02 JUN 2015 by ideonexus
Onomatopoeia, Sound Symbolism, and Phonesthesia
Onomatopoeia and sound symbolism are the seeds of a more pervasive phenomenon in language called phonesthesia, in which families of words share a teeny snatch of sound and a teeny shred of meaning. Many words with the sound sn-, for example, have something to do with the nose, presumably because you can almost feel your nose wrinkle when you pronounce it. They include words for the nose itself (like snout), words for noselike instruments (like snorkel and snoot, a cone for directing a spotlig...24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Human Memory, Computer Memory
Almost all of those limits start with a peculiar fact about human memory: Although we are pretty good at storing information in our brains, we are pretty poor at retrieving it. We can recognize photos from our high school yearbooks decades later, yet find it impossible to remember what we had for breakfast yesterday. Faulty memories have been known to lead to erroneous eyewitness testimony (and false imprisonment), to marital friction (in the form of overlooked anniversaries), and even death ...Folksonomies: memory human condition
Folksonomies: memory human condition
Gary Marcus describes how human memory is haphazard, context-specific. We can't retrieve a specific detail easily, but we can if we are in the right context to trigger its retrieval.
01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
Education Provides Hooks to Hang New Knowledge
Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: the most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor.This is a great metaphor for MemexPlex.