The Experimental Brain

In Which Peter Bites off More than he Can Chew (As Usual)

Here is my plan for the following year, starting in the month of Febuary (through Feb. 2013) My goal, as per my new-years resolution is to get in the best mental shape of my life.

Brain improvement experiment. (memorize one set of facts a month)

1. February: French: Memorize to autonomy: 80% of french, 3,000 words (~100 a day) (vocab)
2. March: Names/ Structures: Memorize the entire UW org chart
3. April: Math: Ref. section of definitive guide to science.
4. May: French: Memorize all grammar (grids)
5. JuneL Work: Memorize June calendar (memorizing grid information)
6. July: Science: Memorize a computer language’s syntax (vocab.)
7. August: French: Memorize a French poem and english translation (poetry)
8. September: Work: Memorize cognitive science facts. (factoids/vocab.)
9. October: Science: Speed calculation, Dual 7 back. (Memory break/ recall at speed/ease)
10. November: French memorize a french short story. (Narrative)
11. December: Work (you’ll find something.)
12. January: Science: Memorize Calc. and Trig. (abstract Syntax)

52 weeks of poetry (trying to memorize a poem a week):

1. Shakespeare: Sonnet 55
2. Hopkins: 34
3. The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Langston Hughes
4. Fog Portrait, Sandburg
5. On Righteous Indignation, Chesterton
6. The Latest School, Chesterton
7. Keats, On sitting down to re-read Lear
8. Hats, Sandburg
9. Dream Deferred, Langston Hughes
10. Golgotha, Sassoon
11. A Girl, by Ezra Pound
12. A word to husbands, Ogden Nash
13. I wandered lonely as a cloud, Wordsworth
14. Seven Ages of Man, Shakespeare
15. Life, Sir Walter Raleigh
16. Dulce et Decorum est, Owen
17. The Charge of the Light Brigade, Tennyson
18. somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond, Cummings
19. The conqueror worm, Poe
20. The Send-off, Owen
21. Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes, Gray
22. The Crocodile, by Carroll
23. The Dead shall be raised Incorruptible, Galway Kinnell
24. It is not growing like a tree, Jonson
25. Good Morning, Stalingrad, Langston Hughes
26. She walks in Beauty, Byron
27. When I have fears that I may cease to be, Keats
28. Darkness, Byron
29. A day of Sunshine, Longfellow
30. Hopkins, 40
31. Blake, The Tyger
32. Chicago, Sandburg
33. The bells, Poe
34. Holy Sonnet X - Donne
35. Elegy written in a country churchyard, Gray
36. Yeats, Leda and the Swan
37. A ballad of Suidice, Chesterton
38. full Moon and Little Frieda, Ted Hughes
39. Autumn, Longfellow
40. Africa, Chesterton
41. Tennyson, Ulysses
42. An Ancient to the Ancients, Hardy
43. A short french poem, both in french, and in translation
44. In Memory of W.B. Yeats, Auden
45. Ode On Melancholy, Keats
46. A short french poem, both in French, and in translation
47. Byron, The destruction of Sennacherib
48. Yeats, The second coming
49. Freedom Train, Langston Hughes
50. Eliot, the Four Quartets
51. Eliot, the four quartets
52. Eliot, the four quartets

Watch one lecture series a month:

1. Listening to Music (Yale)
2. Language in the Brain, Mouth, and Hands (Yale)
3. Classical Physics (MIT)
4. France since 1871 (Yale)
5. Game Theory (Yale)
6. Computer Science I: Programming Methodology (Stanford)
7. The French Revolution (Kahn Academy)
8. Building Dynamic Websites (Harvard)
9. Highlights of Calculus (MIT)
10. Justice, what’s the right thing to do (Harvard)
11. Multivariable Calculus (Berkley)
12. The Creative Organization (Stanford)
13. Utilities, Endowments and Equilibrium (MIT)
14. Introduction to Life Sciences (UCLA)