The Art of Memory

"It’s the book that started the whole field of academic research into the art of memory. For anyone interested in the subject, it’s the first thing to read. Yates starts with the ancient Greeks and tells the story of how the art of memory began, then went through a number of transformations. In the Middle Ages, it became associated with religious remembering. During the Renaissance, it got wrapped up with a whole bunch of Kabbalistic and hermetic ideas that were in the air at the time. Yates’s story ends with the Renaissance, but the story of mnemonics continues and subsequent scholars have brought the story up to date. A memory palace is an imagined edifice in your mind’s eye that you use to structure and store information. In the case of Cicero, that information was a speech. In the case of mental athletes, it might be the order of a shuffled deck of cards. The memory palace is a device that was invented, at least according to legend, in the fifth century BC. Simonides, the famous Greek poet, had an old-fashioned epiphany after a traumatic event. Moments after he exited a banquet, the roof collapsed, killing all inside and mangling the bodies beyond recognition. According to legend, although it’s almost certainly apocryphal, Simonides used the power of his memory to identify the bodies because he could see in his mind’s eye where each of the guests had sat. What Simonides realised, after the event, was that our visual and spatial memories are powerful. This is the birth story of the “memory palace”. We seem to be innately good at remembering things visually. Figuring out how to remember things is what many of these ancient memory techniques are about. If you can engage the visual part of your brain in remembering, it makes stuff stickier. The idea is to take a building that you are intimately familiar with and deposit imagery in that building which is so vivid that you can’t forget it. By placing the memories within this edifice, you are tying them together and keeping them in order. Mnemonists say their skills are as much about creativity as memory. Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery in your mind’s eye. That’s an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the US Memory Competition. Rhetorica Ad Herennium , the book you’re talking about, is actually a guide for orators. Embedded in this long book about rhetoric is a section on how to remember the stuff you’re going to be talking about. It’s one of the only descriptions of ancient memory techniques that survived into the Middle Ages. There clearly were many others. When Cicero wrote about memory techniques, he basically said that they were so well known that he wouldn’t review them in detail. His assumption was that everybody knew this stuff."