A.R. Luria’s man had to remember eight different items and events to recall seven words in Italian, and in sequence. Why was remembering that any easier than remembering the seven words?
I’m similarly puzzled by people who memorize a string of anything by assigning each element to items in a room, or walking through several rooms. Me, I can’t remember which room I left my eye glasses in.
I actually agree with the original post. While I can actually do very detailed memories [spent a fair amount of quality time in traction so I learned to visualize extremely well. But it doesn’t work for shit for memorizing random facts, but hot damn, I can redecorate a space I have been in enough to be familiar with the size and placement of doors, windows and electrical points.] I don’t get the whole memory museum or whatever it is called. If I need to memorize vocabulary for whatever language I am learning to speak [and US legal is just another language. Thank Ghu for Blacks Law Dictionary!] I just suck it up and memorize the damned words and their definitions/translations.
I think it is part and parcel with the different ways people learn - some learn best by rote, some by listening/watching and some by doing. I am definitely a hands on learning type - ranging from sitting and writing out vocabulary and examples to getting my hands dirty with machine oil learning to do maintenance on a compressor. [and fuck you Ingersol Rand!]
Who Is Luria and what 8 Italan words should someone memorize an why?
Apparently referring to this column dated Sept. 1, 2000:
Is there such a thing as “photographic memory”?
See, in particular, the last two paragraphs there for discussion of “Luria’s man” and his memory tricks.
There was a practice used by rhetoricians in Ancient Greece and Rome which used the room technique. IIRC a famous orator initiated the practice. Giordano Bruno and others revived it during the renaissance.
The practice was used as a memory aid for public speeches, which were an important part of civic life in those days. It wouldn’t have done to be seen reading your speech, so it had to be memorized.
It was not however, as simple as assigning words to an object in a room. And usually the physical area involved was larger than a single room.
As I remember (I read about this a couple decades ago), the idea was along these lines:
Let’s say the speech was Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The person to give the speech would choose a physical space that he knew very, very well. As in, he could recall a detailed visual memory of what he would see as he proceeded step by step through the space. I believe it was standard practice to prepare a space for this use by “learning” it.
He would then assign words and phrases from the speech sequentially to the objects he would encounter during his mental promenade through this space. But, and this is key, the word or phrase and the visual object would be joined together by an imagined image, usually as absurd as possible so as to be easy to remember.
So let’s say that on one’s promenade through his garden, he first encounters a fish pond. This needs to be tied to the phrase “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears”. So, he might imagine his closest friend as well as a prominent Roman citizen as well as a peasant laborer all popping up out of the pond holding their detached ears out to lend.
The orator would continue in this fashion until he had easy to remember images tied to each successive phrase of his speech.
Note that the same physical space could be used for different speeches, by choosing different mental images to tie the speech to the objects encountered.
As an aside, I wonder if this is where the phrase “take a walk down memory lane originated”.