Interview with Lynne Kelly author of The Knowledge Gene

What if memory wasn’t just a skill—but a superpower embedded in our genes? 

In this episode, I talk with science writer and memory expert Lynne Kelly about her remarkable new book, The Knowledge Gene. We explore the evolution of human creativity, the deep science of memory, and how ancient oral cultures used storytelling, song, and ceremony as sophisticated memory systems—long before the invention of writing. 

We discuss the genetic clues behind memory and neurodivergence, the science of mnemonic techniques like memory palaces, and how understanding these systems can reshape how we think about education, knowledge, and even what it means to be human. 

Plus: Stonehenge, songlines, memory championships, and a case for putting music and art back at the center of learning. 

This is a wide-ranging and mind-expanding conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

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Transcript

Tripp: This show was recorded in Narrm, Melbourne, Australia, where the traditional custodians include the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and we pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. I'm Tripp Collins, and this is Book Science. The podcast explores how the best science books are written and why they matter. 

Do Aboriginal songlines hold secrets to survival in the desert? Are Neolithic stone circles ancient memory palaces? Lynne Kelly certainly thinks so. She's an author, a science writer, and a memory expert. She and I talked about the surprising way oral cultures store vast knowledge without writing. 

We explore creativity, storytelling, neurodivergence, and how these ancient techniques can transform our modern minds. So wide-ranging and eye-opening conversation, and I think you're really going to enjoy it. All right, today we are talking to Lynne Kelly, author of 20 books, all with a focus on science. 

And today we're going to discuss concepts from a number of those books, including the memory code, memory craft, and most recently, the knowledge gene. Lynn, thanks so much for joining me today. It's an absolute pleasure, Tripp. I'm very excited. I'm just looking at my notes. I have so much I want to ask. 

I hope we can get through it. Let's start with your most recent work, which revolves around human memory, knowledge systems, creativity, particularly as it relates to oral cultures and Indigenous knowledge systems. But I'd like to hear from you. How would you summarize your work in this domain? 

Lynne Kelly: I started a PhD 15 years ago or so on, as a mature age, interested in Indigenous stories in terms of how they encode science. The thing is my natural memory is appallingly bad, and I realized they were memorizing vast amounts of information. And the question which derailed the entire PhD topic was how the hell are they doing that? So I ended up changing over to memory, and the experts are Indigenous cultures, because they have to memorize everything they know. There's a spiritual dimension and so on to their stories and that. But I focus entirely on the science because that is common. Everybody's interested in what's different between cultures. But our science is common. 

Kangaroos go boingadity, boingadity, and the stars move in the same way, no matter what culture it is. And so I started looking into those memory systems, and that became my PhD. And then that got derailed by going to Stonehenge, and I started to see the methods that are used, which we'll get into more detail, in the archaeology. So I started going way back in the archaeology, and the knowledge she has back 40- 50,000 years, showing that these great monuments that people say, oh, they're to the gods or whatever, they were memory palaces. They were systems for recalling vast amounts of information, incredibly robust systems, and we can use them now because our brains work the same way. We just don't. 

Tripp: Yeah, and we're definitely going to go back and talk about a lot of that in specific detail, in particular, I'm going to ask you about memory palaces. But I wanted to ask right now about, since you mentioned your PhD training, it was in nonfiction writing, but you had already had a number of books prior to that PhD work. You were probably qualified to teach the nonfiction writing course, but nevertheless, you enrolled as a student. So what prompted you to get that PhD? 

Lynne Kelly: I want to go back to university. I just love studying. And let's be cynical. I knew that if I was writing on Indigenous knowledges, I had a better chance. I'd already written on for education science, quite a lot of books, and then on animals, on crocodiles and spiders, my big love is spiders, and realize then when I was trying to write the crocodile book that I, there's 23 crocodilian species around the world, trying to introduce them without just making it a boring list because there's a big difference writing for academia than there is writing for the mass market. The Indigenous stories gave me what at the time in my naivety, I thought were cutesy little stories that had just made the book a bit sweeter to read. 

And that's when I stumbled over the fact that these cutesy little stories weren't anything like that. They actually encoded very accurate details of the different species. So I went back to uni in order to write about how Indigenous animal stories encoded behavior, and then started on about memory. 

Tripp: I'm curious about the program on nonfiction writing in particular. Was there something you took away from that apart from the dedicated time for research necessary to fuel like a book project? What did you learn about creating nonfiction work from that course? 

Lynne Kelly: Huge amount. I went in as a PhD researcher, so I didn't have to. This is at the La Trobe University. I went into the English department. I just don't fit anywhere. I'm too interdisciplinary. And that to me is a big problem with our universities. 

I'm going to sidetrack now. Indigenous knowledges are integrated. You know, the stars can tell you about animals, can tell you about relationships. 

We have nice, neat silos in our universities, and they don't tend to talk to each other. So where did I go with this interest in Indigenous stories? The only place I could was creative writing. And the English department took me on with they'd never taken a science writer, always fiction before, or literary criticism. I got a scholarship and I learned a lot by auditing earlier courses. I didn't have to sit big exams or assessments and going to seminars. And it was a mind-blowing experience because people in the humanities don't talk like people in the science. And I learned a lot, firstly, but if anybody gives a seminar with an unintelligible title, they don't know as much as the people who give seminars with intelligible title. That was a big revelation. And that there is a massive difference between writing for academia, which is actually much easier. My first book out of the PhD was Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies, Cambridge University Press, which is purely academic. Writing for trade, which is the mainstream market, is completely different. 

And now I'll get on a hobbyhorse. There's a loss of, as well as a lack of, respect to science happening around the world and for academia. And I think part of the problem is academics don't write and learn to write for people who are not academics or not scientists. If we don't communicate our research, we can't expect them to back their taxpayer dollars going to us sitting in ivory towers and silos and writing for our fellow academics. That is a big motivation for me, writing for the mainstream market. And now I've forgotten the question. I've sidetracked so much. 

Tripp: No, I'm going to keep you right there. So you mentioned your first book, and it was a product of your dissertation, published with Cambridge University Press. And the following book was The Memory Code. And this book was similar material, but you translated it for a popular audience. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to adapt academic work for a general audience? Like, what goes into that? 

Lynne Kelly: The word adapt has to be cut out of that. You can't adapt it. You have to start again, because the voice is completely different. The other thing is you use quirky bits. Now, when you're doing any academic research, there will be little things that happen that can't go in an academic paper. For example, when I was doing a memory palace for all of prehistory, my little dog walked with me. And at the time when we walked past where the dinosaurs came, she always wanted to turn around and go home. 

And I had to pick her up and carry her past the dinosaurs, and then she was fine. Now, that doesn't go in any academic paper. In The Memory Code, it is probably the anecdote that is quoted back to me most. People asked me how the dog is. Now, she was already old, so that's why she needed carrying. So she's no longer with me. And people being sad that I've lost my little dog. That's the big difference is those little quirky anecdotes that bring a human dimension and a canine dimension to the narrative, because it is a story. 

And that's what I learned. And I actually end up teaching in creative writing and professional writing, because it's that narrative that readers need. Scientists reading an academic paper are looking for the introduction, the details, the conclusion and science. But people reading a trade book want to be taken on a journey, and in your journey is the easiest narrative to take it on. 

Tripp: There is an interesting corollary with Indigenous knowledge systems there, because they know that already. When they transmit knowledge, they know that storytelling has to be an integral part of that. Exactly. 

Lynne Kelly: And they have vibrant characters. So the characters will either be extremely ugly, extremely beautiful, very bad. Vulgarity and violence work very well to make it memorable. So what anthropologists, many of them, and most people see as cutesy little folk stories, are not. The thing is that the stories we hear are those that are told to the children. So they're starting to lay down the foundation for the knowledge. 

But in order to get the higher levels, which is where you start bringing in all the details of the information, you have to be initiated. So we don't hear that. And there's really important reasons for keeping it that way. And so those stories, and then you add a whole lot of other memory devices to make them even more robust, which we'll get into. Mythology is a memory device. It's a mnemonic technology. It's not the same as fairy tales. 

I suspect, and there's others who do, that fairy tales are just the leftovers from our old tradition where you just keep the characters and the stories and kick out all the information. 

Tripp: Right. I wanted to ask you about the knowledge gene a little bit. You tell the story how an email kicked off your journey into the world of genetics. And it sounded to me as if you knew, like almost right away, that there is evidence, that knowledge and creativity being uniquely human, and that this was an idea of sufficient weight that you could build a book around it. So my question is more broad. So, can you talk a little bit about how you know an idea is big enough to sustain a book project? 

Lynne Kelly: You have to become obsessed by the idea that you're going to plan the book. Now that's the fun bit. You then got two years later, two years more of going over and over and over it. If it's an idea that you can sustain that, lots of people plan books and start them. You have to be willing to put in those years of just checking every little detail and then going through the editing phase, which I don't enjoy, but thank goodness for the editors. Because lots of things you'll do are not ambiguous to you, but are to the reader. 

That is something that the editors will pick up and it just takes time. So you know the idea is worthwhile if you know that you are going to be obsessed with it for a number of years. Because from starting to publication is usually two to three, if not four years. 

Tripp: And about the book as a format, these days there's all kinds of ways to communicate science and it seems to me that society has been trending towards shorter and shorter forms of communication. Why should we still be writing books? You sort of spoke to this a little bit about the need for scientists to communicate the value that they're creating for society. But in particular, what makes a book maybe uniquely challenging and a uniquely rewarding form? 

Lynne Kelly: You can't get the detail in a short form. Now there's great value for short form and that's where you lay the groundwork. But the sort of detail needed in the knowledge gene and memory craft memory code can't get them shorter. When I first write them they're usually around 120,000 - 130,000 words and I get them down to 80 or in The Knowledge Gene’s case 100,000 words. 

Because there's so many threads and that's what happens because they're integrated. If you do only short form, you're basically doing Google. Now Google is great if you want to find a specific bit of information. But if you want creativity and new ideas you have to link information that hasn't been linked before. And that means that the background for that information, so in the knowledge gene we're talking genetics, evolution, indigenous knowledge, memory systems, cognitive science, all have to be linked together. 

And then it gets into neurodiversity as well. To link them all together with enough depth that the reader is confident that it's robust, but also simple enough that they don't get bored out of their minds with detail. That's where the challenge is and I don't think you can do that in less than a book for something where you're putting the big idea. Then the details can go in smaller form. 

Tripp: Absolutely. Scott Huler, he's a nonfiction author I recently spoke with and he talks about this idea that I think might be appealing to you about a book. That there's sort of the perfect unit of written information. There was space between the invention of the printing press until we introduced the technology of a book in that form. 

Something you can carry around with you. It was just perfectly suited to humans and the way we think. And I wonder what you think about this and I thought it might be interesting to consider analogies in oral cultures, some sort of economic unit of information. Right. 

Lynne Kelly: You've just hit them on about five different themes. Because the transition from oral to literate is really interesting to me in our culture through the printing press and the medieval because books were still not available for hundreds of years because of the cost. They were printed on vellum and even went with paper. Very few people had them. A lot of the libraries were memorized and then translated and so on. 

So you're still using the old memory systems. I've followed the whole thing through that whole process through with China because it's the one country in the world where we can go from rock art through a 40,000 years ago through a continuum through the script to a culture that's still existing today. The literacy rate was extremely low until the 1950s because the characters are so much more difficult than an alphabetic script. I'm learning Chinese in order to handle all of this. And so the memory techniques of story but enhanced with song and characters and so on are prevalent in China, especially rural China right up to 1950s. So you have photos of these performers that took the news and the information around and oral cultures, the news is transmitted this way. They are performance based knowledge systems. So the stories are sung and dance because that's much more memorable. You remember the songs from childhood and teenage years and you don't remember the teacher said in class. And so all of that was still there in China and then Mao Tse-tung bought in Pinyin, the Romanized version and worked on the literacy rate, which thought he tried to get rid of the characters but he failed. 

And I've got all sorts of theories on why and I'm very glad he did because they're hard but I love them. So you've got this continuum and you've got exactly the same thing happening around the world. And so with the printing press you then get the scripts that were handwritten during the medieval times. And so right through medieval and you're talking a thousand years, you've got writing producing books but those books were not available to the vast majority of people because of the huge cost. But also there was secrecy so we should get into secrecy and restricted because control of knowledge is control of power. And you're talking times especially with indigenous cultures where violence wasn't the main control of power or money. 

They were egalitarian mostly in terms of material goods but not in terms of knowledge ever. And so that's power. So you've got books in Western culture from medieval right up to the printing press and then it started to disseminate into ordinary people and the church then started to lose power. They first printed Bibles and other things but agreements but then it started to move. So the first fiction book was considered ridiculous. Why would you write? That's not even true. 

Tripp: Yeah you touched on so many things that we could follow up on. Maybe I'll just start with secrecy and sacred knowledge. You say knowledge is power but also I think part of that is fidelity right? Keeping the information intact over time requires it to be closed to a certain amount of people where they can check against each other. Not just if information spreads to everyone then perhaps it loses fidelity over time. Is that one of the ideas? 

Lynne Kelly: It's absolutely critical to the whole thing. So in America it's called the telephone game. In Australia it's inappropriately called Chinese whispers. Nothing to do with the Chinese. But basically if you start whispering a story to somebody through a group it's corrupted within minutes. We did this for a television show, the host Aboriginal Rob Collins for a show called The First Inventors. And on a beach in Darwin there was a dozen people. Rob told a little story to the first person including animals and plants about five sentences. Round it came and by the end the cockatoo had survived and a monkey had been added and it was completely corrupted. Ten minutes. The producer came over and said we have to film it again and Rob said we can't. We've told them the story, we've explained it all, they all know it, we've got to film it again. He told the same story round it went. 

I think it was the cookaburra survived and a pineapple got introduced. It still got corrupted when they had all been told the story and heard it a couple of times. That's how fragile stories are. Yet we have stories from Australia and around the world and Duane Hummocker talks about this. 

And Patrick Nunn has written a number of books on this. These stories are traced back 10,000 years now. We know they'll go back further and show the sea level changes at the end of the Ice Age, volcanoes that have erupted way, way back. And interestingly, volcanoes that erupted before people came to Australia are not in any of the stories. And that shows that they're not picking up signs in the landscape. I'm working with a Tlingit elder, T-L-I-N-G-I-T from South East Alaska and he's telling me the stories and what he can of that's not restricted. 

Of sea level changes there, you've got exactly the same patterns. If you keep that everybody being told all the stories, you have a 10-minute lifespan. We've got 10,000 year lifespans, these stories, and that's because they keep them restricted. So the stories we hear are the children's stories which give you the foundation. They're grounded when we get to memory palaces and songlines. 

They're grounded in the landscape. And then more and more is added as you get more and more initiated. So the highest level is held by the elders, the knowledge keepers. I call them knowledge elite. And they keep, as you say, comparing with each other to ensure that it's kept accurate. And that's the way you can keep these extraordinarily long, robust stories accurate. 

Tripp: So maybe now is a good time to dive into one of the techniques. Maybe this is the most ubiquitous one. Maybe I should just introduce the concept as maybe some people are unfamiliar, but it's possible to train your memory. It's not only possible, but absolutely necessary in oral cultures who don't outsource memory to written language. And the general name for the aids and techniques are mnemonic devices. 

You talk about a lot of different ones in your books. One particular one seems to turn up over and over again, and this is the memory palace. So maybe could you walk us through what a memory palace is? 

Lynne Kelly: Yes. Now my natural memory is extremely poor. I have a thing called a fantasia. I have no visual imagery and, you know, at school, language and everything were impossible for me. Since I've adopted these techniques, I can memorize anything. So a memory palace is when you set up a location. 

So I'm sitting in our kitchen living area now. If I want to put the countries of the world in in population order, which is one thing I've done, you start with China at that stage was the biggest over at the door I'm pointing to. And you imagine something like a Chinese meal being delivered. The brain naturally does what's called a temporal snapshot. Things you think about at the same time will get linked. 

That's why a lot of people will work out when things happened on how old their children were at the time. So the brain also has place cells. It links things with physical locations. So I've now linked China to that door. Next is India. And India is over near a bookcase over there. And I've imagined a Bollywood performance happening under that. I actually lay down on the floor and tried to watch it. 

That stupid behavior cemented that that's India. And so I go on for 214 countries and I go around the house, down the garden, down the street, get the bread, come home. So now I've got a foundation for them. Now I start adding. If I want to add Beijing and I don't know it, I might think about a bay that with bells around at Beijing. And on that door, I will find something that looks like a bay with bells. Your brain finds those patterns and you start adding characters and build it up and build it up. And so on adding more and more and more information to every one of those locations because the brain sticks information with locations and that also indexes them. So every memory champion I've competed in memory competitions, even took out the senior, all these titles for Australia twice. 

I'm still the reigning champion. Every memory champion uses these methods because that's the way they work. So every Indigenous culture will have stories, origin stories that start with people came out or the ancestors came from here and name every single location. They will name every plant. They will name every animal. 

Geology and relationships and astronomy all be linked in and linked to locations in the landscape. In Australia they're called song lines because they will sing them. So you sing the locations, then you add the extra information and there are songs or performances or gatherings or ceremonies, whatever you want to call them, at each location. 

So I would sing China or India right round and then I have songs and stories for each location. And over years and years you build up this incredibly complex knowledge system that is grounded literally and then enhanced by song, by performance, by characters and then by the physical memory devices that we will get to. It is the most phenomenal system. I've set it up in schools. It is unbelievable how well it works and the school ground is an automatic memory palace. 

Tripp: Just the feats of memory are amazing but it's not just that you can remember information. It's that once you have that structure in place then that opens up new connections that are possible. Maybe talk about that a little bit. 

Lynne Kelly: Yeah because my memory palace, say I've got all the countries in the world, I've also got prehistory, right through history. And so if I come across something, say a person, say Shakespeare, I've now got Shakespeare, and my brain can't help it, I've now gone to the tree that is Shakespeare. 

I've also gone to England and where it is in population order. And then I started asking, Jane Austen must have known about Shakespeare and people in other countries at the same time. I start wondering, Jane Austen never mentioned Shakespeare and yet she was a writer when, yeah I can go on and on and on because I've played with that idea a lot. You start asking questions and seeing connections. 

And so I've now got both of those people but scientists, there's a whole wallop of scientists that come around Jane Austen's time. I'm now seeing where they are and Mozart's down there too. My brain can't help going to that section of the memory trail. So it's seeing those connections that enables the creativity and links. 

And we've got the depths happening now. I don't think we've got the interdisciplinary links happening now. And I think that is one of the reasons why somebody like me was able to ignore the humanities and go stem, stem, stem, because I taught physics and maths and computing and everything and not appreciate that art and music are fundamental to being human, fundamental to our knowledge systems are so incredibly valuable. 

Tripp: There's something about space and the way the brain works that makes these techniques so effective. What do we know about the way the brain works and what is it about place that helps us remember so well? 

Lynne Kelly: We know the place cells in the brain, the 2014 Nobel Prize for Medicine went to the researchers that discovered the place cells in the brain are linked to memory. And we just know that humans can do this in a way that other species do use place, but the idea of structuring information and indexing it on locating it with place is clearly uniquely human. In fact, music, the way we use it, and I can go into details of music, and art are also uniquely human. Art is another way of using the place cells in space. So a lot of the art that you will see from Indigenous cultures actually records place as well. Now, I'm going to sidetrack onto that because of the scrolls and rock art and that I've got so obsessed by. So if you go back, you will see the rock art which marks different specific places, creating a memory palace. 

So you've got those all over the world. And the longest I've found of panels of art, continuous art, is 72 kilometres in 9 mile canyon in Utah. 72 kilometres of art is a blackboard. 

It's the Bayeux tapestry on steroids. It really is incredible because that works for the brain so well. We know that and evolution has placed in us or kept going mutations and so on that enable us to use these skills. 

And that has enabled us for good or evil to dominate the world in a way no other species can, to adapt to different habitats. Interestingly, the spatial abilities are particularly strong in people with dyslexia. And at one school we had a young dyslexic girl, very low self-esteem, set up a memory palace and she absolutely flew with it and couldn't work out why everybody else wasn't finding a disease here. She was. It's easy for everyone but it was really easy for her. So dyslexia is found in every single culture in the world. 

Why didn't evolution sort of phase it out? What earthly use is dyslexia? It's a massive use so you'll find a lot of architects can't spell. 

But they're very good. The dyslexics I've worked with could rotate things in their brains and structures and never get lost and navigate. So evolution has lived these combination of skills. We've all got those spatial skills. We've all got some musical skills. If I sing, you'll know that some of that's very low in some of us except the very few people who have amnesia. No ability for the music. We all have the ability to create art. Innate in us, every little kid will, given the chance, will start scribbling on walls and things all over the world. So this ability to use space and the other enhancements that Indigenous cultures have come right through evolution because storing knowledge is so valuable. 

Tripp: The memory palaces or the song lines, they're out in the world. You walk through the world, you go on a journey, you see the places. They have techniques for sort of condensing down that knowledge and replaying the song line either through ceremony or through art. And one of the more surprising insights from your work is that Neolithic monuments might have been designed as memory palaces. So as those societies were transitioning from more mobile societies to less mobile societies, they decided they're not walking their memory palaces anymore. So they need to create a structure which can hold their knowledge. So can you explain maybe that theory and how you arrived at it? 

Lynne Kelly: Yes. The song lines, as we call them in Australia, Native American pilgrimage trails, Pacific ceremonial roads in Africa, they're all over the world. Once you're looking for that, you can see that all these different things are actually cognitively the same thing. So I wasn't interested in archaeology at all at that stage, but my husband Damien had gone back to university, he collects degrees. And he'd gone back to university to archaeology after information systems. 

And it's interesting because this is in fact an information systems theory. So he wanted to go to Stonehenge. I didn't. I wanted to go somewhere else. The day he wanted to go, it was raining. So I wanted to go to Jane Austen's house. Stonehenge was on the way. 

So we ended up at Stonehenge and I trotted around with him. And it dawned on me that if you're going to farm, you can't just stop one day and say, I'll plant that and we'll be fed tomorrow. It takes hundreds and hundreds of years in order to adapt from a mobile. And I'm glad you use that term, not nomadic. So nomadic is just wondering. Mobile is moving between known sites and all indigenous cultures in the last 10,000 years at least. Have been, not all most, been mobile. So they know their territory is very well. 

They've set up their memory palaces, their songlines. And so in order to settle and farm, you must bring those locations in because you're still dependent on knowing which berries you can eat, which you can't have, the processing, all the other information. So if you replicate the annual cycle locally, you'll end up with a stone circle or a timber circle or a circle some other way, or oval or shape or whatever. And there's earlier monuments. So at Stonehenge, there's a whole lot of monuments before you get to the circle we know. And when I say Stonehenge, people are probably getting an image of the great big sarsens in the middle, the ones with the trilothons on the top and so on. They're 500 years down the track from the first circle, which was a stone circle about 100 metres across, 96 stones, they think initially, and a ditch. 

All of these aspects are really important. So they said the ditch had a very flat bottom in segments. Why did they work so hard to get a flat bottom? It's not defensive. It had gaps across it. 

Because Britain's weather is terrible. And if you don't perform the ceremonies, you lose that information. You've got to keep performing it. A flat bottom ditch in chalk is by far the most effective way of getting a performance site. 

Incredible acoustics. They could bury things which they did in the walls. They had the different locations round on different sizes to match. You had the stones up the top, which were all different, left natural. And if you just stand and stare at a stone, like the bluestones they were, you will be able to see whatever it is. Your brain will make the patterns. 

So you have ceremonies associated with each one, storing the knowledge. You've got exactly the same on a much bigger scale at Avery, way up on the Orkney Islands up north of Scotland, and all over the world. So in Poverty Point where there's no stones, this is in Louisiana, you've got mounds, and you've got mounds all over the US and North America and so on. You've got timber circles, which are Poverty Point after I was there. There was a few potholes. 

They found circles. You've got the same thing everywhere in the world where you've got performance spaces. So at Poverty Point, it's plazas. So at Stonehenge, that open circle, 500 years later, became very enclosed with the great big sarsens. They moved the stones into the middle and made it incredibly secretive. 

You've now got the restricted performance space, where as the public performance space, you must have both. They built Durrington Walls, which is about 3k up, 3 miles or 3k up the road. It's a much bigger site with huge timber circles, all carefully arranged. 

Now, any scientific theory can be falsified. If you can find me a timber or stone monument that is not able to be indexed, able to be walked in a specific order, and that order is really clear, then you haven't got a proper memory palace, and I haven't found one anywhere in the world. I've documented these all over the world, Easter Island, everywhere. 

Tripp: From what I knew of Stonehenge, which admittedly was not very much, was that it was perhaps a calendar and that it lined up with different astronomical events, solstices and whatnot. But what is a calendar if not a mnemonic device? That helps you remember what you needed, seasonal planting and so on. 

Lynne Kelly: Most of these all over the world are aligned astronomical. That's why they're called the Levant Stonehenge, Germany's Stonehenge, wherever Stonehenge. They have the astronomical alignments, but they also have them offset. Stonehenge is the winter solstice, and you'll have different ones doing equinoxes. 

Stonehenge and Durrington Walls will match. You'll get multiple different sunrise, summer, sunset in order to make sure that you will at least get one sighting, because they need to store the annual cycle for hunting, gathering, farming, but also for the ceremonial cycle. Because if you don't keep that ceremonial cycle going, you lose fundamental information, which is a real problem for the elders today and the knowledge keepers, because their culture says you must keep things secret. 

And working with Dave Kanosh, the Tlingit elder in Southeast Alaska, and elders here, how much do they tell me? If they tell me things they shouldn't, they're breaking cultural needs. If they don't and the young people aren't picking it up, the information will be lost forever. It's a real dilemma for them. 

Tripp: In terms of the Neolithic monuments, I remember you had a checklist that you would look for different attributes in order to consider a proper memory palace. So maybe we could talk about that just for a second more. You already mentioned public and restricted performance space. What were the other items on your checklist? 

Lynne Kelly: I'll give you the list in order because I'm here. You're prepared. So, specifically, it's a stratified society, but no indication of individual wealth or violence. So that shows that knowledge is the control of power. So public and restricted ceremonial sites. A large investment of labor for no obvious reason. 

You're talking a million man hours in building ivory or Darrington Walls or something. For what? Some of the theories say in order to show you could, you know, we're better than you. No, as my Indigenous colleagues tell me, we do not waste time on trivia like that. But knowledge is the most essential technology that we have. A sign of a prescribed order that I mentioned before, it's called the method of loci, L-O-C-I, but some way of making sure that there's a structure so it's indexed. 

Enigmatic decorated objects, which we're going to get to, I hope, given my obsession with them. And imbalance of trade. So poverty point, for example, in Louisiana, There's nothing going out and there's all this stone and artifacts and food and everything coming in. 

If you look at Chaco Canyon in four corners area, New Mexico, the huge wealth coming in in terms of jewels and food and there's massive buildings, absolutely extraordinary. Nothing going out. Well, it's not nothing, it's knowledge. University, a whole lot of stuff coming in. You need people to get paid. Nothing physical being produced there, knowledge. 

So when you add knowledge to the trade balance, the balances. Astronomical observations and calendrical devices that we talked about. Monuments that reference the landscape. So if you're taking this gradual adaptation, then you're going to have it referencing the landscape because you've got to have that gradual reference earlier things and all the monuments make reference to the landscape. You'll often get foreign stones being brought in. Poverty Point in particular, lots of foreign stones being brought in because they give a reference to a previous location. Axes made out of a stone that's way more beautiful but less practical than you need and not used. 

There's no use wear on them. There are references to landscape. Acoustic enhancement, these are performance based sites. So you want acoustic enhancement and rock art in a form that works as a mnemonic which rock art all does. And I could go on for hours about that. So that's the fit. I'm looking for those 10. If I don't get at least eight, I dismiss the site. But the monumental sites, you get them every time. 

Tripp: It's not a trivial checklist, right? So that's like a robust amount of requirements in order to apply the theory. 

Lynne Kelly: And that they match cultures all over the world. I haven't just gone, okay, Dja Dja Wurrung, my local, I should acknowledge the old elders on the land that I work on. If I just took Dja Dja Wurrung and tried to move that culture elsewhere into the monuments, I'd fail. And sure, in any way, it wouldn't be legitimate. I'm looking at mnemonic technologies that are unique, not the cultural development of them. 

Tripp: I want to take us back to what you were talking about previously in terms of sacred knowledge. And another place at point are listeners' book Songlines by Margo Neale and yourself, which is part of the first Knowledge Series beautiful book. And there's an obvious way your expertise and hers match up and how they complement and translating world traditions into a book, which it sounds contradictory, but it definitely works. I think it's a great introduction to the world of Aboriginal knowledge systems. So I have a few questions here, but maybe just talk about co-writing the book. How did that process work? 

Lynne Kelly: Margo is Indigenous and Indigenous curator of a massive exhibition, National Museum of Australia, called Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters, which is now that exhibition is travelling around the world at the moment. 

And she had come across my work in memory code and heard about me from various people. I just want to sidetrack there. Talking Indigenous information as a non-Indigenous person is walking on eggshells. There's a lot to learn about how to do it diplomatically. And I took a lot of time at the beginning of my research making sure I could do that. 

And that has filtered through to the Indigenous communities and I've had no criticism, which was really important to Margo approaching me. Now, she's series editor on the First Knowledge of Series, but Songlines are absolutely fundamental. So that's the opening book. And she, Margo firmly believes that we are all Australian, that Indigenous history is Australian history for all of us. 

So the series is written by Indigenous and white people, or non-Indigenous, not necessarily white, working together. So she approached me about the book. Now, she has a couple of really valuable metaphors for what we're doing. And one is the Third Archive. So the First Archive is the way Indigenous knowledges work, all this memory systems that we've talked about. Second Archive is writing and technology that has, in a lot of ways, displaced things that I think should come back. And the Third Archive is the combination of the two, which is more powerful than either by themselves. And so that the book and the exhibition are part of the Third Archive. She has another metaphor, which she just mentioned in passing in something I read and didn't realize how incredibly brilliant she is, which is the body and the flesh, that the way Indigenous knowledges work is the skeleton, when they're performing, must be kept accurate. 

We all have exactly the same skeleton. So the information about the berries and the astronomy and all the rest must be kept accurate. But each performer puts their own flesh on it to make it entertaining, to make it different, and to be individual and those, the great entertainers, are very highly regarded. So that metaphor, I think, really works well for the way Indigenous knowledges work as a performance. 

There is no problem whatsoever in their minds taking that performance information and extracting the practical information they needed any given moment. We have this division between fiction and non-fiction. It's a dichotomy that is holding us back. 

Indigenous cultures don't differentiate, and the human brain is perfectly capable of pinching what they want from it. We wrote Songlines together. The series has gone on. 

It's been extremely successful. We've now started the series for younger readers, not first knowledges for younger readers, and Songlines is the first one out in that. Working with Margo, we're working together on academic stuff now, has been unbelievable in helping me see nuances that I couldn't see from outside the experience of Indigenous culture. So working from theory or as many older anthropologists did from a feeling of superiority and bringing civilization to the poor primitives, you will not pick up any of these nuances because it's partly experienced and can't be written. 

Tripp: The other thing you do, if I may, is you don't just study techniques, you practice them. So I think that must be an important aspect of it. The performance is such an integral part of the knowledge system. Unless you're a practitioner, you're not going to have this slightest idea of what it's all about. 

Lynne Kelly: You won’t believe it works so well, and this is where we've talked memory palaces. I've gone over 10 kilometres now, around my home of memory palaces. Five kilometres, that's Chinese vocabulary. But we talked to mention the physical devices. So I'm going to introduce that concept. So what I'm holding, and you can see, but if this is audio only, the listeners can't, is an Aboriginal coolamon. So this is a food dish carved out of wood that they can carry food around in. But on the back is markings, what appear to be random but they're not one to study them, markings. And a young girl who would get a coolamon like this, this surreal one from over 100 years, Central Desert Culture, would learn the songs associated with each marking and learn to sing them. 

And this acts as a portable memory device that goes everywhere with a... An Indigenous woman that said the ancestors want you to understand this. I get an emotional reaction to it that is a foundation member of the Australian skeptics. I had trouble realizing that I would have this emotional reaction. 

Emotions make things memorable. So I read about the African Lukasa, which I'm holding up now. There's no real ones in Australia. This is copy. This is just a replica set up from my own stuff. But I read about it when I held one at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. I couldn't believe the feeling. But I read about them and it said that this bit of wood carved and with beads on it, hand held, designed to be hand held, encoded huge amounts of information and my skeptical brain stepped in and said, rubbish. There's no way a bit of wood with beads on it would encode information. 

So in my worst scientific method, I grabbed a rectangular bit of wood, randomly shoved some beads on it and decided, okay, let's try it and see anyway. And my husband's a fanatical birder. So I decided I'd encode the bird families, 82 bird families at this state. 

I got it up the right way. Yeah, so now I'm not going to go through them all. So I started singing them. An order came out in the beads, which it just, my brain found the order. 

And then it worked so well. I started adding all the species to each family. It's in taxonomic order. And so some, like the emu has its own family, Dromaiidae, drum roll for the beginning. 

That's how I remember its family, Dromaiidae. And so it goes on. And I started stories adding all the members of it. So that's a day which I'm pointing to that shell is the ducks. I create the story for the 16 ducks and sang it and played around with it. I have 412 species of birds in Victoria. And if you like, if your listeners would like, I will sit here and reel them off in taxonomic order. Maybe not. And then I've started getting, you know, the ones that I call brothers are the same genus. 

So I've now started working out which are the same genus in terms of identifying birds. It's become really valuable and it works unbelievably. I've now done workshops with kids as young as four. We do it with cultural astronomy at Melbourne Uni with uni students. It is unbelievable how well it works. And it's so easy. 

Tripp: I want to get back just briefly to Margo Neale and metaphors and analogies. She talks about, refers to some paintings as encyclopedias or databases. And I just want to ask about these analogies and metaphors and how they're useful and how maybe they fall short of capturing exactly what indigenous knowledge systems do. 

Lynne Kelly: You're right. They are useful, but they do fall short. The experience enhances them. So paintings are knowledge. And that's why you can't replicate an Aboriginal painting legally. They're owned because they're owned by the people who initiate it into the information, otherwise you get the information corrupted. So if you think of Stonehenge or any stone or timber circle around the world as a database, except that all the information is kept in memory, but it's human memory, not computer memory. So any database has to be indexed in order because if not, you can never find the information again. So you can put it into the database and it's gone forever. That's why these structures are so strong. 

So they are variable field databases with information stored in memory. And that, if you use that analogy as a starting point, all the monuments around the world built in that transition. So then the argument becomes, well, what about the monuments that aren't built in that transition? I cannot find a single monument that fits the patterns that's outside that. And you then see, as you go into cathedrals, which are set up as memory palaces again, and that's well documented from medieval, with all the images, the music. You've got the whole pattern because medieval cathedrals, the audience had to build by memory because they couldn't have the books. So you get this movement from mobile into the monuments into built civilizations, and then these extra abilities that we all have built into us being sidelined to entertainment. 

The music moves up to the stage, the art moves on to gallery walls, and we don't use them that way. So that continuum is everywhere, and the analogies help you see it, but unless you experience it, you won't get the full nuance of it. So I can write as much as I like, and that's why I wrote Memory Craft, so that people got the exact methods to experience it themselves. 

Tripp: Yeah, you're touching on something I was going to ask you towards the end, but maybe I'll just bring it up here. So you have a longstanding interest in education, and we're a teacher. One of the points you make in the book is that with written knowledge systems, there began to be this divide between serious literacy and numeracy and more maybe whimsical arts, and arts in the absence of its demonic meaning perhaps became more purely driven by aesthetics, which only reinforced that divide between arts and more serious study, and we're in a time where schools, you know, if they don't receive all the funding they need, the art programs are usually the first to go, but your work points towards reintegrating arts and music and dance and storytelling into education as core tools for learning. So would you like to talk about that for a bit? Absolutely. 

Lynne Kelly: I was a teacher for 40 years, taught some upper primary, but mostly senior secondary and a little bit of tertiary, and yes, the arts up until really recently in human history were part of information systems. Now, I was part of bringing computers into schools. So what we did was we started with computer science, but it was soon integrated across and we have technicians who help the classroom teachers integrate it right across. That's the model we need for art and music and performance. So that, and if you're desperate for money, there's no shortage of parents out there who have got these skills, but teachers with these skills can integrate across into the curriculum. 

So let's take a simple example at Malmsburry Primary School down the road here. They did force in science. Now, force, it went right across the curriculum from the little kids up to 70 in the school from grade five kids right up to 12 year olds. So they done force. And a week later, I said to every student individually, force, you did force in science. 

I put in context. Yes, what is a force? 50% of them said it's when your parents make you do something or, you know, three out of 70 told me it was a pusher or a pool. And the rest told me it was from Star Wars, made the force be with you, which is lousy physics. So the music teacher then, I can't do this without the actions, but the music teacher then took the Imperial March and made a little song, a force is a pusher or a pool, pusher, pool with the actions. 

They did that in class in music once. A week later, I quizzed them all again, exactly the same wording. And 100% told me it was a pusher or a pool, did the actions and laughed. 

Yeah. Because they, it was fun. It was emotional. 

It was movement. So you've got your active kids happy with this. So when the teachers reduced the term force in class, none of the kids in their heads, only three of them were doing push, pull, push, pull. 

Now all of them were doing push. So I'm not say using music for the whole curriculum, but key terms, key stuff use music. Art, I talked about the 72 kilometer panel, but there's panels like that everywhere. And if you take them into China, there's things called hand scrolls. You've got the Bayeux Tapestry. But in China and Asia, these horizontal scrolls, hand scrolls, one word, tell stories. 

And the replica I've got here is five meters over five meters long. And they're aimed to be viewed bit by bit. And there's a book, A Thousand Years of Manga, that shows the continuum from the scrolls into Hokusai the wave guy, coin to turn manga, and then into what we know as manga. Art, these ways of recording information makes it memorable. I've done it with kids, with little scrolls, with just cartridge paper, doing a story of the planets as they approached the sun. And Saturn, so they come in order to a dinner party at the sun. And Saturn comes and dawned with rings all over, and Jupiter's a stormy and angry. 

They created these characters. I've done it with little kids and bigger kids. It cost almost nothing. They had fun. They bought art in. Then they started doing encoding, how many moons there were. They found ways, where there was an atmosphere, there was ways to encode information into that story. 

You know, Mercury, the ancient Greeks were doing this the whole time. So the Sapiens book is now in three volumes of graphic novel. There's bits in it that are in the images that you cannot put in writing, for no other reason except the images evoke humour. So again, we've got art can be bought right across the curriculum, added a mention, lose nothing, increase memorability, and ground fundamental layer. 

Tripp: I want to take a bit of a hard left turn here. So I'm going to go to Polynesian Navigation. And I was in the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, and I adore that museum. 

I think it's amazing. And there's a section on navigation and how Polynesians use waves. And there was a quote, and it was pulled from David Lewis's, with the navigators, about how the navigator would use his testicles to feel the waves. 

And you can imagine this was very memorable. But I sort of forgot about it until I read a very similar line in songlines, which was a highly skilled navigator can determine the slightest wave movements by entering the water and using his scrotum as a hypersensitive detector. So I have to ask, do you have an explanation of this, or where can I find more information about this? 

Lynne Kelly: David Lewis is where I got it all from. Okay, that's interesting. Was it in songlines? Should have been a fully cited quote. It didn't fill my books. 

Tripp: Yeah, it is in songlines. And you have a David Lewis citation near it. It just wasn't like directly on that line. I just wasn't sure if there was another source of information. 

Lynne Kelly: We, the navigators, and East is the Big Bird of the two that I use. I became absolutely obsessed by these navigators. And so they learn so delicate differences in wave motion that they have to use the most delicate part of their bodies. This is something I haven't been able to experience. But then if you take it further, they use the star charts, which are made of shells and sticks. 

So now you've got your portable devices. They sung it. The navigation schools were highly restricted. Right. The navigators were very powerful. 

You can now go through that list I just, we read before, and the navigators fit it. And I do them in detail in the academic book. And they're using all the same techniques again. So because, and I can't emphasize this enough, they are innate to humans. 

Right. So, basically, humans, really ancient, unbelievably effective, and evolution favored them, jointly integrated, because it's such a powerful way for knowledge. And we are not taking advantage of that innate potential that we all have. 

Tripp: Yeah, that's a good segue into the genetic component. So if there is indeed a gene responsible for human creativity and transmission of knowledge, and humans have been genetically similar for hundreds of thousands of years, this would seem to suggest there should be evidence for, you know, archaeological evidence for creativity and knowledge transfer, putting aside for the moment that there are actual living cultures whose stories can be traced back directly. But part of the fun of knowledge he was reading about the archaeological evidence, which of course is open to different interpretations, but I believe you presented some compelling cases. And so maybe can you talk about some of your case studies from that book? 

Lynne Kelly: There's a whole lot, but let's take the European cave because the Ice Age cave. So if people think of the rock up there, they think of the horse heads or the lions or whatever, and Lascaux Cave. 

But if you look at the horse's heads, you'll see the ears are in different positions, and anyone who's into horses know how much information there is in the position of the ears. But what the books don't show as much because they don't look as pretty on the cover is how much abstract art there is that it was built up, that they're in panels everywhere, great long panels, and that at the points of art are the most highly resonant positions and that they are performance spaces there. So you've integrated the music with the art. At some positions of very high resonance where there isn't a suitable panel, there will still be a dot or something indicating that location. So the integration of music and art is heavily indicated. 

You've also got performance being indicated in the art. This is not only Homo sapiens, it's also Neanderthals. So the Bruniquel cave in France has, where they've taken a whole stack of stalactite types, they've used heat to dislodge them and they've stacked them and created a memory palace. And it took a lot of work. 

And this is Neanderthal and there's art there as well. So you've the same science. And the gene that we talk about in the knowledge gene, NF1 neurofibromatosis type one, that is clearly linked to these various, these various skillset. We have a unique gene, unique version of NF1 and male emphasis is not a single gene theory. It's a gene that has a lot of effect theory. And it causes a disorder called neurofibromatosis type one where what is heavily impacted apart from the tumors that are caused, that's the main field of research for the obvious reasons. It impacts music hugely, massively, spatial abilities, ability to use imagination and let's see, it impacts all the same things we're using. So you have to ask the question, why did evolution hundreds of thousands of years ago not only lead this gene in but spread it through the human unique allele, through all humans, all Neanderthals, all denisovans, which are the only three hominin populations that we have DNA for. All of them have the human version. 

What is so valuable that it's worth risking one in 3000 births with the tumors and the other problems and knowledge is that important. Now there's also Fox P2, the so-called language gene, but also other genes are impacting on this as well. But evolution has made sure that not only do we have language but that we link music and art and spatial abilities, these knowledge systems, and it's clear in these caves there's recipes for creating the colors that required all these, you know, heated up to this thing and do this. Going back, you know, 70,000 years or something, how were they remembering that they were bringing colors from all over without a knowledge system? It cannot work. 

Tripp: Yeah, and related to that, I guess, is just the survival of cultures. I wanted to bring up this quote you have, culture is built around what you do have, not what you don't. 

I love that. It's fundamentally biased to talk about societies as illiterate, right? Exactly. And because of preconceptions about Indigenous cultures as being maybe primitive, there's sort of a need to address and up in long held biases against Indigenous knowledge. And we touched on this in a few different ways, but one of those biased views is that Indigenous stories are just frivolous superstitions. Your work, the work of others, show that it's clear that storytelling, you know, it's not literal representation. There's sophisticated use of imagery, characters, song, dance, and this encodes vital survival knowledge because, well, of course it does. 

I mean, the fact that these cultures have endured, at least here in Australia, the Aboriginal culture goes back at least 65,000 years. This points to the existence of an incredible body of knowledge. In a YouTube video explaining the Seven Sisters exhibit, Margo Neale says, every element of the story contains critical information for survival in the desert. So, no specific question there, but maybe you just respond to that a little bit. 

Lynne Kelly: Marvelous Margo Neale. When we're together, Margo Neale has this presence. She'll walk into a room not trying to attract any attention and all the attention will be on her immediately. And that's part of the performance thing. So, yes, everything has to be kept in these performance, in these information systems. 

They're phenomenal. Can I sidetrack to the question you didn't ask on your own? Of course. Because if you look at these, and I've worked closely with Margo Neale on this concept, you have got to have the people repeating the information, keeping it absolutely accurate, not liking change, and being really attentive to details. You've just described autism spectrum, diversity, not disorder. 

They are performance-based knowledge systems. You must have people who, like Margo Neale, can attract attention, perform hyperactive, taking in all the information, and then you've got other neurotypical filtering it through. This is a gross oversimplification. 

And that's why we've got to be patient. Without ADHD and autism, these systems will not work, and every population in the world has specific proportions of autism and ADHD and dyslexia. And evolution has not phased them out. 

They are consistent, and yet we consider them disorders. I talk about ways of using a classroom to take advantage of these. So evolution has put neurodiversity and then you've got the diversity that I've got, a fantasia, I have no visual imagery, no audio, I can't recall any of that. 

So if I meet you tomorrow, I won't recognize your face unless you're behind a microphone and you're in context. Why on earth would 4% of the population globally have this lack of visual imagery? It wrecks our memories and lots of other things. And the research is showing we don't get post-traumatic stress. So I can, like when my father died, it was very young and it was very traumatic. I wept and was very upset and then recovered very quickly and carried the family through. So just one or up to four in a population of 100, that if the group gets this trauma, we can carry them on because we will recover quickly because we can't relive it. 

I can't replay past events. So what evolution, I've looked at congenital deafness and color blindness, there's a whole stack. I'm coming to the conclusion that everybody is diverse. 

Right. And evolution has put these diversities in because as a population, they work to ultimate levels. And what we've done in our society is sidelined neurodiverse and we've sidelined the humanities and we've got people like me that love school, good at maths and science. We've sort of become the stem. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we really are not taking advantage. And I think that's now I get political, how we can end up with such narrow thinking at political levels because nobody on the diverse spectrums is going to get elected and they don't have, it's a different value system. Artists should not work for money as much. 

The musicians, you wouldn't go into those if money was your only. And so you can see that we need to take advantage of all these skills that evolution's put in us. And the best models we've got are indigenous cultures and our own and people like Margo Neale that is so keen to take advantage of everything. It's worth going. 

Tripp: Yeah, that's a really powerful framework for celebrating diversity for the superpowers that they do have instead of focusing on the deviation from what's considered normal. There's an entire chapter in the knowledge she devoted to neurodiversity. On the surface, you might wonder, well, how does this all fit in? But as you read into it, it's clear that you're making an argument that these people were useful at first, not only useful, but integral in society throughout time. I want to maybe take it back to Margo Neale and other indigenous people that you've worked with and indigenous knowledge keepers around the world. It's clear that there's a strong response to your work from indigenous communities. Maybe you're helping to validate and dignify traditional knowledge systems. And this must just be amazing feedback to get proof that you're affecting real change out in the world. Would you like to talk about that? 

Lynne Kelly: Yeah, it's a feedback system. So if you look at Dave Kanosh, the Tlingit in southeast Alaska, he was using memory boards like I was talking about, the portable devices and that, and the landscape and everything as his grandparents had taught him. But he hadn't realized that some of that was actually Tlingit tradition. He thought his grandparents had taught him these methods on boat trips from Seeker to Juneau and so on. 

Until he started talking to other elders and found they'd been taught too. So he's now working with the Sea Alaska heritage, which represents Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida, the totem pole people. And so starting to explore these and what he and Margo and others say is that I've translated. I've added in the word, Margo says I've added in the word mnemonic into the vocabulary on indigenous knowledge. One indigenous knowledge keeper that I first approached about this information, I said, how do you explain your knowledge system? And he said, we just know it. That's why I said, why haven't you talked about these ways? 

We just know it. And he said, and how do you describe your knowledge system? I don't know where to start. So it's the fact that I've come in so superficially that I've been able to then explore what is so obvious to indigenous people. So all I think is I've bridged in terms of language because I asked the question. Yeah. 

Tripp: And also engaging with the people. I interviewed authors of a book called At Every Depth. It's about climate change in the oceans. And they talk about the story of someone was studying these formations off the West Coast in the US. And they were looking at them and they had this theory that maybe they're clam gardens used by the Native American tribes there. But they hadn't thought to ask a Native American. And of course, when when they did, he was like, oh, yeah, I know exactly what these are. 

I can tell you what these are and how they were used. So he had never thought to explain it to anyone. It was just part of his knowledge system. Part of it is just engaging, right? And just asking the right people the right questions. 

Lynne Kelly: Yes, I've learned a lot from Tyson Yunkaporta who wrote Sand Talk and other books. And what he taught me was to add the human element. So let's take my memory palace for Chinese vocabulary. I get to a location where I've got to encode the word love. And it's done for anyone who knows Chinese here. 

It's set up on the Chinese radicals. So I'm there. I'm trying to put in the character. I'm doing the tone. 

I'm waving around with the tones. I have to add in a story that gives me the tone, the character, the meaning. And out comes Anna. And I say to Anna, who owns the house, I'm not casing your joint to, you know, I'm not staring at your house. 

So I explain what I'm doing. And she says, I love orchids. She, her work is with orchids and starts talking. So now my image of this house has Anna as a person with carrying orchids. 

All of a sudden, this location has come to life. And this is what Tyson's [Yunkaporta] emphasized, that these systems are communal. The more you do it with other people or engage other people, the more memorable it'll become because it brings out an emotional response. So that's what working with the Indigenous cultures, things that are blatantly obvious to them. And what are we doing in schools? We're going to learn from computers. There's so much we can do and not lose anything that we've got. 

Tripp: I want to ask you about the end of the book. So it ends with the following line, together we can change the world. And I think it would be difficult to come to land on something more aspirational than that. If you had to sum it up, what do you hope people take away from reading your books? 

Lynne Kelly: That together we can change with the diversity of musicians, the artists, everything. And my world is so much richer now that I'm engaging with art and music and things that I just didn't because I was physics and maths. And I still love physics and maths. 

And engaging with different neurodiverse voices in the book. Tavish is the best bird around on bird calls at all of 12. And he is helping me learn the bird calls, which I have tried and tried before. The more we engage with people's expertise, and the more we bring knowledge and respect back into art and music and everything, the more we all benefit. And we don't have to lose the symphony. 

Tripp: Do you have any advice that you might give someone aspiring to write a science book? 

Lynne Kelly: Firstly, keep the quirky bits, the little bits of dogs that don't like to go past dinosaurs. And the other thing is use voice recognition and be talking to someone. So when I'm recording, people say that no, me, they can hear my voice in it. It's because that's how I record it. So when I've got the eye on my phone and I'm walking or whatever, I will record bits and then translate and edit and transcribe and so on. But I do use voice recognition a lot as if I'm talking to someone. And the person you're talking to is around 16, right here that wants to learn, but isn't yet at university. And that will pitch at the right level. 

Tripp: What about topics you're excited about continuing to explore, follow on? Is there any projects that you want to talk about? 

Lynne Kelly: Yeah, I'm getting really into the Chinese hand scrolls. I've now had art lessons and calligraphy lessons and binding lessons. And I'm starting to do, I'm doing all of prehistory as a hand scroll, as an artwork. 

I can't work out why these long horizontal scrolls aren't used in Western society. So I'm really excited about that and learning Chinese in order to learn more about them. Plus I'm engaging in music, plus doing more on your adverse, plus working with Margo again, plus I wish there were more hours in the day. 

Tripp: Absolutely. Where would you direct people if they wanted to find out more and support your work? 

Lynne Kelly: My website. If you Google Lynne Kelly, spelled L-Y-N-N-E-K-E-L-L-Y, it's lynnekelly.com.au. Also my book that's in there. 

Tripp: Absolutely. Lynn, thank you so much for your time. We've been talking quite a while now. Is there anything you wanted to touch on before we end it? 

Lynne Kelly: Oh, just, thank you. The kitchen table, which you must have read about in Knowledge Jean. The number of things that happened around this kitchen table, because I've invited musicians, artists and neurodiverse people, put food on the table, which they contributed. And then I'd throw in a topic thinking, I know what people are going to say, and nothing happened the way I thought. Engaging with other people who think very differently is the most exciting thing you can do. So grab a musician and artist and neurodiverse person. 

Tripp: Awesome. That's fantastic advice. All right. We've been talking with Lynne Kelly about her many books on memory, creativity, oral cultures, Indigenous Knowledge Systems. We've only just scratched the surface, so if you enjoyed this conversation, do yourself a favor, pick up some of Lynn's books. Lynne Kelly, thank you so much for being on Book Science, and I really appreciate your time. 

Lynne Kelly: It's been great fun Tripp. 

Tripp: Hey, Tripp here. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, there are a few ways you can help us keep the conversation going. First, be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast. It really helps us connect with more listeners. 

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The Patreon is also a great place to get in touch, and we'd love to hear from you. So what books would you like to hear us cover next? Remember, you can find show notes and all things Book Science, as well as everything else I'm working on at TrippCollins.com. Thanks for listening. I am Tripp Collins, and this has been Book Science. Your invitation to think deeply, stay curious, get off the scroll, and get out into the world. Take care.