This is an opinion editorial by Thorbjørn König, a principal product designer with a sole focus on creating great user experiences for bitcoin products and services.
One of the more curious features of bitcoin is that if you are able to memorize 12 or 24 words, known as a recovery phrase or seed phrase, you can essentially hold your bitcoin in your head.
The motivation behind creating a mnemonic phrase, complementing the existing and not so human-friendly, binary and hexadecimal representation of the seed, was to create a group of easy to remember words, which could easily be written on paper or spoken over the phone.
The introduction of the mnemonic phrase has given rise to a wealth of self-custody products and services — the reasoning being that you should never be relying on your memory alone to access your wealth.
These self-custody products and services come with a set of security and user experience challenges themselves.
We have been developing for a specific challenge — secure encoding, storing and retrieval of a string of words, providing solutions for people that are mostly logical-mathematical oriented.
People are different though, and for a subset of people it is easier to memorize musical tones, shapes, objects or motion, than it is to memorize words. For these people, new mnemonics, such as musical or spatial mnemonics — would present a more meaningful user experience.
New mnemonics would require novel self-custody solutions for secure encoding, storing and retrieval of information — presenting a new opportunity for software and hardware developers and designers.
Brains
Having an understanding of our strengths and weaknesses, preferences and aversions, can help us single out individual tools for learning and memorizing.
Our brain, consciousness and understanding of self, is one of the most contended spaces of contemporary science — and pop-culture alike.
Following this is some of the thinking behind personality types, learning and memory — which can assist us in building new mnemonics and the accompanying self-custody solutions.
Although not entirely conclusive or unanimously accepted by the scientific community, there is something here worth our attention.
Left-Brained Versus Right-Brained
Psychobiologist Roger Sperry discovered that our brain has specialized functions on both hemispheres, and that the two sides can operate practically independently — for example he discovered that language was controlled by the left-side of the brain. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his split-brain research.
Over the years this has been over-generalized by popular psychology, stating that people are either left-brained or right-brained.
More recent research suggests that while the brain’s hemispheres have distinct processing styles, mental processes are shared among both sides — they do not function exclusively, but complementarity.
For example, math abilities are strongest when both brain hemispheres work together.
Still, the left brain hemispheres tend to manage many aspects of language and logic, while the right brain hemispheres tend to manage spatial information and visual comprehension. And most people have, if not a dominant brain hemisphere, then at least a distinct individual preference for activities related to one of the two brain hemispheres.
Multiple Intelligences
Developmental psychologist Howard Gardner challenged the notion that there is a single type of intelligence with his theory of multiple intelligences.
He argued that we each have several types of intelligences, at varying levels of proficiency, such as; linguistic intelligence; logical-mathematical intelligence; spatial-visual intelligence; bodily-kinesthetic intelligence; and musical intelligence.
Note that the linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences are the most valued in school and society.
In summary:
Linguistic Intelligence: Is sensitive to the spoken and written language, easily learns languages and uses language to achieve goals.
Logical-mathematical: Analyzes problems logically, performs mathematical operations and investigate issues scientifically.
Spatial-visual intelligence: Recognizes and manipulates the patterns of wide space, as well as patterns of more confined areas.
Bodily-kinesthetic: Uses the whole body or parts of the body to solve problems.
Musical intelligence: Is skillful in the performance, composition and appreciation of musical patterns.
Now we can explore the alternative expressions of the classic mnemonic phrase — with the personality types and various intelligences mentioned above in mind.
Expressions
Mnemonic Phrase/Words
The mnemonic we know and love — 12 or 24 words. Introduced with BIP39.
Often managed by the user alone, preferably secured on stainless steel, but in many ill-considered cases simply written down on paper.
Also, several self-custody services stand ready to assist you — should you find yourself losing sleep over being your own bank.
All the above with the add-on possibility of memorizing the string of words yourself.
An example of a mnemonic phrase, 12 words:
Mnemonic Phrase/Braille
There are ~8 million individuals with visual impairment in the U.S. alone — and over 253 million globally.
More inclusive bitcoin self-custody products and services are needed.
Braille is a tactile system of touch reading and writing for the visually impaired, in which raised dots represent the letters of the alphabet.
Braille is read by moving the hand or hands from left to right along each line.
Numbers are generated by placing the Braille number sign # before the Braille letters “A” (#A = 1) through “J” (#J = 0).
This mnemonic phrase:
alpha — day — december — valid — abstract — stone — panda — industry — robust — culture — kidney — youth
Would be this in Braille:
alpha
day
december
.. and so forth.
Some Braille Resources:
- Braille-Tools — this library offers some CSS and Javascript to display Braille in web pages (for sighted people).
- The Bitcoin white paper, transcribed in Braille, including tactile diagrams.
For years, the South Korean company Dot Inc. has been innovating with tactile communication — a few real world examples:
Dot Cell/An Electromagnetic Tactile Actuator — the world’s smallest and most cost-efficient Braille cell. Due to its compact and modular nature, the use cases for the Dot Cell are endless.
Dot Watch/6x Braille Cell — The Dot Watch lets you experience time in a completely new way: without sound, just by yourself. Truly, a new sense of time.
Dot Pad/300x Braille Cell — Access visual content from any source. For the first time, you can feel your handwriting, sketches and signature.
Dot Pad Developer Center/SDK Guide/Sample Code/Dev Tools — Develop a whole new category of accessible applications for the first real-time tactile graphics display.
Mnemonic Phrase/ELIA Frames™
Of the 8.4 million people who have a visual impairment in the US — only about 60,000 of them can read braille. Meaning, 99.1% of people who have a visual impairment can’t read Braille, the reason mainly being that they lost their vision as adults. For many, the learning curve is too steep.
ELIA Frames™ is a new tactile reading system — an intuitive and easy to learn alternative to braille — particularly for people who learned how to read regular text before losing their vision.
Hello World — set in ELIA Frames™:
Easy to read, also for people with 20/20 vision. Albeit a bit harder to write.
Here’s a mnemonic phrase:
alpha — day — december — valid — abstract — stone — panda — industry — robust — culture — kidney — youth
Now set in ELIA Frames™:
alpha
day
december
.. and so forth.
Mnemonic Design/Logograms
When director Denis Villeneuve began working on the science fiction movie Arrival, he and his team turned to real-life computer scientists Stephen and Christopher Wolfram to assist with authentic science.
Christopher specifically was tasked with analyzing and writing code for a fictional nonlinear visual language.
Aaron Morrison
Early on, the Wolframs cut the logograms into sections of — 12.
Wolfram’s software can identify and track complex shapes, creating a bank of known words or thoughts.
Only a handful of the logograms have translations, but it would be possible to build out a larger vocabulary. The designs and tools are in place. All that’s missing is the will — and a lot of patience.
Mnemonic Design/Shapes
As grammar is a rule-based system for phrases and sentences — shape grammars are rule-based systems for describing and generating designs.
Shape grammars generate designs by computing directly with shapes in two or three dimensions, rather than with symbols, words, numbers or other abstract structures that represent visual shapes indirectly.
Shape grammar development begins with a vocabulary of shapes — and the definition of spatial relations between these shapes, constraining the ways that vocabulary elements may be combined with one another.
Andrew I-kang Li, an associate professor in design and architecture at the Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT), Japan, has developed a shape grammar software tool for designers.
Mnemonic Design/Origami
Origami…
Read More: New Mnemonics For Bitcoin – Bitcoin Magazine