Why do we remember and cherish the best books?
Answers
Your theme is memory, but not the sort of memory that automatically embeds itself in our minds, like a first kiss.
The original Latin memory treatises talk about a distinction between natural memory and artificial memory. Natural memory is like the basic cable package. It’s our brain’s biological capacity for recall. Artificial memory is what you are able to do with your natural capacity through training, practice and using mnemonic techniques.
You wrote that memorising is a “primal capacity from which too many of us have become estranged”. Please explain.
One of the things that I was surprised by in my research was that although the idea of a disciplined, trained memory feels novel to us today, it was commonplace in ancient history. Once upon a time, people treated their memories with more sanctity. They cultivated their memories. Today we don’t think of furnishing our minds, and few schools emphasise memorisation.
So how did we become estranged from this “primal capacity?”
Our culture changed. Technology allowed us to outsource our memories. I’m referring to technology in the broadest possible sense, encapsulating everything from the alphabet to the Blackberry. These technologies remember for us. Once you had printed books, it was no longer important to keep thoughts in your mind because you could reference them externally. We no longer needed to exercise our memories to the limits of their capacity. To some extent, we’ve forgotten how to remember.
Read
Let’s turn to those artificial repositories of thoughts and facts – books. Starting with The Art of Memory by Frances Yates.
It’s the book that started the whole field of academic research into the art of memory. For anyone interested in the subject, it’s the first thing to read. Yates starts with the ancient Greeks and tells the story of how the art of memory began, then went through a number of transformations. In the Middle Ages it became associated with religious remembering. During the Renaissance it got wrapped up with a whole bunch of Kabbalistic and hermetic ideas that were in the air at the time. Yates’s story ends with the Renaissance, but the story of mnemonics continues and subsequent scholars have brought the story up to date.
Yates writes about a mental device for memory retrieval called a “memory palace”. What is this?
A memory palace is an imagined edifice in your mind’s eye that you use to structure and store information. In the case of Cicero, that information was a speech. In the case of mental athletes, it might be the order of a shuffled deck of cards. The memory palace is a device that was invented, at least according to legend, in the fifth century BC. Simonides, the famous Greek poet, had an old-fashioned epiphany after a traumatic event. Moments after he exited a banquet the roof collapsed, killing all inside and mangling the bodies beyond recognition. According to legend, although it’s almost certainly apocryphal, Simonides used the power of his memory to identify the bodies because he could see in his mind’s eye where each of the guests had sat. What Simonides realised, after the event, was that our visual and spatial memories are powerful. This is the birth story of the “memory palace”. We seem to be innately good at remembering things visually. Figuring out how to remember things is what many of these ancient memory techniques are about. If you can engage the visual part of your brain in remembering, it makes stuff stickier.
So how do you construct a memory palace?
The idea is to take a building that you are intimately familiar with and deposit imagery in that building which is so vivid that you can’t forget it. By placing the memories within this edifice you are tying them together and keeping them in order. Mnemonists say their skills are as much about creativity as memory.
Please explain the role of creativity in the art of memory?
Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your mind’s eye. That’s an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the US Memory Competition.
Yates writes that the earliest known book with memory tips dates to 90BC. As one of the earliest skills of essence, is mnemonics one of the first sources of self-help literature?
Rhetorica Ad Herennium, the book you’re talking about, is actually a guide for orators. Embedded in this long book about rhetoric is a section on how to remember the stuff you’re going to be talking about. It’s one of the only descriptions of ancient memory techniques that survived into the Middle Ages. There clearly were many others. When Cicero wrote about memory techniques, he basically said that they were so well known that he wouldn’t review them in detail. His assumption was that everybody knew this stuff.
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