"Chicago is up in the house!"/"He's never nipped at anybody but he barks and growls"/"I wanna be your dog"...

... "Everyone left is from Chicago"/"It's the love-in of a lifetime"/"People are going to be really embarrassed some day to look back and realize that they had joined in on something that was really a mistake and they chose the wrong side and that they joined it with such fervor"/"Did you ever do that when you were young?"



All this video was recorded yesterday... except the flashback. (That was originally blogged on February 17th.)

And here's the NYT article on "self-compassion" that I talk about in the car.

What are the 200 best #1 songs — going all the way back to 1955?

List-a-Beefy has figured it out and has been posting one song per day, with fascinating/trivial details, since the middle of last week. The person compiling this list has a mind-boggling fixation on the details of the Billboard charts, and this is not just thrown together, believe me. Understand the task: You have a huge group of songs when you look at 52 weeks from 55 years, but you are limited to the songs that made #1. You have to compare songs from vastly different eras. He's got Dean Martin, "Memories Are Made of This" at #199, and "TiK ToK" by Ke$ha at #198.

I mean, if I tried to do this, at least half of it would come from the 60s and there'd be whole years where I feel no emotional attachment to anything. List-a-Beefy is not like that. List-a-Beefy knows what he's doing. And he puts things into a historical framework. For example, when "It's My Party" — #196 — was #1 for 2 weeks in June 1963, replacing Jimmy Soul's "If You Wanna Be Happy," later to be shunted out, in turn by "Sukiyaki," by Kyu Sakamoto, Israel executed Adolf Eichmann. Think about it. I'm inclined to practice my skill at mnemonics with those sets of facts: There's Jimmy Soul, happily scarfing down sukiyaki at a party, while Lesley Gore is crying... over the death of — sorry, Lesley, this is mnemonics — Adolf Eichmann, whose soul drifts by...

The best way to learn: Practice retrieving what you've studied.

"What we recall becomes more recallable in the future. In a sense you are practicing what you are going to need to do later."

In the study reported at the link, the students who wrote a free-form essay on what they remembered from what they'd read learned the material best, even though they felt least confident that they had remembered well.

"For me, I will often see a calendar in my head, and it's usually a month at a time."

"When I hear the date, it's like my brain immediately goes to a position on a calendar and once I locate it, I see what happened instantly."

"Weigel v. Kaus Detwitterfied."

When something interesting happened on Twitter, can you save it from oblivion? Mickey Kaus tries, but it's a tedious tangle of terseness. Twitter is the Memory Hole and you don't want to stick your arm down there.

"I intend to keep things small. Really small. Thoughts and memories don't need closets. I shouldn't need closets."

Expansively contracting.

Pear-shaped women have bad memories.

As you already know, it's bad to be fat. But there's always more news about fat. The way you are fat matters. You've probably already heard that it's bad to be apple-shaped, and maybe you were taking comfort in the fact that you are fat, but pear-shaped. The new news is here to rip that comfort away from you. On the other hand, it will be easier to forget.

"[M]uttering to yourself and talking about things out loud helps improve your memory and the knowledge that you retain."

"You may look a little odd talking to yourself, but studying out loud improves information retention by differentiating bits of knowledge."

(And don't miss the photograph at the link!)

Memorial Day.

(Enlarge.)

"Cut deeper, pull harder."

Heard by a woman having her eye surgically removed.

Although normally a patient does not remember anything about surgery that involves general anesthesia, about one or two people in every 1,000 may wake up during general anesthesia, according to the Mayo Clinic. Most of these cases involve the person being aware of the surrounding environment, but some experience severe pain and go on to have psychological problems.

If not remembering is part of the process, do we really know how many people experience awareness during surgery? If you've ever had general anesthesia, are you sure this didn't happen to you? If you somehow, now, could find out that it had happened, but you still could not remember it, it wouldn't bother you as much as it should, would it?

Coffee time!

Don't forget!



More!



Okay!



That's more like it!

The 55 mice used in the University of South Florida study had been bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease....

When the mice were tested again after two months, those who were given the caffeine performed much better on tests measuring their memory and thinking skills and performed as well as mice of the same age without dementia.

Those drinking plain water continued to do poorly on the tests.

"Yawn. Hipster dud bookseller hates his customers. What’s new?"

You go to all that trouble to elaborate numerous categories and subcategories of people and that's what you get for your first comment? Life is harsh!

Well, there's some interesting detail in those categories (along with some boring humor — e.g. "a $4 half-soy-half-decaf-latte-with-a-shot-of-pretention").

I found that 7 types of bookstore customer post via an Ezra Klein tweet. Ezra parks himself in the category "Browser."

I think there's an 8th category, into which I'd put myself. "Reminiscer." This is someone who used to hang around bookstores all the time and leave with a pile of miscellaneous books, but now drops in only occasionally, looks around, and remembers when she didn't spent nearly all of her reading time on line. Now, all those book covers look like front pages of websites. She might click on a few — i.e. open them up and read a few lines, maybe even a few pages — and then she contemplates the way she used to feel that she needed to make these blocky objects into personal possessions and proceed through them systematically, front to back. Then she shakes off that reverie and goes somewhere else, somewhere where the WiFi is free.

"A simple example would be the number 37, which is lumpy like oatmeal, and 111, which is similarly lumpy..."

"... but also round like the number three (being 37 × 3). Where you might see an endless string of random digits when looking at the decimals of pi, my mind is able to 'chunk' groups of these numbers spontaneously into meaningful visual images that constitute their own hierarchy of associations."

Lessons in how to think from an autistic savant. Maybe you find them useful. Maybe you don't.

"There is no other way to describe it. He butchered her. He killed her in cold blood while she begged for her life."

So why did Julio Marin-Garcia get the minimum sentence for murdering his wife? Because he says he doesn't remember doing it?

Dane County Circuit Judge John Markson [said] that it is possible that he will pose no danger to society if he leaves prison in 20 years.

"The greatest punishment is not what I do but having this on your conscience," Markson said.

How much, exactly, do such things weigh on the mind of a man who says, "I am sincere when I tell you that I don't remember what happened at that moment"?

"Columbia, Rudin acquire brain rights."

Another headline I like.

The story is about the acquisition of the rights to make a movie about Henry Molaison — AKA H.M. — the man who lost the ability to form new memories as the result of a operation on his brain that was intended to treat his seizures. Molaison's problem made him a useful subject for various experiments. Is that cinematic enough for a movie?

(We talked about Molaison back when his obituary was published.)