Moonwalking With Einstein
When he walked, Buzan seemed to glide across the floor like an air hockey puck (the result, he later told me, of forty years’ training in the Alexander Technique).
Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item. Chunking is the reason that phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code and that credit card numbers are split into groups of four. And chunking is extremely relevant to the question of why experts so often have such exceptional memories.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.
EP shattered that assumption. What Scoville did to HM with a metal straw, nature did to EP with herpes simplex. Side by side, the grainy black-and-white MRIs of their brains are uncannily similar, though EP’s damage is a bit more extensive.
Within the category of declarative memories, psychologists make a further distinction between semantic memories, or memories for facts and concepts, and episodic memories, or memories of the experiences of our own lives. Recalling that I had eggs for breakfast this morning would be an episodic memory. Knowing that breakfast is the first meal of the day is a semantic memory.
Sigmund Freud first noted the curious fact that older memories are often remembered as if captured by a third person holding a camera, whereas more recent events tend to be remembered in the first person, as if through one’s own eyes. It’s as if things that happened to us become simply things that happened. Or as if, over time, the brain naturally turns episodes into facts.
I thought of my own self fifteen years ago, and how much I’ve changed in the same period. The me who exists today and the me who existed then, if put side by side, would look more than vaguely similar. But we are a completely different collection of molecules, with different hairlines and waistlines, and, it sometimes seems, little in common besides our names. What binds that me to this me, and allows me to maintain the illusion that there is continuity from moment to moment and year to year, is some relatively stable but gradually evolving thing at the nucleus of my being. Call it a soul, or a self, or an emergent by-product of a neural network, but whatever you want to call it, that element of continuity is entirely dependent on memory.
Ed wanted me to start my investigation with the classics. In addition to the Ad Herennium, there would be translated excerpts of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria and Cicero’s De Oratore for me to read, followed by a collection of medieval writings on memory by Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter of Ravenna.
One of the tragic consequences of embedding narrative into the landscape is that when Native Americans had land taken from them by the U.S. government, they lost not only their home but their mythology as well.
A trained memory was the key to cultivating “judgment, citizenship, and piety.” What one memorized helped shape one’s character. Just as the secret to becoming a chess grand master was to learn old games, the secret to becoming a grand master of life was to learn old texts.
Indeed, the word “topic” comes from the Greek word topos, or place. (The phrase “in the first place” is a vestige from the art of memory.)
When the Slavic bards were asked whether they repeated their songs exactly, they responded, “Word for word, and line for line.” And yet when recordings of two performances were held up against each other, they clearly were different. Words changed, lines moved around, passages disappeared. The Slavic bards weren’t being overconfident; they simply had no concept of verbatim recall. Not that this should have been surprising. Without writing, there is no way to check whether something has been repeated exactly.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.”
As Thomas Aquinas put it, “Things are written down in material books to help the memory.” One read in order to remember, and books were the best available tools for impressing information into the mind. In fact, manuscripts were often copied for no reason other than to help their copier memorize them.
In fact, it wasn’t until about 200 B.C. that the most basic punctuation marks were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, the director of the Library of Alexandria, and all they consisted of was a single dot at either the bottom, middle, or top of the line letting readers know how long to pause between sentences.
Without sophisticated artificial intelligence capable of figuring out context, a computer has no way of telling the difference between “The stuffy nose may dim liquor” and “The stuff he knows made him lick her.”
Along with page numbers and tables of contents, the index changed what a book was, and what it could do for scholars. The historian Ivan Illich has argued that this represented an invention of such magnitude that “it seems reasonable to speak of the pre-and post-index Middle Ages.”
In his essay “The First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton describes a switch from “intensive” to “extensive” reading that occurred as books began to proliferate.
He imagined creating a “Theater of Memory” that would serve as a universal library containing all the knowledge of mankind. It may sound like the premise of a Borges story, but it was a very real project, with very real backers, and it made Camillo into one of the most famous men in all of Europe. King Francis I of France made Camillo promise that the secrets of his theater would never be revealed to anyone but him, and invested five hundred ducats toward its completion.
Lifelogging is the logical next step. Maybe even the logical final step, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a cultural transformation that has been slowly unfolding for millennia.
And primitive cognitive implants that create a direct interface between the brain and computers have already allowed paraplegics and patients with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) to control a computer cursor, a prosthetic limb, even a digital voice simply through the force of thought. These neuroprosthetics, which are still highly experimental and have been implanted in only a handful of patients, essentially wiretap the brain, and allow direct communication between man and machine.
A smarter, taller, stronger, disease-resistant person who lives to 150 is still, in the end, just a person. But if we could give someone a perfect memory and a mind that taps directly into the entire collective knowledge of humanity, well, that’s when we might need to consider expanding our vocabulary.
I used a technique known as the “Major System,” invented around 1648 by Johann Winkelmann, which is nothing more than a simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds. Those sounds can then be turned into words, which can in turn become images for a memory palace. The code works like this:
In the PAO system, every two-digit number from 00 to 99 is represented by a single image of a person performing an action on an object. The number 34 might be Frank Sinatra (a person) crooning (an action) into a microphone (an object). Likewise, 13 might be David Beckham kicking a soccer ball. The number 79 could be Superman flying with a cape. Any six-digit number, like say 34-13-79, can then be turned into a single image by combining the person from the first number with the action from the second and the object from the third—in this case, it would be Frank Sinatra kicking a cape. If the number were instead 79-34-13, the mental athlete might imagine the equally bizarre image of Superman crooning at a soccer ball.
As the role of memory in the conventional sense has diminished, what should its place be in contemporary pedagogy? Why bother loading up kids’ memories with facts if you’re ultimately preparing them for a world of externalized memories?
The slow disappearance of classroom memorization had its philosophical roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s polemical 1762 novel, Émile: Or, On Education, in which the Swiss philosopher imagined a fictional child raised by means of a “natural education,” learning only through self-experience. Rousseau abhorred memorization, as well as just about every other stricture of institutional education. “Reading is the great plague of childhood,” he wrote. The traditional curriculum, he believed, was little more than fatuous “heraldry, geography, chronology and language.”
“He was always in the 1-D classes, while I was in 1-A. One-A was for the bright kids, D for the dunces. But when we went out into nature, Barry could identify things by the way they flew over the horizon. Just from their flight patterns, he could distinguish between a red admiral, a painted thrush, and a blackbird, which are all very similar. So I knew he was a genius. And I got a top mark in an exam on nature, a perfect mark, answering questions like ‘Name two fish you can find living in an English stream.’ There are a hundred and three. But when I got back my perfect mark on the test, I suddenly realized that the kid sitting down the hall in the dunces’ class, my best friend, Barry, knew more than I knew—much more than I knew—in the subject in which I was supposedly number one. And therefore, he was number one, and I was not number one.
in the marginYES!
“I would go into the classroom and ask the students whether they were stupid or not, because everyone had been calling them stupid, and sadly they believed they were stupid,” says Buzan. “They had been inculcated with the idea of their own incapacity. I said, ‘OK, let’s check it out,’ and I’d give them a memory test, which they’d fail. I’d say, ‘Seems you’re right about being stupid.’ Then I’d teach them a memory technique, and then I’d retest them, and they’d get twenty out of twenty. Then I’d basically say, ‘You told me you were stupid, you proved you were stupid, and then you just got a perfect score on a test.’ So I’d get them to question: What’s going on here? For some of the students who’d never gotten a perfect score on an exam, this was quite a revelation.”
in the marginBeautiful!
Mind Mapping, a term he later trademarked. One creates a Mind Map by drawing lines off main points to subsidiary points, which branch out further to tertiary points, and so on. Ideas are distilled into as few words as possible and whenever possible are illustrated with images. It’s a kind of outline, exploded radially across the page in a rainbow of colors, a web of associations that looks like a prickly bush, or a neuron’s branching dendrites. And because it is full of colorful images arranged in order across the page, it functions as a kind of memory palace scrawled on paper.
in the marginApp idea
Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.” If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.
But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root inventio is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying.
“If they get an essay question about the causes of World War I on their AP test, they can just see that part of the map in the mind, and the causes are right there,” says Matthews. There might be an image of a black hand to represent the Serbian nationalist organization that Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassin belonged to, next to a machine gun wearing running shoes, which represents the arms race that swept Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, and beside that a pair of triangles to
in the marginI wonder if this is why i care so much about being able to draw
In 1887, John Langdon Down, better known for the chromosomal disorder that bears his name, coined the term “idiot savant.” The word “idiot,” regarded as politically incorrect, eventually fell away.
How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.