and even contradictory force to the theory of entropy. Yes there are mechanical aspects to life and mind, there are algorithms and cause-effect processes—and they are observed all throughout an apparently machine-like universe. They appear as information processing, symbol manipulations following step-by-step functions to compute input and output. Matter and physics have been summarized like this—matter and physics are forms of information.
Even a true theory of computation in the sense of a Turing Machine, must be expanded to include the workings of analog computers and neural nets and even quantum computation. So the metaphor is a moving target. Computation is only one incomplete model, not sufficient in itself. The map is not the territory. You cannot make a map of a field and then grow food-crops in the map—the real food-crops only grow in the actual “Field” itself.
2) Connectionist Model: comes from observations of the biological neuron and the observed network dynamics in the actual brain and nervous system of living creatures. These observations are reduced to mathematical models and further experimented with and developed through computer simulations. Artificial intelligence techniques such as neural nets and machine learning are products of this work. Connectionist models represent information through a top down and/or bottom up connected network of dynamic units. Dramatically surprising effects are discovered in these simulations, in particular the phenomenon of “emergence”, where very complex and apparently intelligent behaviors can be invoked through sets of simple nodes with very simple rules. Emergence shows that simple rules generate complexity from the bottom up and demonstrate higher-level patterns and evolutionary processes such as the flocking behaviors of birds and fish or movements and processes reminiscent of cells and other small animals.
The connectionist model is based around the idea that very simple rules applied to a large set of nodes can demonstrate rules and events that exist in the other models. These are very simple mechanical processes like the propagation of force through rows of falling dominos. These simple mechanics invoke non-linear dynamics that show unpredictable results more like clouds or the weather, than like machines. Perhaps clouds and machines are just dipoles of one continuum.
3) Extended Mind: Cognition and memory are "situated" in the context of neurobiological body, subjective perception, action, experience, processes, material artifacts, technologies, culture, other people, and the world environment. It is an embodied cognitive loop of reception and transmission. Cognition is "distributed'' across body, brain, and world in a single continuum. It functions in natural and humanly designed environments that shape what we can know and do—we also act on, and change our environments.
Our language becomes an extension of our thought. Through our speaking we observe the meaning of our words is not merely in our head. We speak and write and create artifacts that carry meaning. Through our enactments and artifacts, our meaning is made explicit and tangible and persistent. Information and meaning are encoded into mental images and material artifacts. Artifacts make it possible to externalize and keep track of information by extending it physically into the environment. This makes it possible to think and feel outside the brain and body—to participate in a larger part of the mind. We are actors as well as perceivers and the environment responds to our actions.
4) Field Model (Holonomic brain theory and M-fields theory): this is perhaps the most fruitful, but currently the most controversial of all the models. While it is based in hard evidence produced over hundreds of years, it chips into the presumption of a reality that is merely materialist, and this is clearly a politically enforced taboo. But in other areas of science the field model is becoming dominant. Every school boy or girl knows about Einstein’s theory, that all matter is made of light. And Quantum Physics, although it is misunderstood by even the most expert of physicists (by their own admission)—Quantum Physics remains the most practically successful technological and scientific model in existence.
The field model can be grasped though some very simple visual metaphors, especially the observable phenomenon of light and the movements of water and waves. The holograph is a three dimensional image produced by a laser and a wave interference pattern in a glass sheet. This wave interference pattern is essentially the same as the pattern on the surface of a pond when you drop two stones in the water. The concentric waves moving through time and space is a metaphor for the dynamics of fields. It has been observed that these types of dynamics are what happens inside the brain as the electrical symphony of neuronal activity. These electrical “brain-waves” can even be measured as extending at a distance outside the scull. It has been theorized that there are similar fields (not necessarily electrical) that behave like the invisible fields of electro-magnetism or gravity. These fields are invisible, but can be observed through their effects like holding a magnet under a piece of paper covered with iron filings. The M-field is a general term for Morphic Fields or Morphogenetic field.
“We are already familiar with the idea of fields extending beyond the material objects in which they are rooted: for example magnetic fields extend beyond the surfaces of magnets; the earth’s gravitational field extends far beyond the surface of the earth, keeping the moon in its orbit; and the fields of a cell phone stretch out far beyond the phone itself. Likewise the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains… Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they’ve been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual, I mean, most of our personal life, and most of our cultural life is habitual. When we consider memory, this hypothesis leads to a very different approach from the traditional one.” —Rupert Sheldrake, //name of text?
Interestingly each of these four models of the mind is also a model to explain the natural universe. Which posits the question: What is the relationship between the two? Why would the same models be descriptions of both mind and universe?
Dave Baumbach is a writer, illustrator, and digital-web-media designer/developer, specializing in elearning and human memory.
dave@geniusdojo.art
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