How (and why) to memorize anything
The true story of a journalist who achieved the 'impossible'
For the past six years, I’ve studied memory for my PhD dissertation. As part of this project, I’ve researched the techniques that ancient and medieval thinkers (such as Thomas Aquinas, the subject of my dissertation) used to train their memories to accomplish feats that sound completely implausible to us.
Ancient literature if chock full of anecdotes recounting such feats. Pliny recounts how Scipio could remember the names of all the citizens of Rome. Similarly, he reports that Cineas, an ambassador from King Pyrrhus, memorized all the names and faces of the members of the Roman senate and nobility the day after he arrived. In his book On the Soul, Augustine recounts how his friend Simplicius could recite the whole of the Aeneid (over 10,000 lines long) and various of Cicero's speeches, both forwards and backwards, or recite any line from any book on demand.
Given the rarity and enormous expense of books throughout the ancient and medieval period, there were obviously powerful incentives to push one's memory to the limit. The success of one's career as an orator, scholar or preacher in large part depended upon it. However, not only did ancient and medieval authors have powerful incentives to memorize, they also had access to an elaborate set of techniques, and routine training in those techniques, to help them do it.
These techniques sound profoundly counter-intuitive to those who have never encountered them before. In brief, ancient and medieval authors would fabricate images to represent the things they wished to remember. They would then imaginatively place these images in a series of architectural spaces (loci), often derived from local temples or churches. When they wanted to remember something, they would "retrieve" the image of the thing they wished to memorize from the appropriate locus, traveling to that space in the privacy of their minds.
Most people's intuitive objection when they hear these methods explained, is that memorizing all those images and places just adds a huge amount of unnecessary overhead work. The weird thing, however, is that these techniques work. There's simply no doubt about it. This was proven in an extraordinary way by the journalist Joshua Foer, the author of the fascinating 2011 book Moonwalking with Einstein.
In the book, Foer recounts his year-long effort to train his memory using the loci method in preparation for the American Memory Championships. Foer's journey began when he first covered the American Memory Championships as a freelance journalist. What struck him was how all of the "mental athletes" (as they call themselves) that he interviewed, and whom he had just watched memorize vast quantities of randomly shuffled decks of cards or random digits in mere minutes, swore up and down that they did not have particularly good memories.
“My memory is quite average," the European memory grandmaster (i.e. a mental athlete who has successfully memorized 1,000 random digits in an hour) Ed Cooke told Foer. "All of us here have average memories.” He added, “What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly.”
Convinced by Cooke to undertake a rigorous regimen of memory training under Cooke's tutelage, Foer returned one year later, and won the American Memory Championships. To do so, he memorized a randomly shuffled deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds, 107 first and last names in fifteen minutes, and other various such-like challenges.
The book is a riveting read. I just finished my second read-through, and highly recommend it.
Foer comes across as a reliable guide to the weird world of mnemonic competition and practice. In the conclusion, he admits that for all of the enormous progress he made in his capacity to memorize all sorts of data and trivia, he found the process of using these mnemonic practices in daily life challenging.
The problem with memory training, is that it is highly task-specific. A person can train himself to memorize large numbers of digits, and make little progress in his ability to memorize, say, poetry. Meanwhile, he might remain just as absent-minded as before (Foer himself recounts how, shortly after winning the memory championship, he forgot that he drove his car to a dinner appointment, only remembering after opening his front door after taking public transit home!)
However, he says, for all the limitations of these memory techniques, the process of training in them for a year changed him in ways that matter.
He writes:
But after having learned how to memorize poetry and numbers, cards and biographies, I’m convinced that remembering more is only the most obvious benefit of the many months I spent training my memory. What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.
This is certainly one of the key takeaways from my own studies into memory. We only remember what we notice. Furthermore, it matters how much we want to remember something, and how intensely we focus on it. This is why Aquinas, in his four rules for how to train one's memory in the Summa theologiae, exhorts his readers to have "anxiety” (sollicitudo) in relation to the things one wants to remember. In other words, memorizing something requires that we single that thing out as being important, and then pay attention to it long enough to commit it to long-term memory.
It used to be the case, up until not so long ago, that intensive memory training was par for the course in any education. It was expected that any truly educated person would have considerable portions of English poetry memorized, especially Shakespeare, or any number of great speeches by the likes of Cicero, as well as considerable portions of Scripture.
In order to memorize these texts, the one memorizing had to pay attention to the texts at a level of depth and with a degree of focus that far exceeds what we normally expend in reading most books. The one memorizing absorbed these texts into his being, in the process learning the lessons that they had to teach far more thoroughly than those of us who read them once and toss the book to the side.
Foer's book not only reminds us that every single one of us with a normal, functioning brain can memorize far more than we give ourselves credit for, he also reminds us that we may well have a moral responsibility to memorize more than we do. At a minimum, in memorizing we become more fully human, in that we become more fully present to those things that we deem worth remembering.
I look forward to reading Moonwalking with Einstein and to expanding my memory capability.
John, Orthodox jews memorize the oral Torah and written Torah. It might help your phd to look into the methods they use to memorize both. Here is an article that will help give you some background. https://aish.com/48943186/