A 2 minute look ahead to what’s happening in episode 2 of Can I Improve My Memory on Channel 4 tonight (8PM UK).
Follow me at twitter.com/tedcooke for live tweets during the show.
A 2 minute look ahead to what’s happening in episode 2 of Can I Improve My Memory on Channel 4 tonight (8PM UK).
Follow me at twitter.com/tedcooke for live tweets during the show.
One of the fun things about filming “Can I improve my Memory?” for Channel 4, was getting to work as memory coach for three very interesting people with very different personalities. With the release of tonight’s first episode it’s fun to reflect on the different learning styles of my three memory pupils!
When you’re teaching anything, you have to bear this in mind: everyone’s different and everyone’s memory is different. To be successful, you have to adapt to three things. First, people differ in what they’re interested in – and interests are key to memory; second, they have different associations in their brains, so they make different connections; third, of course, is personality, which influences more or less everything!
So here are some reflections on Amber, Chris and Len.
Love-Island winner Amber is incredible fun to work with. She’s fun, imaginative and high paced. And she has very strong opinions! So when you’re learning with Amber, you’ve got to be on your toes. One of her great strengths is that Amber is very intuitive and in touch with her emotions, which is a great asset for any learner, as she’s quick to realise what makes her interested, and what bores her- and not afraid to tell you. Because she understands this, it’s easy for Amber to use her imagination to change the way she looks at things till they become more memorable. That’s a huge strength.
Memory superpower: imagination!
Chris was a champion boxer, so he knows what it takes to win. And he knows that the eventual performance is 99% perspiration, 1 % inspiration. He’s also though a very deep thinker, someone who likes to understand and inhabit concepts before putting them into practice. He’s eager to learn, quite philosophical, and has a fascinating life story. All of these are great strengths to adapt to and work with. But it’s his champion’s mentality and hard work ethic that stand out! Knowing how to win makes a heck of a difference when it comes to high level performance.
Memory superpower: a champion’s mentality
It was great also to work with an older person in Len Goodman from Strictly, as so often people think that just because you’re old, you can’t learn. That’s nonsense, and I was excited to work with Len to prove the point. And so was he! At least most of the time.
Len is an extremely funny man, and a great character actor, which means he’s very able to finding amusing ways of learning things. Humour is like a magic wand in memory- as soon as you find something funny, it’ll stick into your brain. And that’s one of the most potent tools a learner can have. So while teaching Len, it was all about the jokes- which extended to him taking a tremendous ironic interest in early 1990’s rap!
Len’s superpower: humour
The golden rule of memory is to make what you’re learning interesting. All three of my pupils here had a gift for that- but in very different ways.
You can find out how they went about their learning in episode 1 of “Can I improve my Memory” here.
Learning is a Game – a 20 minute talk on memory, fun and education by Ed Cooke at TEDx Thessaloniki.
15 minute talk on the richness of perception and the importance of memory in experiential learning.
A talk at internetdagarna about the past and future of learning technologies.
20 minute talk on memory and the future of online learning at TEDx LSE.
A talk at Wired where I memorised the phone numbers of 400 audience members
I popped on to This Morning to dispel some common memory myths, promote my upcoming TV show -‘Can I improve my Memory‘ (Channel 4, Thursday 15th July) and battle some spectacularly hyperbolic captions.
This is how it went…
I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to do a write up of our first prototype of Karl-Heinz StockHausen’s Kugealauditorium, a project I described in a previous post. Anyhow- better late than never, so here’s an update on KA2.
Recap of the project
For Kugelauditorium, our plan is to develop an open-source recipe for spherical concert halls that are cheap and easily deployable. We’d like to create a universal instrument that can provide for its users expansive psychonautical journies capable of vehicling them to the outer reaches of human consciousness, or, if not, then at least give them an engaging audiovisual experience. The provisional dream is “a Kugelauditorium for every garden”.
For that to be the case, we need a very simple and cheap design that anyone can knock together in no more than an hour or two, that’s sufficiently magnificent for human consciousness that it is more highly valued than, say, a lawn. In other words, something an order of magnitude or two simpler than any present-day equivalent immersive sound experience, but at least as compelling.
To develop such an ambitious recipe, we’re engaging in a rapid prototyping methodology loosely inspired by the Starship development system currently being executed by SpaceX at Boca Chica, Texas.
Obviously our project has much more upside for the future of human consciousness, but SpaceX’s work bakes in a few pretty robust insights about project management, decision-making and building towards ambitious future scenarios in a speedy way.
Their method in a nutshell is to optimise for the number of iterations in the development process. So rather than even trying to get everything right first time, they build speedily and iteratively and holistically. The genius of this method is various:
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We began the project in April, and aimed for the first prototype in May. This interestingly led to an initial budget estimate of $50k for a KA being compressed down to a budget of about $12000- the merits of a tight time scale eviscerating all indulgence.
Here’s how we did it:
Dome
We built the dome using a very simple compact kit provided by Build with Hubs. They provided just the joins between struts, and the struts themselves we got from a hardware store for $150. They came in 50 odd 240cm round poles, and we cut them at a single point in the correct ratio to waste no wood (1179 vs 1221mm for short and long segments, if you’re interested). There’s a nifty thing on their site that helped calculate the ratio. Using two spherical domes, placed one on top of each other, we could get a fully spherical dome for $400.
Speakers
Next, for speakers, we got two cheapo 5.1 surround sound speaker systems that took care of amplification and presented a total of 10 channels to address. That allowed a 360-degree sound experience, though only 2D- as the speakers were all arranged around the middle rung. On the software side, we used standard tools . All of this part was done by Tomek Smilok.
Lights
To simplify things on the light side of things, which was not our main focus, we used sound-reactive LED strips, so as sound travelled round lights were activated with the moving sound (this saved requiring programming the light by itself) and provided a glimpse of how the light can in future be super-additive to the sound. This was the work of Iannis Bardakos and friends, and involved lost of soldering.
Music
Tomek created an improvised symphony entitled ‘backpain’. Of course, till you have a Kugelauditorium in your garden, you won’t have the faintest idea of the magnificence of the experience but here’s a sense of it.
Result
Phenomenologically it felt relatively spectacular, definitely tremendously immersive and engaging.
That was Kugelauditorium 2, (KA2) and it was pretty epic. The experience of the surround sound was great -one felt held as if a spirit in space, and it was unexpectedly comforting- I suspect the final instrument may have some pretty potent psychotherapeutic uses. Visually, the full sphere looks more than twice as cool as the generic hemi-dome, justifying the indulgence by itself, and we were able to get a glimpse of the full experience. Undoubtedly, this represents an instrument that every garden in the world should possess.
Total cost was $1200, and it took a Saturday to knock together.
Areas to focus on in KA3
We figure that a dozen or so iterations will be enough to get to something truly masterful, so we have no time lose in keeping iterating. The next prototype will be built in London in July, with the following one likely in August by Californian sound artist Sarah Stevenson.
The principal limitations in KA2 were:
The key issue we’re addressing in KA3 is the first, making the sounds fully three dimensional and over many more channels, including the capacity to map the sounds to that space in software easily. We’ll also aim to develop the structure so that a person can be suspended in the middle.
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KA3 spec: our main project here is to make the sound fully 3-D. So we’ll use the same basic dome structure, but use stronger wood to create the possibility of a single person being suspended right in the middle to enjoy the fully three-dimensional sound immersion.
We don’t know how many individual sound channels are required for fully-3D maximal precision of audition, but because the dome structure has 42 joins (from top to bottom at the different layers: 1/5/10/10/10/5/1) and because is 42 is more than 10 and because audition isn’t terribly spatially accurate, we’re going on the basis that 42 will more than cover it, and 41 in fact since there is no lowest point. That we guess will be perceptually equivalent to having 1000 speakers in terms of spatial precision (we may be wrong about this, of course).
For simplicity for the next version, we’re cutting this 42 down since 32-channel audio is relatively easier to manage from a hardware perspective, so we’ll aim for that, provisionally with 1:5:5:10:5:5:1 at the different levels of the dome (or perhaps 1:4:6:10:6:4:1), and a subwoofer at the bottom to make 32.
The basic diagram of the architecture is like this:
So our complete recipe for the kit (not including lights) for the KA3 will be this:
So in total we get to £2300 before cost of any lights we may add. Not bad, but still touching $3000 and twice as expensive as the first prototype. We will need to build efficiencies into the prototyping process, but we should still get 12 prototypes in for the original Bitcoin which was swapped for the dream of a Kugelauditorium.
With this recipe, we can get to a fully spatialised 3-D sound and that will help us answer these questions:
We aim to have the prototype built for end of July, the work taking place not in Burgundy but in the crypt of a chruch in Holloway, UK, under the auspices of Merijn Royaards. The hope is that he audio hardware will be fit for purpose, and so future iterations will be able to reuse the same hardware.
I’d love to express my thanks to, among other in what was a glorious group project, Tomek Smilok, Alix Faddoul, Iannis Bardakos, and Primavera Di Fillipi for actually building the thing.
We often assume we see the world just it is; but many examples suggest that we’re highly constrained by our own memories in what we experience. It’s a bit like the world is rehearsed.
By confusing your memory, however, you can counteract this tendency, and perceive the world anew. It comes down to breaking from the comforts of routine. Here are four suggested ways you might upset invisible routine, and thus memory, to so see the world clearer.
1) Sleep with your head at the wrong end of the bed: on waking up, your memory will be lost for words and give you a half-second or so of pure perception- where you may notice, for instance, that your curtains are ugly and need replacing.
2) Eat dinner at breakfast time: it’ll be uncomfortable, but interesting: you’ll perhaps notice that your sense of the difference between morning and evening is based mainly on the distinction between corn flakes and macaroni cheese.
3) Re-arrange your furniture: when a room is reconfigured, the very objects themselves can be seen anew.
4) Go nocturnal, and check out commuters in your new (7 a.m.) evenings. You’ll perhaps notice new things.
Once you’ve felt the power of a simple refresh like this, you can have spectacular fun finding tiny ways to incorporate a change of perspective into your routines and habits so that they never become an immovable constraint and you remain free to transcend them when necessary.