Creating Memory Hooks For New Ideas - Dick Rauscher

I’m back at the writing here at Stonyhill after a great spring trip in our new 20 foot Lance camper. The last Nugget, which was planned to be sent out while traveling between Kelso Dunes and Las Vegas, was the victim of too many “happy hours” around a campfire, and other amazing wilderness distractions. You can see some of the pictures we took, and a short narrative of our seven-week journey on our travel blog RV Travels.

I didn’t get much writing done during those seven weeks on the road, but I was able to read five amazing books on my unread bookshelf. Books that have been calling to be read for months. Over the coming weeks, I will share both their titles and some of the great insights I discovered inside those five books.

Today’s Nugget came from ideas contained in The Sacred Depths of Nature by Biologist Ursula Goodenough.

“Human memory, she writes, is like a coat closet. The most enduring outcome of 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.”

I have many readers who comment that the Stonyhill-Nuggets make a lot of sense when they read them, but a week later they have trouble remembering or understanding the concept that was offered. Now I will simply smile and say to them “no hooks” yet!

Each Stonyhill-Nugget is offered to create hooks for my readers so future encounters with the concept of primitive ego, and the importance of awakening the human consciousness, don’t simply fall on the floor.

As Goodenough says “the point of hearing a story (or idea) for the first time is not to remember it but to experience it”.

Expanding on her hook metaphor, there isn’t going to be a test on the ideas and concepts contained in each new issue of the Stonyhill-Nugget. The Nuggets are simply offered as “an experience of a new idea” to help my readers create hooks for future encounters with their primitive ego and the gifts that come with the “awakening” of our human consciousness.

The seven-week trip interfered with the Stonyhill-Nugget publishing schedule, but it was a good opportunity to slow down for a while and experience the amazing beauty of nature in the South West and experience some new “idea hooks” that I will share with you over the coming months.

The 1998 Dodge pickup did a great job pulling the camper! You can tell it’s really powerful because it’s always the loudest truck in the campground.