How to Remember

from delancyplace.com:


In today's excerpt - the individuals with the most prodigious memories, those that
win the United States and World Memory Championships, use a technique called the
"method of loci" or "memory palace." Since the human brain is highly adept at remembering
spaces and images, they simply visualize a house or palace, and visually place each
item on a path through the house - using a highly unusual and memorable visual association
for each item. Then, to remember, they simply take a mental "walk" through the house
on that same path and "see" each item they need to remember. It turns out that this
"memory palace" technique was used by the greats of antiquity during times when
- because of the absence of the printing press and the internet - memory was a much
more highly honored ability:

"Virtually all the nitty-gritty details we have about classical memory training
were first described in a short, anonymously authored Latin rhetoric textbook called
the Rhetorica ad Herennium, written some?time between 86 and 82 B.C. ... The techniques
introduced in the Ad Herennium were widely prac?ticed in the ancient world. In fact,
in his own writings on the art of memory, Cicero says that the techniques are so
well known that he felt he didn't need to waste ink describing them in detail.
Once upon a time, ... memory train?ing was considered a centerpiece of classical
education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students
were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.
"In a world with few books, memory was sacrosanct. Just look at Pliny the Elder's
Natural History, the first-century encyclopedia that chronicled ... the most exceptional
memories then known to history. 'King Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers
in his army,' Pliny reports. 'Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people.
King Pyrrhus's envoy Cineas knew those of the Sen?ate and knighthood at Rome the
day after his arrival ... A person in Greece named Charmadas recited the contents
of any volumes in libraries that anyone asked him to quote, just as if he were reading
them.' ... Seneca the Elder could repeat two thousand names in the order they'd
been given to him. St. Augustine tells of a friend, Simplicius, who could recite
Virgil by heart - backward. A strong memory was seen as the greatest virtue since
it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge.
"The [technique] is to create a space in the mind's eye, a place that you know well
and can easily visualize, and then populate that imagined place with images representing
whatever you want to remember. Known as the 'method of loci' by the Romans, such
a building would later come to be called a 'memory palace.' Memory palaces don't
necessarily have to be palatial - or even buildings. They can be routes through
a town or station stops along a railway. ... They can be big or small, indoors or
outdoors, real or imagi?nary, so long as there's some semblance of order that links
one locus to the next, and so long as they are intimately familiar. The four-time
U.S. memory champion Scott Hagwood uses luxury homes featured in Architectural Digest
to store his memories. Dr. Yip Swee Chooi, the effervescent Malaysian memory champ,
used his own body parts as loci to help him memorize the entire 56,OOO-word, 1,774-page
Oxford Chinese-English dictionary. One might have dozens, hundreds, per?haps even
thousands of memory palaces, each built to hold a different set of memories. ...
" 'The thing to understand is that humans are very, very good at learning spaces,'
[memory grand master] Ed Cooke remarked. 'Just to give an example, if you are left
alone for five minutes in someone else's house you've never visited before, and
you're feeling energetic and nosy, think about how much of that house could be fixed
in your memory in that brief period. You'd be able to learn not just where all the
different rooms are and how they connect with each other, but their dimensions and
decoration, the arrangement of their contents, and where the windows are. Without
really noticing it, you'd remember the whereabouts of hundreds of objects and all
sorts of dimensions that you wouldn't even notice yourself noticing. If you actually
add up all that information, it's like the equivalent of a short novel. But we don't
ever register that as being a memory achievement. Humans just gobble up spatial
information.'
"The principle of the memory palace is to use one's exquisite spatial memory to
structure and store information whose order comes less naturally. ... The crucial
thing was to choose a memory palace with which [you are] intimately familiar [such
as] the house you grew up in. ...
" 'It's important that you deeply process that image, so you give it as much attention
as possible,' Ed continued. [So if, for example, you want to remember the cottage
cheese on your shopping list,] try to imagine [Claudia Schiffer swimming in a tub
of cottage cheese]. And make sure you [visually place this cottage cheese image
in a specific room in your mental house] ... The Ad Herennium advises readers at
length about creating the images for one's memory palace: the funnier, lewder, and
more bizarre, the better. ... The more vivid the image, the more likely it is to
cleave to its locus. What distinguishes a great mnemonist is the ability to create
these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike
any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly.
Which is why [memory champion] Tony Buzan tells anyone who will listen that the
World Memory Championship is less a test of memory than of creativity."
Author: Josh Foer
Title: Moonwalking with Einstein
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 2011 by Joshua Foer
Pages: 94-100

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
by Joshua Foer by Penguin Press HC, The
Hardcover