Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

Remembering Memory

How many times have you forgotten your grocery list? Someone’s birthday? The last digits of a phone number? You are not alone, obviously. We all forget. We store our appointment dates, phone numbers, birthdays, to do lists in our phones and computer, so we don’t really have to remember anything, our access to that information always at the tip of our fingers. In the age of smart phones and high-tech computers, we depend on technology to do our remembering for us. But this blind reliance on technology is the exact thing that is ruining our minds and our capacity to remember, to memorize. 

In Moonwalking with Einstein, journalist Joshua Foer explores “the art and science of remembering everything.” Chosen by The New York Times veteran book reviewer Michiko Kakutani as one of the top 10 books of 2011, Moonwalking with Einstein is full of eye-opening insight into how we went from a society that remembers everything to a society to forgets everything.

Before the invention of the printing press in 1440, people used to know everything by heart. Priests recited sermons by memory; scholars and politicians spoke speeches learned by heart and great works like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were shared from generation to generation through oral tradition due to memory. But how did these learned thinkers manage such incredible feats of memory? Foer reveals that these “simple” memory techniques were popularized and widely used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans. According to Foer, these techniques are actually quite simple and can be taken up by anyone. As a journalist, Foer covered the U.S.A. Memory Championship, which is exactly what it sounds like: master mnemonists who compete to memorize every thing from random decks of cards to an unpublished poem. This type of event has its own regional championships as well as a championship in several countries around the world and a World Memory Championship. A mental athlete, or a competitive mnemonist is someone who can impressively remember names and faces, long lists of random numbers, poems, whole books and a seemingly endless list of facts. Basically, anything that can be remembered will be remembered by a mnemonist, if he is willing to remember that particular piece of information.

Why are these skills so impressive? It’s not everyone who can memorize a series of 3 000 random numbers or recite Paradise Lost from start to finish without one glitch in their recital. Captivated by this extreme “mental sport”, Foer wonders what it would take to become US Champion. How hard is it, really, to remember? With the help of Ed Cooke, who he met at the US Championships, he learns the secret techniques used by the ancients in order to formally compete in next years USA Memory Championship. Cooke ranks prominently in the worlds top mnemonists and he is also the creator of an innovative website, called Memerise, which teaches memory techniques to help people to remember. (It is actually quite fun, and I highly recommend it for procrastinators who need a break from 9gag.)

So what are these “ancient” techniques that mnemonist use to memory? The method of "loci," which is also known as the method of the memory palace, is one of the techniques that mnemonist use to memorize just about anything. The memory palace is a building or space that you create in your head that you use to store information. In order to build a memory palace, one would have to imagine a location that is familiar to them, (your childhood home or your highschool) and use the spaces in those buildings as storage rooms for memories. Foer tell us that “our brains don’t remember all types of information equally well”, which is why ordinary things are easier to forget than things that are outrageous.  For us to remember those ordinary things we need to make them outrageous. So, next time your mom asks you to pick up the dry cleaning, picture a dancing skeleton in your father’s suit in your front door entrance, so when you visit your memory palace you are instantly reminded that you must pick up the dry cleaning.

When it comes to memorize numbers or a random deck of playing cards, we need to get a lot more creative. Foer identifies two distinct techniques for memorizing numbers. Hint: this is handy for phone numbers, birthdays, and anniversaries. The first technique is the Major System, which was invented by Johann Winkelman in 1648. The major system is “a simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds” which will be turned into words, and then memorable images that you can effectively store in your memory palace.  Each number has a corresponding letter, so 0 would be S, 1 would be T or D, 2 would be N, 3 would be M, 4 would be R, 5 would be L, 6 would be Sh or Ch, 7 would be K or G, 8 would be F or V, and 9 would be P or B.

As an example, Foer uses the numbers 32 and 33, which in the major system would be MN and MM, respectively. 32 will conjure up the image of a man, and 33 would probably be your mom. 86 (F and SH) will be a fish and 92 (P and N) would be a pen. (If you are interested in practicing the major system, I suggest you visit Cooke’s site Memrise). This technique is straightforward, and effective, but as Foer points out “nobody wins any international memory competitions with the Major System.” Then what do they use? The Major system is great if you want to memorize a phone number or your credit card number, but when you need to memorize “a hundred thousand digits of pi or the career batting averages of every New York Yankee hall of Famer” mnemonists use the trusty, yet complex technique of “person-action-object”, which is the PAO system. With this technique, one must associate a person, doing an action, with or to an object and associate it with a particular number. Foer associates 34 with Frank Sinatra (person), singing (action) into a microphone (object). This doesn’t mean that the number 34 MUST be associated with a talented musician; you pick the people, actions, and objects you want to associate to any given number. The PAO system takes a lot of practice and time to fully memorize, but it allows you to “effectively generate a unique image for every number from 0 to 999, 999”.

Memorizing a poem, let alone the entirety of Shakespeare’s works, is a bit more complicated than the Major and PAO systems. Homer’s famous works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are known to be epic poems that have been recited and passed on from generation to generation, orally. How did the ancient Greeks memorize such lengthy poems? The unknown author of Ad Herennium, a Latin book on rhetoric, suggests that “each word [of the poem] was painstakingly selected, the product of a single artist expressing his singular vision” and should therefore be committed to memory through the technique of memoria verborum (memorizing word for word). One would associate an image with the word, something that is not hard to do when you need to remember the image of a boat or a Cyclops. The problem with this technique is that there are certain words like “and” and “the” that cannot conjure up an image in your mind. There have been many attempts at associating images to such words to facilitate the memorization of poetry, like for example, Metrodorus of Scepsis, who developed “a system of shorthand images that would stand in for conjuctions, articles, and other syntactical connectors.” Foer offers a variety of techniques and examples on how to memorize poetry, the most famous and most commonly used (even today) would be rote memorization. This is when your teacher requires you to learn something, most often than not, a poem, by constantly repeating it until it sticks in your head (this is probably how you’ve come to memorize Shakespearian sonnets and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock).

With our alcoholic-like dependency on technology growing stronger as the days go by, it’s no wonder our memory has been reduced a tool we seldom use. Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein is calling for a memory revolution; we need to unplug ourselves from our machines and use the brain we’ve been gifted with, or else we will be doomed to an eternity of forgetting.