Memory Research Group: Six Months of Reading Backward Through Time

The Memory Research Group's first six months of reading (June to December 2025) traced how memory has been conceived from classical memory palaces to digital systems, and concluded that contemporary technical systems have rediscovered many of memory's old tradeoffs and ambiguities. Frances Yates's The Art of Memory opened the sessions, and Edwin Hutchins's Cognition in the Wild raised whether memory requires a specific substrate or is better understood as patterns of coordination. The group read Mary Carruthers, Alan Jay Smith on cache memory, and Paul Ceruzzi on magnetic core memory, where retrieval required overwriting and restoring data. The group reported that no single framework dominated its discussions.