Seven Ways

There are seven ways that we best retain information, and five of these ways are tied to our natural innate skills as humans. These five are: typing, handwriting, speaking, seeing, and hearing. Two other ways help you complete the process of learning by semantic cross-tagging: mixing and anchoring.

Typing is a skill that we develop to codify something in symbolic notation: language. When we use keyboards for entry, this gives the language center of our brain a workout, which is concerned with coding and symbolication. But what are these codes and symbols? In language, we break our writing into chapters, chapters into paragraphs, paragraphs into sentences, sentences into words, and words into letters. These symbols, their organization, and their semantic meanings are inherent to symbolic processing. And, as humans, we definitely excel at this.

But there are more kinds of codes and symbols. When we use a musical instrument, we usually produce music in a coded symbolic representation: note for note. We break songs into sections, such as verses, refrains, and bridges. We break sections into chords. We layer melody on top of accompaniment, on top of bass. We accent with drums. We break melodies and chords into notes. We even break notes into tone, duration, and volume. Unlike text, music has quite a number of internal properties of continuity. Like staccato and slurring notes together. All of these are also kinds of language symbols that our brains use. Clearly we are using our brains' auditory centers when we make music.

I certainly didn't miss that writing is a bit like music, also. Because when we write creatively, we use plots like we use the interrelationship of melodies and leitmotivs. We make characters and develop alternate realities. We use metaphor and hyperbole. We season our writing with alliteration and onomatopoeia. A theme can pervade a novel. The resolution of a character's arc can stir us like a brilliant cadence. But writing struggles in the last chapter to compete with the finality and intense closure of the coda for a great piece of music.

Handwriting is a perfect way to match our muscle memory to our brains. We coordinate our hands and eyes to denote what we hear or what we think. Taking notes can be a compelling way to retain your thoughts. When we combine it with symbolic representations, we can end up with text, mathematical equations, musical notation, or even scribbles, doodles, and drawings. Let's face it, we think a bit more when we are handwriting than when we type, because a different part of our brain is required to do it.

In some ways, handwriting is utilizing the visual center of our brain. Typing does this also because we use our eyes to verify the text we enter. It seems like it is the connections between brain centers that reinforce our understanding of knowledge and help us to retain and memorize.

Speaking is our natural form of expression. We use our voices conversationally and this method of communication is highly generative, using our cognitive powers to express a thought, a concept, to deliver commands, to convince or inform. We use our language processing centers in a different way, and this is evident in the way we often speak very differently than we write: less formally. When we are in front of a group, we speak from memory, following a train of thought. Actors and presenters learn to do this and shade their performances with attitude and gesticulation, making the art of speaking a multi-dimensional task.

When we sing, we are expressing much more than just notes and words. We are using emotion. We link our generative capabilities to our voice when we sing. When we learn to play piano and sing, we are using much more of our brain than we usually might employ.

Seeing is much more than just looking at a photograph or diagram. It's also seeing in the mind's eye. Some people are very visual and can instantly see a concept in their head before they can express it. They can see the directions on a map in their head when they drive. Our eyes are the key to visualizing, certainly. But even blind people can see concepts. We have spatial reasoning to thank for this. When you have a visual memory, you get to see an object when it is described.

There is more to visualizing than just what is real, though. We can thank our imaginations for this fact. We can imagine impossible figures, for instance, and this concisely illustrates that our imaginations can transcend the real.

Perhaps for many people the spark of an idea comes visually. Perhaps concepts are symbolic for others. Perhaps concepts are neither visual nor symbolic for some: just floating in consciousness waiting to be expressed in some way.

Hearing is a natural way to capture and acquire information. But few of us actually hear a sentence and turn it into text in our head. Maybe a few of us turn it into visual information. But most likely hearing is its own domain. Somehow what we hear simply gets directly converted to knowledge. Still, often we must write something down to retain it, usually.

When I am composing or playing piano, I do not generally rely on my ear to remember the tune and the rhythm. Thankfully, I can record what I play. In other situations, I write down what I play (by hand), in common musical notation.

Even so, I can hear quite a bit of music in my head. It even seems like it is playing back. At 17 years old, I used to do this just before going to sleep, in that nebulous state in between waking and sleeping. I would consciously play a piece in my head. One that I was working on, or a familiar song. Or even a symphony. I guess I was practicing the ability to imagine polyphony. I was on the verge of being a composer at that age.

Mixing modes is the most powerful form of memorization. Sight-reading is a great way to commit a piece to memory. Playing a piece I'm composing, to cement the chord and melody structure is a good way to hone a piece. Record it and listen to it later, to take a step back and form new ideas for where the piece is going.

Listening and taking notes is a good mixture of modes for memorization and retention. But if you really want to cement it into your memory, type up your notes later. Draw diagrams. Learning, though, is much more than memorization. True retention requires application of a concept.

Anchoring is an essential endgame for learning a subject properly. I have a friend who says "I don't want to hire the people who can memorize terms and subjects, I want to hire people that can do something with what they've learned". Memorizing words in a foreign language is useful, but using those same words in sentences is much more powerful because then the words will forever be connected to concepts and subjects in your mind.

Where Do Ideas Come From?

Sometimes I have too many ideas. The problem becomes: which ideas might pan out, and how do they interrelate? But for most, it's more a question of: where do ideas come from? Let's talk about the various places.

Spontaneous Head Combustion

Sometimes an idea just pops into your head. I think this is because brains are always processing in the background. I had a calculus teacher in high school, Mr. Pearson, who said that the solution to a particular differential equation he had been working on would sometimes come to him while shaving.

Though that was a fairly nerdy thing to say, he wasn't far off my point.

The process of spontaneous idea generation is related to why we dream: the brain always wants to exercise in periods of disuse. When shaving or driving, your brain is not fully engaged. This means there are cycles that can be put to use. We will return to this later. But some people dream in ways that are connected to stuff they are working on. During my most productive periods when I get a cool idea and then rush to implement it (especially a very complex one that will probably take several days of constant work) I am told that I sometimes talk in my sleep: I'm mumbling variables and data structures. This definitely happened to me when I was working on Mosaics in Painter.

Hmm. Maybe I work too much!

But a simple way to use this is to think about a problem before you go to sleep, and your mind may come up with a solution while you sleep. In fact, I used to listen to music in my head right when I was going to sleep. I liked to listen to Beethoven's 9th Symphony in this state. Not really listening, per se. Actually just hearing it in my mind, every note and phrase. It was great practice for musical composition.

Sketch It Up

I like to sketch things out, and get ideas that way too. I guess it's because I'm a visual person. But, for me, lots of graphical ideas work themselves out on paper. A doodle can quickly become something larger.

I was working on borders and corners one day when I realized, as many people have, that you could represent the corners as four image pieces and the edges as another four image pieces. And the edges could be stretched or repeated. So I drew one of my favorite things, and I have reproduced it at left. I suppose it's a good example of three-dimensional thinking.

I draw in guide lines that showed the corner pieces and the edge pieces succinctly. Then I realized that these corners and edges could be filled with pretty much any image.

So i drew cylinders with pipes interconnecting them, like you see at right here. I realized that even shadows could be part of these clipped images. Note: this 3 x 3 partitioning is used to create buttons and other UI elements, also. In fact, that was what I was using it for at the time.

But I didn't want the UI to be constrained to be a rectangle. No matter! These pieces will still work, as long as all the corners are squarish. For instance:

At right, I have shown something that can be made out of the usual eight pieces, just rearranged in a different fashion from the typical arrangement I have shown so far.

This goes to show that it doesn't matter how you design it. If you take a little care, that design can service a much larger class of objects.

This design really hinged on two things: the corners and the edges. So I concentrated on the corners. What could the corner possibly be? A number of three-dimensional things popped into my head, and I sketched them up.

Here are a number of possibilities that occurred to me, drawn as corners. To left: a gabled approach that exhibits shading and has pyramidal corners. To right: that same approach, but with different edges. The edges can have their own articulations as well.  There are plenty of three-dimensional things that can grace the corner of a design.

Here, I explore the use of cubes and balls. To right I considered using a stake at each corner and a taut piece of rope in between. And knots on the rope in between the corners.

Of course, there are a number of articulations on the edge that can be used in addition to knots and spikes. Really, any repeating line pattern can be employed along the edge.

Here are some line patterns: wavy lines, beads, and twisted rope. Of course braids and yarn motifs are useful as well. But plain patterns, like stripes and diagonal "candy" stripes are also useful.






Exercising Your Brain

When I am otherwise not mentally engaged, I use that time for practice. Sometimes I do something tedious like factoring five-digit numbers in my head. You know, I like prime numbers. For instance, today I passed a house on San Jose-Soquel Road that had a number of 24,769. (I look on the right side as I'm driving home and there are often odd numbers like this one, which means they won't be divisible by 2.) I'll cut to the chase and tell you that it's 17 x 31 x 47. It took me about 4 minutes to determine that, performing long division in my head. Then, when I got home, I checked it using Siri.

It may be tedious, but it does help to keep my brain sharp when it comes to numbers. Another activity I do while driving is writing songs. I compose the melody and lyrics simultaneously. When I get an idea, I record it into Voice Notes, an iPhone app. I will go over the lyrics a few times and record a verse or a refrain.

This process keeps my creativity working while I would otherwise be bored. Exercising the right side of my brain. I used to turn on the radio while driving. I don't do that any more. I let my mind fill the silence.

I also got a great idea for a novel while driving. So I used Voice Notes to get it all down.

And, by the way, it might be a good idea to pull over, if you get too involved in an idea while driving!

Know Your Subject?

When I am wracking my brain for ideas on a particular thing, I can easily come to a standstill. It is at moments such as this that I take a step back. Specifically, this is called meta-level thinking. This process can actually be impeded by knowing too much about a subject. You can get into the mindset of thinking that it's all been said and done.

When writing a novel, it can be as simple as taking a step back and considering a character's arc. When writing music, this can manifest itself as rearranging the structure. Or adding in a full break or another device that so often makes songs interesting to our ears.

The Beatles practiced this. In We Can Work It Out, for instance, there is a section that breaks into triplets in an otherwise foursquare piece. On the back side of Abbey Road, they ran all the songs together into a single homogenous piece, a structural device.  In Getting Better, one of the verses becomes one long melody instead of several broken up melodies. On All You Need Is Love, the verses contain an extra half-measure per phrase, which helps to offset the otherwise foursquare melody (the Beatles called it the Dirge), the device of changing the time signature.  Or just having two authors can create a cognitive dissonance that can make a piece remarkable. On I've Got A Feeling, arguably the last composition that Lennon and McCartney wrote together (unless you consider the back side of Abbey Road to be a single piece), their contributions are quite different, and improve the song immeasurably. It goes on and on.

When programming, it helps to look at the problem in a different way. This can be a meta-level approach when you look at multiple ways of solving the problem, or you find a way to combine what would otherwise be different methods. This is particularly good when there is something you are missing.

Sometimes it's just a matter of employing multiple modes of thought at the same time.

Ideas Travel In Groups

When finding another person that is likewise creative, it is often possible to have a huge idea session. This has happened to me countless times with various people, including Tom Hedges and John Derry, the co-authors of early Painter.

A single session can generate hundreds of good ideas, I have found. When you get onto an interesting or fruitful subject, the result can be a veritable treasure trove of ideas.

This may be the Lennon and McCartney effect: the influence of two brains on creation is synergistically better than if the two created separately.

I have experienced this effect with John Derry on several occasions. Together we thought up Painter's image hose, for instance.

Combining Expertise

When you become an expert on one subject, it can help to give you the ability to solve problems in that subject. But is thorough research a ticket to stagnation?

I have found that it helps to be an expert on several subjects and then to combine the knowledge between the subjects. I'm a pretty good programmer, for instance, and I know how to draw. Combining them produced Painter.

Anyway, it's hard to ignore the profound influence of general thinking: knowing a reasonable amount about several subjects and thinking about how they relate.

Grist For the Mill

I'm not sure why it is, but I am equally sure that this is true: when we have emotional experiences, we are driven to create. This is typified by Lord Byron clutching his forehead at the top of the stair: the tortured artist. Or by Michelangelo undergoing great pains to complete the Sistene Chapel's frescoes: the agony and the ecstasy. Is it a cliché that only through pain can we create?

No, I don't think that it is. After hitting a patch of black ice and crashing my car in Denmark on the night of December 28, 1995, I sat down and wrote 7 really good poems. Sure, I write song lyrics, but poems? I was in a rare mood that evening after some wonderful "Good Samaritan" Danes stopped to pick me up and kindly delivered me to my Hotel in Copenhagen. Note that this near-death experience is not chronicled in my post Handling Serious Events. It seems I have more than my share of such events.

But, seriously, how many love songs are there? How many my baby done left me songs are there? I tell you: there's something to this theory of emotional distress and creativity. It's grist for the mill.