Conference hydra::dejavu

    Can't even remember my own telephone number so I keep it written down
    on a slip of paper in my wallet.  So rarely do I call myself and then
    there is never anyone home anyhow so why bother?  I got some buisness
    cards which arrived only two days before I moved.
    
    Guess some people have all the luck!
    
    Anyhow, if there was something really important to remember, where
    would I keep it?  What, again, if the most important thing to remember
    is how I got myself into this situation (life) in the firstplace;
    where and how would I store the information?  In my brain?  Hey, it's
    the first thing to go!
    
    Now where did I put those Akashic CD's
    
    ???L.???

    re: .1 (Larry)
        
          Good one!   The whole idea of memory and how it's accessed, etc.
    is pretty interesting, I think.  Quite slippery!
    
    
          Actually, what I found interesting in that article and how it
    relates to reincarnation for me has to do with the paragraph that tells
    of others who have had similar memories.   The one individual who could
    no longer process went insane (remember that I entered a note in here
    somewhere wherein Lazaris delineated the fine-line difference between
    genius and insanity as the person who processes versus the person who
    is unable to process?  Further, that genius is simply an ability to
    focus?)  Well, Mahadevan himself says ..."a strong concentration and
    a genuine interest in the material are helpful".  But what it means to
    me is that it makes sense that we don't easily remember other
    lifetimes.  How would we discern one from another?  Wouldn't we, too,
    drown in "a flood of recollections" as the person who went insane did?
    Perhaps we can consider it a "blessing" to not have that memory in
    our conscious mind.  Perhaps (he says rhetorically) this is the reason
    we have a SUB-consicous mind in *this* lifetime and that we also have
    an UN-conscious mind to encompass *All other* lifetimes?  Hmmmm.
    What if Lazaris is right...oh my God, what ever will we do?!
    
    Frederick
    

    Anyhow, memory is just a convenient concept to describe the energy
    pattern one calls "mine".
    
    silly boy,
    
    L.

    If I had the capacity to recall anything that I ever did or said or
    experienced,I think I would never be able to sleep,and,would die of
    exaustion!
    
    To me,memory is what makes us conscious,aware,exist.Without memory,we
    would function only on a primitive instinct level.We would operate
    according to our genetic auto functions,such as hunger.
    
    PEACE
    Michael
    

    re: .3  Larry,  "mine" or "mind"  ?  :-) 
    
    		Just checking...
    
    Karen

    re .5 Karen
    ...yes, just answering
    
    afterall, isn't a person's "mind" the *most* "mine" thing there is?
    
    L.

    
    Quoted from the novel I'm writing (The author gave me permission...)
    
    "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the White Queen
    said to Alice. And Ariel listened, and wrote down the thought carefully
    in her rounded eight-year-old's script, then promptly lost the paper.
    She remembered it, years later, lying on some couch somewhere, moving
    backward and forward, hopping from when to then, running in place for
    awhile, dutifully chasing pieces like them from her life and other lives. 
    She wished, oh how hard, lying there, that she were an idiot-savant, 
    recalling immediately and clearly, at any one moment, like days and 
    dates to infinity, every detail of every minute from the Big Bang to the
    end of it all. Remembering every nanosecond of the past would be easy,
    she told Doctor Whoever. Recalling tomorrow would take a little longer.   
    
    -Gloria
    

                
    I was watching Geraldo (not actively - just getting ready for work and
    it was what was on at the time) (;^) when 'Rainman' was first released. 
    He had on the show 4 'idiot savants' that morning.  One fellow was 
    particularly amazing.  When asked about a particular day in history, 
    he was really able to recall the day of the week, the events that he 
    participated in that day,  the current events from the news, the
    weather, and etc.
    
    Made me tired just listening to him.  And he always started his
    dialogue on a particular day with, "Nov. 4th, 1937 - that was a day 
    I'll always remember."  (;^)  He had a good sense of humor too!
    
    Cindy

	Um, I forget what I was going to say...

	Oh yeah, I saw an austic person on a talk show of some name.  He could
	listen to a piece of music for the first time in it's entirity then
	proceed to play it note for note, in perfrct time, the whole thing.
	He could even recall and replay pieces he heard only one time twenty
	years prior.  He also did a (you wouldn't believe it unless you heard 
	it) impersonation of Louis Armstrong.  Amazing.

	He was in his thirties and needed help tying his shoes...

	Terry

    
    Uh Terry,
    
    >Um, I forget...
    
    Oh _gawd_!  (;^)  gggrrrrooooaaaan!!!
    
    Ditto on the savant comment.
    
    Cindy

    Not related to anything...
    
    First:
    A recent news article described someone with brain damage (accident?)
    who could not recognize faces, even their own.  The interesting part
    was that "eeg"(?) type studies showed that some _portion_ of the brain
    was remembering the face, but was unable to communicate that
    recognition to the conscious mind.  (No details on how this conclusion
    was reached, sorry...).
    
    Second:
    Many years ago, I read a (reliable, authoritative) account of an
    experiment peformed during "brain surgery", with the patient's
    permission.  The patient was under local anesthesia.  While the
    brain was exposed, gentle electrical stimulation of selected areas
    produced "verbal replay", in considerable detail, of old memories.
    The replays were authenticated at the time to to evryone's
    faction.  The included "forgotten" incidents, with considerable
    detail.
    
    My (inexpert) conclusion from these incidents would have been that
    there is a "mechanism" of the brain that stores "everything", in
    extreme detail.  This store is normally not accessible, or access to
    it can be lost thru injury, while the store remains intact.
    
    Jumping from that conclusion, then perhaps hypnosis or drugs can
    provide access to this area.  Yet, it appears that hypnosis can not
    be relied on.
    
    comments?
    
    thanks
    dave pierson

    
    Musing idly, unconnected fragments, mildly lunatic...
    
    A reasonably well-known British scholar of medieval music suffers from
    a degenerative disease of the brain, and as a consequence seemingly 
    functions as though he has no memory. He can process and retain 
    information for a few moments only - when he takes his glance from a
    person or object and returns to it, it is as though he is seeing it for
    the first time. He keeps a notebook by his side, and writes in it
    constantly to record his observations - but the problem is that he is
    continually writing about the same things - until he turns the page, or
    loses interest. 
    
    Interestingly enough, though, there are occasional bursts of recall and
    he can play villanelles, motets, pieces of flawless music which he
    never knows he has performed...
    
                                *************
    
    In one of those episodes of childhood that brought her into being, 
    A., beaten and enclosed in a closet, calms herself by conducting an
    experiment - she will shut out all sound by covering her ears, close
    out the minimal light that creeps under the door by screwing shut her
    eyes. Thus two of the means she has to define time and space no longer
    exist, and it doesn't matter if it's few minutes or many. The
    experiment is a qualified success - the memory is lost until someone
    opens the door some decades later...
    
       

RE: .11 (dave pierson)
    
    > "eeg"(?) type studies showed that some _portion_ of the brain was
    > remembering the face, but was unable to communicate that recognition
    > to the conscious mind.  (No details on how this conclusion was
    > reached, sorry...).
    
    Its not to hard to figure out.  Take EEGs for a bunch of faces that
    they "should" recognize and a bunch that "should not" (i.e. strangers).
    If there is a significant difference in the "average" EEG in the two
    cases than it can be concluded that somewhere in the brain something is
    reacting differently.  If they are not conscious of it, you can
    conclude that it is nevertheless not reaching consciousness.
    
    There has been a lot of work in the last decade or so in "averaging"
    the EEGs from many similar stimuli and comparing or subtracting out
    the results to the "average" under different circumstances.  A number
    of "simple" processes such as recognition, decision, basic perception
    and motor control have been studied.  The technique is called Evoked
    Potential EEG.  It's even been applied in some ESP studies with what
    the experimenters thought was positive results, though most of the
    parapsychological community is dubious because there subject is
    generally considered fraudulent.
    
    > My (inexpert) conclusion from these incidents would have there is
    > a "mechanism" of the brain that stores "everything", in extreme
    > details.
    
    Many people, some of them quite expert, have concluded the same thing.
    Unfortunately it is an unwarented conclusion.
    
    We can only conclude that some memories are stored which are
    inaccesible to conscious recall.  This has been known for very long
    time, since those memories may influence peoples behavior in subtle
    ways even when they cannot remember the specific incident.  The great
    detail called up by the brain stimulation (Penfield or something like
    it was the name of the experimenter) was never verified, only the
    rough details of the forgotten incidents.  It is known that when we
    remember an event, however vividly it seems, most of the details are
    "filled in" by a process of subconscious logical guessing.  There is
    no real reason to believe that the same isn't happening here.
    
    Even if the individual events are remembered in full detail, there is
    no reason to believe that *all* events are so remembered.
    
    > ... perhaps hypnosis or drugs can provide access to this area.  Yet,
    > it appears that hypnosis can not be relied on.
    
    I see you've been reading my notes.
    
    We seem to remember things by following "chains of associations".  When
    we forget things its frequently not because the memory is gone, but
    because there is no meaningful chain of association which reaches it.
    Sometimes "lost" memories can be recovered by strengthening the chain
    of association (e.g., sitting in the same place you were when the
    incident happend, or just sitting if it occured while you were sitting
    somewhere), or by finding an alternate chain (concentrate on some
    seemingly unimportant detail which you know about and seeing what it
    suggests).
    
    Hypnosis and drugs can both cause sort of random associations to be
    plowed through.  Lost memories *can* be recovered by hypnosis, but it
    is next to impossible to choose which they are going to be.  They may
    well get incorporated into false memories about what you were trying
    to remember.  Very unreliable indeed.  I know of no drugs which work
    any better, and it is rather unlikely that they exist.  The most
    precisely tailored drug we know of is a junk-yard car crushing machine
    when a micro-manipulator is called for.
    
    						Topher

    re: .13 (Topher)
                   
          As I read through your reply, I was trying to see how what
    you said fits into the CYOR scheme of things or how it relates from
    the quantum physics point of view.  Actually, there are points at
    which the lines intersect, I think.   
          If we are creating our reality moment by moment (since time
    is non-existent beyond physicality) then it sort of makes sense
    that setting up similar events will produce similar outcomes.
    The "coloring in" that you speak of could also be seen as not so
    much being how things "were" but rather how they "are."  That someone
    else sees it differently doesn't really matter, since reality is
    subjective and each of us sees the reality we want to, anyway.
    What I guess this can be saying is that reality is transcendent,
    if we want it to be, which in the case of these individuals is 
    perhaps "all" that they are really doing.  Maybe, like some sort
    of a "walk-in", they are simply shifting in and out of their
    present reality.  While I think the brain has been set up to do
    the conscious processing for us, perhaps, I don't really believe
    that memory lies within its mass.  Anyway, it is interesting to
    see how science and metaphysics interrelate on this.
    
    Frederick
    
          

re: .14 (Frederick)

	I think it was Rudolph Stiener (although I'm not sure) that 
	theorized that the brain is no more that a complex transmit/receiver.  
        All it does, he says, is move info to and from some other repository 
        of everything that ever was/is/will be.  He went on to say that this 
        is where our dreams originate, that we're only "receiving" them from 
	this "place".  Who knows?

	Terry

Does anyone know anything about somehting called MegaMemory?  It's a 
series of tapes which you can buy which supposedly help you improve your 
memory.  Any info, pointers, or thoughts on memory-improvement techniques 
would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

Oh, I forgot to mention...(just kidding :-)


Matt

    This is nothing definitive, but I've seen about a dozen reviews
    of MegaMemory on the Usenet from people who have tried it,
    and it seems to not be nearly as revolutionary as the ads
    claim.  Seems to use the same imagery-word association techniques as in the 
    other books and courses on memory tricks.  These methods go all the
    way back to the ancient Greeks and beyond.  I still remember the list
    of ten items I memorized in high school when I first tried out one of
    these tricks.  
    
    I guess my feeling about it is that it's very useful when you need
    to do rote memorization of an important list or table, but _much_ more
    difficult than they claim to apply it to general study habits and
    daily life situations.  A number of people experienced with these
    methods have argued with me that it just takes practice, but I see
    that the amount of practice required varies a lot from person to
    person.  Some people get the hang of coming up with dramatic
    memorable images to link together quite easily, others have a very
    hard time of it.
    
    If you check out the library, some of the books on memory tricks
    (Harry Lorayne's books, and some more recent ones, like Tony Buzan
    and maybe some of de Bono) would give you a good feeling for how these 
    techniques work and what you might use them for.  Then, you'd be in a 
    stronger position to decide whether to invest in the Mega tapes in
    particular.
    
    							kind regards,
    
    							todd

Todd,
	Thanks for the info (and so fast!).  Those pointers should prove 
to be quite helpful.
	
	I'd be curious to hear if anyone else has had any experience with 
memory improvement techniques/tools/products too that they could share.
Thanks for any contributions to this topic :-)

Matt

    
    I use and recommend alpha state. It is another name for the Silva
    method, a topic in this notes file. Read that and then see if it
    what you are after. The results I have obtained are phenomenal.
    
    Graham