Many writers I admire wrote regularly for magazines and newspapers. The dynamic evolution of events is a different challenge than the quietness of one’s own mind engaged in creation. It also makes for a good way to keep contact with the outside world of the present. Nowadays, the attention deficit and the overwhelming informational deluge makes it even more tempting to read a newspaper or magazine than a novel.

Paradoxically, you’re reading this on yet another page fighting for your attention. But curiosity is one of my defining features, so I’d like to recommend three articles that I read recently. It’s easier than ever to publish online and the multitude of voices and channels is a good thing. But this time, my selection focuses on popular magazines which have a well-established reputation.

I will not summarize the articles ― just some thoughts and comments, so I don’t spoil the original articles that I’ll be linking. Just like the five books I’ve recommended recently, this will be a recurring column which will improve through your comments.

Keep your memories in mental boxes and drawers

Make a mental note with contextual details of the thing you want to remember. They will bring the scene back in all its colors. Don’t get lost in the details though, just try to make associations.

It’s much more likely to remember what you had for lunch last Tuesday if your favorite artist was sitting at a table nearby and the waiter complimented your hairstyle. You’re guaranteed to remember locking the door if you hum a silly tune on your way out.

Such associations are an excellent method of fixing memories, even when the logic that connects them is something only you know.

But there’s a more general method for memory improvement, known since Antiquity and popularized by Cicero and Quintilian: the method of loci, also known as the memory palace.

Think about a building or a room, real or imaginary, which you know in great detail. Visualize its front door, the hallway in all its length, where there’s a smooth burgundy carpet or shiny beige floor tiles, the doors that lead to all the rooms, the windows and paintings hanging on the walls, where a light buzzes or there’s a chandelier with six bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

Make yourself comfortable in that building or room of yours, get familiar with all its corners. Nothing surprises you anymore because you know automatically how to reach from that round corner window in the kitchen to the third shelf of the mahogany cabinet in the children’s dormitory.

Now stick something to your mind by placing it precisely in your memory room or building. Visualize yourself entering, going through the hallway, entering the room and placing the memory exactly in that drawer or box you know so well. Whenever you need it, retrace your steps and retrieve it with full confidence.

This sounds almost like a hypnosis technique, but many memory champions use it. Hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of points in memory palaces of the contestants were adorned with decimals of π or random numbers in memorization competitions.

Multiple studies have shown that the method is equally useful for polyglots, for (re)constructing their vocabulary. Another benefit was improving the mental state of people suffering from depression, by reactivating their positive memories.

Madeleine Aggeler, a lifestyle and wellness reporter, wrote for The Guardian about her own attempts to populate her memory palace with decimals of π or random words. She discussed mnemonic techniques such as the method of loci with experts in psychology and neuroscience, but the precise mechanisms they activate are not well understood, despite multiple consistent results.

Look back on history without mixing in the present

Memories build our personal history, as we recount our past with precision or affection, overcoming challenges that seemed too much. Looking back, we may not know how we made it, yet here we are.

“Hindsight is 20/20”, the saying goes, and it’s equally valid for events and for ideas. In retrospect, the solution to a problem makes it look like the difficulty we were facing was a non-issue. But history is an excellent teacher: we now see an easy route from the problem to its resolution simply because we solved it in a natural, almost obvious way.

However, such thinking may not be a good fit for the history of ideas. At most, it promotes a reverse engineering approach of the present state, but with a wrong point of view. When you already know the solution, the problem is simply not there anymore. Same goes for a decision: you may be thinking that it was taken aware of the consequences ― but that’s not usually the case.

Historical thinking that uses the correct context of events means first and foremost respect for the truth, by separating it from speculation. It is the understanding that we’re living with our eyes fixed towards a foggy road, navigating through a seemingly clear present towards a practically invisible future. The rearview mirror does give some information, but not on the direction we’re heading.

The engineers and the researchers working on Project Manhattan were well aware of the consequences of their work, as they were plans, not accidents. But finding complex mathematical computations such as roots and logarithms among Egyptian papyri or Babylonian clay tablets does not imply an understanding of them as mathematical functions. The race between Achilles and the tortoise makes Zeno of Elea a voice in the debate between atomists like Democritus and supporters of the infinite division like Aristotle. But it does not suggest that either of them had any understanding or remote thought about atomic physics or the topology of the real number line.

When working with history, some interpretation errors are due to profound mechanisms of our minds: the fear of the unknown and the inexplicable. You don’t even have to think about Antiquity to see such examples.

Think about the most recent time you met with a couple of friends. Ask them all detailed questions about how your day together went and compare that with your own memories. You’re almost guaranteed to find many differences, and if you ask about motivation, “Why did you say or do that?”, you’ll see the impulse of your brain to create meaning and justification, even when it’s forgotten or there simply was none.

Even more similar examples are contained in the tragic events that you went through or witnessed. Very few such events have a causal justification or, when they do, it rarely is about science or logic and mostly about the sheer complexity or plain randomness of life itself.

“We crave certainty, especially in the face of tragedy, and are quick to weave disparate facts into a coherent, and often sinister, narrative.”

So writes the historian Francis Gavin, in his essay published by Noēma, on “the forgotten art of thinking historically”.

Observe and be aware of your phenomenal experience

We’re all observers, both of our personal history and of the grand scheme of things. As such, awareness itself makes us less of recording devices and more of recounters ― not of “it”, but of our personal version of “it”. We see, we measure, we internalize. This is equally valid for the story of our lives, and for any scientific attempts.

The measurement postulate is one of the most controversial examples in quantum theory ever since the beginning of the twentieth century for this very reason. Amazingly, the mathematical formalism of physics explained that the observers themselves can no longer be objective, completely detached from the phenomenon, but instead, they influence its unfolding.

When an observer measures or simply looks at an experiment, they send rays of light (photons) that tamper with the quantum behavior of the system. This makes “observing” the system apparently impossible and replaced by “interacting” with it.

Despite the universality that mathematics claims or the uniformity of physical laws, the measurement postulate leaves room for interpretation and experience, as the outermost layer on top of theory.

And it is not the only such result: the mere topic of “interpretations of quantum mechanics” opens a multitude of possibilities, formulated, among others, by physicists like Niels Bohr or Hugh Everett.

The contrarian voices reject any mixture of subjectivity in science, let alone in fundamental theories like those concerning the subatomic world. But there’s a field of philosophy that tries to find balance.

Phenomenology is the study of the foundations of experience. It starts by accepting that one cannot understand the world in other ways than through their senses or at least through some indirect approach. The only way of doing it rigorously is to understand the basics of this indirection. Perhaps the observer is not objective, but, if they understand how their own subjectivity works, then they could abstract it away or somehow diminish it, as if it were a shade that a photographic filter applies to a picture.

The Austro-German Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was one of the founders of phenomenology, with important books on logic and mathematics (Philosophy of Arithmetic and Logical Investigations being the best known). Franz Brentano, his teacher, tried to combine phenomenology with psychology, but Husserl’s phenomenology insisted on the focus of rigorous conditions of experience, not on man’s feelings, emotions, or thoughts.

But phenomenology does not want to take away the observer ― on the contrary. The measurement postulate is, in a way, fundamental for the phenomenological approach of the world, not just in science.

Since the only way to understand reality is through experience, that makes it even more important to get to a rigorous, scientific understanding of the latter. Metaphorically speaking, phenomenology is like a coordinate system for experience. It doesn’t ignore it, it contextualizes it in a frame that allows for a rigorous analysis, with almost formal methods.

The philosopher Steven French wrote an essay in Aeon explaining this fascinating approach of physics. It accepts and integrates the role of the observer, instead of eliminating it or deeming it a shortcoming. French is also the author of a book on this topic, and the article contains many other references of both philosophy and physics.

This concludes my small selection for this week. What have you been reading recently? Would you share three recommendations in the comments?

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