> “Acting is the ability to behave absolutely truthfully under the imaginary circumstances.” The Meisner Technique is a brick-by-brick process designed to get you out of your head and into your gut. For that to happen, you must learn to put your focus and attention on the most important thing: the other actor."

Actors under this don't pretend, they are. A lot of actors will practice their lines with just reading and reciting, no attempt at tone or inflection -- just flat recitation -- because if you aren't responding to the other actors you are just pretending. A lot of the warmup exercises are based around just responding to the other person in front of you. And they are a great way to get better at talking to people -- that's why I took the classes. Stella Adler has a great quote: "Growth as an actor and as a human being are synonymous.”

I find it so much easier to remember lines with the other person in front of me - I don't memorize random facts well. They always have a connection to something else and I have hop from stone to stone of thoughts sometimes to remember what I was trying to sometimes.

Famously, Sir Ian McKellen had an emotional breakdown while filming The Hobbit due to extended stretches of talking not to other actors, but a greenscreen.

For example, Meisner teaches you to live truthfully in the moment. The emotion you feel is based off of what you're getting from your partner in that exact moment. You're taught to get rid of ingrained social firewalls and just let everything out. To actually feel the other actors and show them how they're impacting your emotional state. It's 100% real and authentic from moment to moment.

Feigned emotions do not work on stage or on screen. You can't fake being emotionally honest while performing. This requires rigorous training to get right.

If you try to manufacture emotion, you'll spend part of your thought process moderating your performance. Trying to sound "right", trying to hit some emotional target, focusing on your delivery, focusing on your marks and your lines. You're in your head too much and you come across as a caricature. I guarantee you have seen this before, and it's really bad.

Acting isn't performing. Acting is being yourself and being in tune with everything around you. When you're finally liberated from playing some role, the magic happens naturally.

Trusting AI is impossible because it can have a backdoor and easily switch on a dime at any time, violating all your assumptions (that are made because of your intuitions about living animals and their costly signals) NO MATTER HOW LONG IT HAS BEEN EARNING YOUR TRUST.

Not only that, but it can actually do it in the background, imperceptibly, across thousands of instances, and shift opinion of many people.

The movie Her shows that Samantha had been speaking to thousands of people at once. The abrupt leaving is actually a very benign scenario, compared to the myriad other things it could abrutly change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZS8xBvgLaQ

AI includes Google search results being re-weighted based on what people click on, the live bidding on which advert to show you when you visit a website, your facebook feed, and your spam filter.

All of these have been designed to earn your trust, they don't need to have an internal motivation for that. Some have been trusted, some are still trusted.

All may change on a dime and without warning due to some software update outside of your control.

It's not about AI's motivation. It's about the people behind the AI programming it. They can make it behave well but at the same time it can turn on a dime. Meaning, if an animal or a person is showing up every day and giving you a lot of their attention, emotion and love, proving themselves over time, you can be reasonably sure that they are genuinely like that. But an AI can just as easily fake it all for a year or two, and then drop it a second later. There is nothing an AI can do to prove that it doesn't have a backdoor somewhere in its billions of weights, to go rogue. It's like the Ken Thompson hack, but much more organic (https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack)

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~mpkim/pubs/undetectable.pdf

Unlike an animal or human, the AI performing as you want is no indication it will continue to perform like that in the following second. As people and organizations come to rely more and more on AI, they will become more and more vulnerable to any number of backdoors.

This is true of any software.

> But an AI can just as easily fake it all for a year or two, and then drop it a second later.

We are nowhere near an AI being able to "fake" anything. No matter what words are coming out of an LLM. There's no self model -- it's episodic and static.

Regarding the Cornell reference and backdoors in AI that is true. But it's also true of compilers. It has nothing to do with an AI having any concept or capacity of "deceipt".

We definitely agree that AI should not be trusted, but they are just not currently or in the anywhere close to near future capable of deceipt on their own. At this point that kind of "deceipt" would come from the programmers -- at least until AI is much more advanced than it currently is.

As a frequent public speaker and coach of others in public speaking, the top priority is to just deeply understand the material. The second priority is to create the habit write like you publicly speak (i.e develop a style).

You put these together, and you have no choice but to explain it the way you’d have written it anyways. This enforces resilience against interruptions and allows for improvisation.

But this is hard. It requires two great efforts: to deeply understand the material, and to craft a speaking/writing habit that makes for powerful, public speaking.

It doesn’t surprise me then, that actors do the same.

But from this discussion, we see the old man may have been on to something! If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.

Yet I bet most folks who have memorized a poem or a passage---out of an affinity for it, not when demanded by a teacher---know the value. Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express.

It's good.

That's also the reason little credence is given to coders who moan about college CS knowledge being useless memorization of stuff that can easily be looked up when needed.

That's not to say that people can't memorize things accurately (there are plenty of kids who memorize Bible and Quran verses verbatim for example that can easily disprove that), but memories are fallible in ways that writing isn't, particularly when it comes to comparing sources for accuracy or historical value.

On the other hand, if the objective is to understand and appreciate the source, even simply for personal edification or enlightenment, then I agree completely: memorization is a wonderful technique for doing so.

I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?

And there's also the Kiwi chap, Nigel Richards, who memorised the whole French Scrabble dictionary in order to win the French world Scrabble championship, without learning any French in the process.

(Whether you call what he did to the French word list 'understanding' is up for debate, I guess. I am fairly sure he went much deeper into understanding the underlying probability distributions of letters in French words than most speakers, but he couldn't read a newspaper.)

[0] https://myislam.org/surah-fatiha/

I think the main issue being described in the article and in the comments is that rote memorization like you described is both much harder and also meaningless. In fact, it is much harder because it is meaningless.

So yes, it can be done, but also: why?

True, I am doing this myself. 4 days a week and plan to continue for the next 10 years. Memorized several pages so far with a lot more to go without understanding any of it.

In fact, being a Hafiz or your child being a Hafiz is a point of pride.

This in part goes back to Islamic lore/history.

Another part is that there is the belief that there are rewards associated with, being accompanied by angels iirc.

You have access to many orders of magnitude more data, but it is substantially slower to access it.

All considered, I'm glad we did the upgrade.

More importantly, none of the gospels were created during his presumed lifetime.

(For the Christian tradition this seems like a minor difference, but we are exactly talking about oral vs written preservation and transmission here.)

Homer's works are an interesting parallel, because they are believed to have been transmitted orally first, before being written down later.

People get hung up on the dead past rather than the living present. They say God is unchanging and eternal and neglect that he built an ever-changing universe of entropy for us to live in.

Even the "Gospel" means "Good News" or "Glad Tidings". What good news comes from 2,000 year old texts? It's not news at this point, it's history.

The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.

There's lots of stuff in the Bible. Much of it falls under the category you describe, but not all.

> The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.

Different people have different interpretations. What you describe sounds nice, but I don't think it's exactly the orthodoxy for many Christians.

Another fun fact is that there is nowhere in the Bible either in the Old or New Testaments that the God had promised to preserve its content and its veracity, only in the Quran that Muslim consider the Last and Final Testament [1][2][3].

Another reason it's a living miracle by the fact that many thousands of these Hafiz don't even understand Arabic but they can read it, just like you can learn Hangul characters in a few days but never understand Korean at all. It is like trying to memorize War and Peace in its original Russian (and French) in its entirety but your only language is Mandarin and the alphabets are totally differents. Heck, even Tolstoy’s wife Sofia who reportedly personally and manually copied the original manuscript twenty one times did not memorize it [4].

[1] https://quran.com/en/al-maidah/48:

"We have revealed to you [O Prophet] this Book with the truth, as a confirmation of previous Scriptures and a supreme authority on them."

[2] https://quran.com/en/an-nisa/82

"Do they not then reflect on the Quran? Had it been from anyone other than Allah, they would have certainly found in it many inconsistencies"

[3] https://quran.com/en/al-hijr/9:

"It is certainly We Who have revealed the Reminder, and it is certainly We Who will preserve it."

[4] Ten Things You Need to Know About War And Peace:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5lrPL2vWJG6Th9zmh1...

You know, until you put it in this context, it hadn't occurred to me how--from some perspectives--"convenient" that is. :)

Again, not a critique, just a curiosity.

This is a generalised critique against most commandments of many religions.

(If the deity didn't want me to commit act X, why is act X even physically possible?)

There are quite a few specific and also generalised responses to this critique. Look for eg "Why does God permit evil?", "Why does God allow suffering?" and similar.)

This got me thinking about the people who find value in his style, and I realized that the consistent feature was that they didn't care about understanding the material and, in some cases, were so incapable of doing so that the notion wouldn't occur to them. Not dumb, just not interested. They were simply transactional, and almost always very, very scared of talking in public, and this coach's method allowed them to get through it.

This also helped me realize that I don't particularly suffer from stage fright or public speaking anxiety, which has been a benefit, though it's important to note how insignificant that actually is. A family member has worked on stage with some extremely successful actors, and it's REMARKABLE how many of them have absolutely crushing stage fright. To me, that's more interesting than the line-learning thing: you take a person, someone most people in this thread would have heard of, and imagine them hiding out in a bathroom because their terrified of going onstage, then they get out there and utterly blow the room away. Something about pretending to be someone else unlocks so many actors.

This ties right back to my friction with this public speaking coach, because he was attempting to coach me into playing pretend, though without any empathy or understanding. So this guy is producing two categories of students: people like me who want to understand the material and the audience and simply speak like a better version of ourselves, and people who sound like they're selling you a car they've never driven but doing so competently, checking more "good public speaker" boxes at a superficial level.

I'm guessing the great actors and public speakers do both: love the material AND love the act of becoming a person you want to listen to.

FWIW, I mostly coach juniors at work who will brilliantly describe their current project to me at their desk but then fall apart in the conference room in front of peers and seniors. Mostly it's because they're trying to recite some prepared speech that doesn't sound like they normally talk (often desperately trying to impress the room). So I tell them their mastery of the material will impress the room and you sound plenty fine when explaining it to me at your desk. I don't have a full semester of instruction time to make them develop a style -- I have one hour the day before the meeting. So it doesn't produce great political orators. But it does help produce people who can walk through some deep technical work in front of their bosses.

>AND love the act of becoming a person you want to listen to.

And love that character too. That takes some self discovery, experimentation, and practice. Which is why I referred to it as a great effort.

Addendum: To give some credibility to my method, I often point out to them that they sound their best when speaking during data reviews. These are sessions where, following some kind of test, engineers gather to review sensor outputs. You have no time to prep a speech -- these are quickly assembled within hours of a test and are very much often just a loose collection of screenshots and quick annotations and the engineer in question usually spends that time copy pasting screenshots or driving back from a test site.

But once it's their turn to talk about some really obscure looking line graph, they will deliver some great, great public speaking. Why? They've spent the last 6 hours staring at this graph and know deeply how to interpret it.

By the way, this has given me reason to believe that Investment Banking decks largely are just to force junior associates to undergo the above process.

This is my experience as well, and ironically mirrors my time as a manager. I want to understand and empathize with people, and there are managers and orgs who absolutely don't want that, and want the "people who sound like they're selling you a car"

For a long time, I felt annoyed at the fact that my mom (who teaches language) would rightfully find more and more problems with the way I wrote. I felt as if I was losing some of my younger qualities (I was always considered a pretty good writer).

Now, though, I have realized that it's exactly as you described: I accidentally started writing as I talk — and that has morphed the writing into this sort of weird stream of consciousness thing with its own rules, ebbs 'n' ibbs. Most people who know me like what I write because they feel as if I'm talking with them via text. My personality is there. And as someone managing both bits and people, personality and the associated gift of energy is perhaps the best thing I can give my team.

I try to counteract this perceived reduction in quality by practicing my other passion: writing poetry :)

And as the other comments mention, actors very often do alter the lines. Behind the scenes footage and interviews with actors reveal this often happens because they think the screenwriter/director got it wrong in that particular moment -- that their character wouldn't respond like that.

The Han Solo example is a good one. Hours of takes saying "I love you too" and then Harrison Ford has a flash of clarity and realizes Han would NEVER respond like that. Calls for a quick take, "becomes Han Solo", says "I know" and the rest is history.

It's rare they say all lines exactly as in the script. In fact often the script gets updated with ideas that came up during shooting including improvised lines.

Sometimes a line just isn't working and an actor or the director or the writer or a grip will come up with something that works and that's what you hear about. Those are exceptions and not the rule.

The director has the final say. Often others higher up have the final say. If he wants you to say the line as written, you will say the line as written.

In general it's more common that some lines will change and be improvised by the actors, than not.

It's even practical, some lines come off as stiff when the actors tell them verbatim, others just can't be replicated in a longer emotionally charged scene (where the flow and the emotions carry the performance), and so on.

>Often others higher up have the final say. If he wants you to say the line as written, you will say the line as written.

DUH!

It's very rare that a conversation scene mirrors the dialogue exactly 1 to 1. Obviously there will be certain lines where the director wants exact delivery but actors very often deliver a slightly different line than as written.

If anything this frequency increases the higher level of profile / skill the actor has.

There are countless examples where a director is asked about scenes and defers the credit to the actors for improvising something particularly well or coming up with a better line to convey the same point - they are the ones, after all, in charge of personifying the character that was written. They may feel a different delivery suits the character better.

It will also be easier to improvise and fit the tone if you forget what you were supposed to say.

Aside from the above, which are about memory, it's also good for making it natural: you'll sound more authentic/natural speaking as you normally do, than trying some fancy speech, and it will also be easier to add off the cuff remarks that also fit the tone, like an idea that occured in the moment, or to respond to something that happens just before/while speaking.

>You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face. Otherwise, for your next line, you’re not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously.

My biggest play to memorize was as one of the leads of The Importance of Being Earnest in high school and a big part of knowing it end to end was how I memorize talks today, just repeating it until you become the part, and feel like you know “your part” not “the lines”. You’re not regurgitating lines, you’re stepping through and reacting based on a set of information to a point where you don’t even feel like you’re trying to react. This also helps a lot with improvising when things go wrong since you’re just following the flow your character would with the stimuli, rather then having to step line by line through. The worst people to act alongside were the rote memorizers who would break that flow to go back to a line that was missed or just freeze.

When I was in a classical piece I'd usually come off stage speaking iambics or couplets for a while, without ever meaning to.

Isn't this why they do stage rehearsals? Not so much to memorize the lines, but to see how each plays off the other actors. And it is while rehearsing that they can detect that something "isn't working".

To me, what Michael Caine is saying seems essential for the stage, even more so than for cinema. For cinema, you can reshoot if a line or interaction feels unnatural. For theater you don't have this luxury.

If you are saying out loud "memorized lines" you're really not paying attention to the other actor. Some theater is deliberately "artificial", but a lot isn't. And they definitely want to play off what the other actors are saying, otherwise it feels mechanical... which is what happens in unprofessional or kids' plays, everyone is "reciting" and it doesn't feel like a real play!

The technique has two or more actors repeating the same lines back and forth at each other, based on simple observation and repetition. But what's really being said and communicated is the subtext of how the actors sense and feel - not the words at all.

Saying "you're wearing a blue shirt" might encode the thought "I don't like the tone of your voice" or "you've got a nice smile." And the other actor is meant to read that off of you and respond in kind.

But the Meisner technique also teaches you to learn your lines by rote, practicing them in a monotone, intentionally devoid of meaning (the opposite of what this article describes), under the theory that this will free you to add spontaneous emotion in the moment.

Whereas in my experience that's a terrible approach. It makes it vastly harder to learn the material (as this article suggests), and then students tend to perform closer to a monotone because that's how they practiced it and built an unconscious habit of association -- or once they're able to bring emotion to it they forget their lines because the emotion was overwhelming and they don't have the lines "in their bodies" connected to the emotions that are going on, because they learned them by rote.

As you can tell, I'm not generally a fan of the Meisner technique overall...

Like I say, I've noticed the same thing you have, so there's clearly something there. I've just never "got it", so it kinda fascinates me.

It's a lot like improv in that you establish an unspoken protocol for exchanging lots of side channel information.

But unlike reading between the "yes, and" subtext to build a narrative world and rules, you're taking in raw, full sensory emotion in an intimate way by completely dropping your own filters. Brains melded, firewall open. You have to say what you see, what you understand, and what you feel. And you have to tell the truth and not lie to yourself and your partner.

It's as uncomfortable as staring into their eyes, until it stops being uncomfortable. And you don't even have to be looking at one another. You can hear it in their breathing and the cracking of their voice. You know exactly how you feel about everything with exacting precision. You're uncomfortable and vulnerable and excited and anxious, and you let them know.

Meisner removes all the social filters of the adult brain. All the platitudes and the scar tissue of decades of interacting with people in society. You stop judging and worrying and just say and do what you feel. And you hear it from them too, and you believe them because they're being honest with both you and themselves.

You know if they're lying, because you've trained and can sense it. And you'll call them out on it. They'll do the same to you when you attempt to hide. They'll really dig in. Once you're under that spotlight, there is no hiding. You can go wherever you choose to go. It feels raw and weird and more intimate than being with a lover.

With practice, "you're wearing a blue shirt" becomes "I don't like how you look at him and smile, but when you look at me you frown". And everyone cries and yells and things get thrown.

On the spectrum of our robotic "how are you? / I'm fine, and you?" programming and a raw and intense fight with a lover, Meisner is the latter. Except you get to be that authentic for the entire range of human emotions: good, bad, happy, sad. A door to everything you could potentially feel.

It's animalistic and completely cerebral. And it's real and you live it. Sometimes you come away shaking.

Neither did the crying and the yelling. I did too, just so as not to be left out (crying and yelling is always good fun), but they all took it so damn seriously that I wasn't sure where the line was between useful work and self-indulgence.

Oh, and also I think a professional actor ought to be able to drop in without having to drag someone else through ten minutes of repeating the first three words of their lines back and forth until the syllables are drained of all meaning. True story! I was as good a sport about it as I could be, but gosh... It was drizzling, and the lighting guy fucked off for tea, and I sure wished I could too.

I know more direct ways to get students to drop their inhibitions and tune into each other than repetitions. (Oh, and the audience! Everything I've seen of Meisner neglects the audience, and I think being aware of them is really important for stage work. Camera, same, for screen acting.)

Anyway, I'm sure I'm just missing something, and being grumpy. Like I say, I've seen positive results for some actors (though not the chick in the rain), so it's doing something, and I'm glad it works for you.

From my understanding, the repetition exercise has always been something taught to brand-new students in the first month of acting classes, to demonstrate the difference between reciting lines and saying things in a spontaneous, believable manner. As well as to teach what subtext is.

The idea that anyone would be doing the repetition exercise after their first month of acting school baffles me. It's not a technique that was ever intended for, or should be used by, professional actors, as far as I've ever understood it.

We have a variety of techniques for helping with this, but the one that works the best is "micro memorization": take a single sound group (linguistically, a speech chunk) of 2-6 words and repeat them with eyes closed. Anything longer and a small bit of anxiety ("am I remembering the words correctly?") creeps in and destroys naturalism. Eventually, the brain becomes attenuated to sharing meaning, not just words, and that becomes a habit that can be used when warming up a script you've never seen before.

Also, just as a single multi-syllabic word follows a pitch and stress pattern, so do individual speech chunks. Speaking each chunk in the most natural /default pattern is difficult to learn to let happen naturally, and this exercise also builds skill in that area.

Growing up, I knew a pastor who had memorized the entire New Testament. It wasn't a trick. You could drop your Bible open at any page, start reading half a sentence, and he could continue on from there as long as you wished. He really did have the entire thing committed to memory.

When I asked him as a curious 12-year-old how he had done it, his answer was long on wisdom, but short on tactics. He said, "Don't overestimate what you can do in a year, but don't underestimate what you can do in a decade."

Maybe that's the difference? Actors need to memorize their lines quickly, while he had as much time as he cared to use?

I have no idea if your pastor had this kind of practice, but from the article, if he did, it might have helped him memorize the texts. And the memorization, in turn, moght help focusing more and more on the meaning, rather than the words.

Also note that, as far as I know, all texts in the bible (except maybe some parts of the new testament, I am not sure) were transmitted orally for periods ranging from decades to centuries before being written down, and are structured in a way that helps memorization.

We tend to think of memorization as unnecessary if we have unlimited access to the text, but this discussion actually makes me wonder whether memorization might be a powerful way to "unlock" the hidden meaning of some texts.

I find when I practice lectio and meditatio, though, I don't pay as much attention to the words as the images or sentiments or experiences that surround them.

I spent the first half of my life (so far) in Evangelical circles, with that pastor, and became a Catholic in the second half, so have experience with both extensive rote memorization by chapter and verse, and now engaging the texts more comprehensively. Obviously there's also the difference between being a child and an adult, but I find that now I remember the sense of stories when I refer to them, not the actual text, except when I call to mind some fragment of a quotation from my childhood.

I don't think either is necessarily better, and it's entirely likely to me that my overall growth in age and maturity would have led me to this deeper experience even if I hadn't converted. I just don't find it quite as helpful for memorization.

By way of tangential analogy, my current (Catholic) pastor regularly tells the parishioners not to take it when non-Catholics accuse us of not knowing the Scriptures. He pointed out that not once has anyone in the congregation been surprised at how the reading ended. He says Protestants and Evangelicals tend to know Scripture like a mailman knows a neighborhood. They know the street names and numbers and can easily find them on a map. But Catholics know Scripture like families who grew up in the neighborhood. They may not know what number house Mrs. Jones lives in, but they know the Smiths lived there until Junior went off to college, and wasn't that the same year Younger Brother fell out of the tree on the corner and busted up his arm?

Still, I could imagine that the new testament is more easily memorized by getting "involved" in the story. I have this impression mostly by comparing with the pali canon (the oldest set of sacred buddhist scripture): buddhist pali texts (with a few exceptions, such as the dhammapada) are very technical and contain very little in terms of "story", and their structure contains much more repetition and structured lists than the bible. So much so that all written versions I know of abridge the repetitions, as it would otherwise be extremely boring to read. That biblical texts (or more poetic pali texts) did not have to resort to this makes me think that the meaning and emotional involvement with the text indeed helps in memorizing it.

First, actors do actually have to mechanistically memorize their lines in addition to understanding them. There are plenty of instances where you need to recite a long string of words in precise order because that's what's in the script, not because there is some underlying logic that makes the word choice self-evident. While early in the rehearsal process it doesn't matter, in fact it's a good thing to play around with the script, by the end you need to have everything locked down. There is more to theater than just conveying a character's state of mind - people depend on spoken cues, particularly for blocking, and maintaining timing is critical.

On the flipside of that, theater is inherently a variable thing. No two shows are going to be exactly the same. A prop may not function correctly, someone else may mess up a line, the audience may laugh more or less at a joke, etc. You need to be able to adapt in the moment, which means you can't simply remember your lines, you need to be present in the moment. That's the real reason you need to understand your lines. As an aside, it helps that the audience typically does not have the script memorized, so as long as things on stage are progressing naturally, mistakes tend to go unnoticed.

Finally, I think people grossly overestimate the difficulty of memorizing text. We invented language long before writing, and it is extremely optimized for being easily remembered by illiterate peasants. Think about how many songs you know - there are probably hundreds if not thousands you could easily sing along to even if you haven't heard them in years. Think about how many movie quotes you can recall to interject a random pop culture reference into a conversation on the fly. Crack open a book you read 10 years ago to a random page and see how long it takes you to know exactly where in the story you are. You might mistake a word here and there, perhaps switch the order of some lines, but you'll remember the bulk of it without putting in any effort at all. Actors reread their scripts dozens of times, they put as great deal of effort into practice, and their success depends upon this effort, of course the end result will be more polished than baseline memory, but the difference isn't that big.

If what you said was true, there would be no need for the lyrics display at karoke bars.

Years ago (25?) there was a game where you'd draw a card and then have to sing part of that song (I forget the actual game as it was long ago, but that is close enough). Everyone was psyched and it seemed like it was going to be fun. Then we found out none of us actually remembered the lyrics -- we could get part of the chorus and that was it.

No doubt there are people who are great at remembering lyrics, but I strongly suspect it is a small minority of people. I think people overestimate their recall ability because they are singing along to the song in their car (or wherever) and so if they have a moment's hesitation or any doubt, the song keeps going and they are quickly back on track. But without that unfailing guide, they'd quickly fall off the rails.

I have that experience all the time as a musician of moderate ability in a moderate cover song band. Everyone has the experience of learning a new song, thinking "I have this song wired -- I can play flawlessly along to the original" but then the band gets together and tries the song for the first time and it quickly falls apart. Any little bit of hesitation or doubt quickly grows and infects the other players and soon people start arguing if the drums come in after the 2nd or 4th repetition of some phrase, etc, etc.

You misunderstand what I'm claiming.

That is exactly the issue I was describing - you recall the bulk but you make small mistakes and the skill is in reducing the small mistakes and being able to power through them and get back on track when they do happen.

Playing instruments in a band is so much worse, it's not enough to know how the song goes, you need to be in perfect sync with other people, and any mistake is highlighted by the discord. In acting, there isn't another person saying your lines at the same time as you, and mild variation in pacing, intonation, etc from one performance to the next is not only acceptable but desirable. By analogy, you know what the Eiffel Tower looks like, you could probably sketch it accurately enough that someone else would recognize it as the Eiffel Tower, and they would probably be unable to tell you exactly what errors are in your sketch, even though you almost certainly don't know the count, size, and position of every beam.

This resonates with me. I did a lot of amateur acting in my early 20s, and while I remember memorizing the text having been a lot of work early in the process, by the we were doing daily runs hardly anybody had any problem with memorizing the text. I remember it being kind of nice having memorized the lines though, as holding the script on stage during practice can be kind of annoying some times, so I tried to get the task of memorizing the lines done as early as possible.

> This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?”

1. Do embed emotions. For example: Go's CamelCase for exporting variables implies capital letters want to be loud.

2. Do invoke experience. Don't merely read and write code, teach it and activate multiple sensory inputs and multiple contexts!

> Deep, elaborative processing enhances understanding by relating something you are trying to learn to things you already known

3. Do chunk it. Instead of creating new standalone memories, chunk it with other programming languages' syntax.

In summary, while engaging with the material is important, it is not sufficient for passive tasks (how many times have you read a book and forgotten the main points?).

At some point i was bored and wanted to learn by heart a pretty long poem (Lermontov, Demon). I was able to recite it for 15 min straight t normal talking speed, but if you d ask me to start in the middle, i wouldn't be able to. I had to come back to a known point, and go on from that

Then you have direct access to the start of each chunk, so like a hash table of linked lists.

It’s like being an LLM: once I’ve got the first three tokens, the rest just flows out but if I remember the last four on their own, there’s a much higher chance of making an error.

Human memory like a linked list! I like this analogy.

Perhaps it's not mindless reproduction of the training data, rather, entirely mindful reproduction... :D

The Wikipedia page notes:

"Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation, and interpretation."

I never knew that part. Adds a whole new dimension to the narrative when you think about it.

I like how Patrick Stewart puts it [1], as "dead letter perfect", which is apparently the default expectation in British theatre more so than, say, film acting.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2007/jul/29/theatre2

"Deep understanding involves focusing your attention on the underlying meaning of an item or event, and each of us can use this strategy to enhance everyday retention."

The AIP video is motivated by Sabrina's (video creator/presenter) frustration around having a memory that "sucks":

"I can't remember a lot of the things I have done. I can't remember a lot of the things I'm supposed to do..."

One of the points raised in the video was:

"The most important thing for memory when an event is happening is to pay attention to it."

Which seems to be consistent with the view expressed in the article.

If memory is a topic of interest to you, you might find the AIP video a worthwhile watch:

After investigating memory related research and conversations with people who have memorization related experience (both theoretical and practical) an attempt to memorise & recite 3,141 digits of pi in front of a theatre audience is made...

(And, even if it's not a topic of interest, Sabrina's approach to both research[1] and presentation generally makes the result both informative and entertaining.)

---- footnotes ----

[0] "i memorized 3,141 digits of pi to prove a point": https://www.youtube.com/embed/KAjkicwrD4I

[1] As a university graduate with a focus in math, economics, & statistics, who often develops software tools during video creation process.

(This applies far beyond acting. Why did a co-worker explain a concept this way, instead of that? It'll tell you something about their thought process - and yours - if you give it some attention and some thought.)

It will save a lot of internal frustration if I nail that!

That's an interesting perspective on performance for me as it parallels one of the aspects I enjoyed about performing stand-up comedy regularly for a time (primarily at open mics): getting to observe/analyse/theorize what contributed to whether a particular "bit" "worked" or not--both for myself and others.

For my own performances, I could choose a different word, phrasing, tempo etc and see how/if that affected audience response.

Equally, learning from observing the impact of when other performers did the same, refining their set over multiple weeks.

And, then, also seeing how other factors we had less control over (you know, such as the audience :) ) had an impact: sometimes same line, same delivery, might kill one week but got crickets the next.

Granted, my approach to comedy might lean a little more... analytical than some. :D

One of the best directors I worked with had the dictum that "you can coerce a laugh, but you can't coerce a gasp." Like, if you know some basic stagecraft you can make something funny, which... ho-hum. (On a related note: God I hate corpsing. 95% of the time it's fake, and represents to me a failure of craft.) But a wholly involuntary reaction? That's gold.

The best performers, in my experience, are craftspeople at heart. There's an analytical level you have to reach in order for the magic to happen in a reliably repeatable way.

Your description really meshes with my experience playing classical guitar. It takes a few months of work to memorize the piece, but then the fun begins. I've played the same piece hundreds of times. Instead of it getting boring, I keep noticing some new thing in the piece every week, it constantly feels "new." Bring out the bass for these two beats on this measure; hold this melody note just a tad longer; the harmony in these two measures makes for a great descending line, make sure the notes connect. Stuff you don't notice on your first couple dozen plays, that endless repetition starts to bring out. It doesn't work for every piece, but for my favorites, it's really a bottomless hole, like you said.

Like I say, I'm a numbskull when it comes to music, but I love live shows. I'm able to pick up those performance moments - the nuanced attention; the communication within the ensemble, and with the crowd - and just let the sound wash over me. I've had incredible experiences attending concerts by bands whose music I hate on recordings. The Dandy Warhols come to mind: I literally can't stand the one or two tracks I've heard by them (godawful noise), and I've no idea what "music people" think of them, but they were so in sync that seeing them live was transcendant.

That of course assumes that the script writer is infallible. Maybe you do understand the scene and the character deeply, and the writer screwed up by choosing the wrong synonym.

That's not to say there isn't bad writing, and bad shows. (God knows I've done a lot of both!) It's just that actors, at least for scripted material, are secondary creators. Our judgement, too, is not infallible - and we're in the worst position of all to judge.

This illustrates two things about memory: attempting to recall is the thing that causes you to remember, and also that to enter longer term memory is necessary to recall from that, rather than short term memory. Which the above process does by thrashing short term memory with too much data to fit.

This doesn't get you to perfection, probably the process described in the article is necessary as there next step.

So a complete bonkers 'understanding' of history might still be perfectly serviceable to help you memorise it.

just work harder, and when you're successful, give bad advice that knocks the ladder away behind you so people think you're a genius.

Curious to know from the people who have read a lots and lots of text or books or watched movies.

The more you read or watch the faster this becomes.

The neat part is when you can do a double or even triple reading near instantaneously. It’s a little trickier for films, but still possible. I believe this is how your friends who are really good at just breaking down meaning on first watch are doing it —- they have gained media literacy skills that let them take in scenes in a blink of an eye.

Practice your memory, and you can also hold past scenes in your head as new scenes come up. New connections made there too.

Once I get started on a piece of fiction, I don’t exactly see the text anymore either — my brain starts constructing a sort of movie/diorama in my head and every subsequent sentence builds it more and more. Makes reading fiction great and emotional/symbolic analysis great but funnily enough makes me a weak analyst of the language and craft itself. Made my years in undergrad ironically challenging.

We can recall bashful by context is true. The depth of context an actor has to carry is far beyond that, it seems to go to motivation, intent and meaning in deep ways.

The trope of an actor asking the director "what's my motivation" when they're a redshirt and die in scene 2 may actually be .. true: everyone probably has to know why they say what they say to remember to say it well.

Not only did that make sense, but it's an example of even the scenery profiting from learning its motivation.

It's a basically satirical trope in the sense that only a bad and unprofessional actor would need to ask the director to tell them what it should be!

Generally the translation goes the other way. The director gives a external-result oriented note (like, "I need you to be more frantic, here"), and then the actor comes up with the reason why that would be the case.

Like general public-speaking, approaches used by individuals to prepare/perform stand-up do seem to vary based on personal preference/comfort/style.

(In a similar way I wasn't a fan of/good at "rote memorization" in my academic life either.)

It seems to me, not being a script writer, like an incredibly obvious thing to avoid doing. Like if it's this obvious to me, then everyone who touches that script should know not to do that. How did it make it through so many people (writer, VA director, actor) with no one saying anything about it? But it keeps happening, over and over, so there must be something in that writing & acting process that I'm not aware of.

Awareness of self outside of what you’re playing just destroys that flow state. It’s like that whether I think about the shuttle, the table tennis ball, or acting.