Part of some current research into the use of architecture
in allegories has led me to Christiania Whitehead’s book Castles of the Mind. It is a brilliant book but one chapter was
particularly interesting as it discussed the role of memory.
Memory techniques are drummed into us from early age now. What I’d never really considered however
was how these techniques were developed.
Whitehead begins with Plato and Aristotle.
Plato was of the opinion that the act of remembering was where
an “immutable structure of truth” already within us was brought to the surface
of our conscious. As a result, he felt that “artificial memory techniques” encouraged
memory without understanding and should thus be discouraged. Anyone who has
heard a young child sing the alphabet song and recite the letters “aich, eye, jay, kay, ello, menno, pee” might
agree with Plato at this point.
Aristotle on the other hand believed that the very act of
memorising followed the comprehension of something by the senses and that to
remember a copy had to be made within your memory. He also differentiated between
remembering and recalling. The former was involuntarily while the latter was “a
reasoned search, journeying through a succession of associated ideas to reach a
desired destination”. Logically following this description of recollection,
memory techniques were of use (in Aristotle’s mind) as they allowed one to
associate the memory within and amongst associated ones.
The concern with remembering stems from the Greek and Roman
oratory traditions and the development of rhetoric and speech giving in
general.
The variety of artificial memory techniques developed over
time and the first associations between memory and recollection occur in 86-82
BC in Rhetorica ad herennium which
argues that recall can be enhanced through the use of a imaginary environment
which linked objects with topics (i.e. a spade with agriculture).
Interest then peters off until the 13th C. with
the exception of the writings of St Augustine who used classical techniques to
aid Christian goals rather speech making. This dip in interest, Whitehead
argues, is due to the academics of the time (churchmen) actually taking a greater
interest in forgetting as this
allowed them to focus on salvation rather than secular matters.
The 13th C. however did see a resurgence,
possibly due to the increase in preaching and thus a need for better memory and
works of antiquity were also becoming more widely disseminated.
This new interest coalesces again in the use of mental
architecture and Boncompagno da Signa (Professor of Rhetoric in the 1230s at
the University of Bologna) advocated the use of a monastery of school as a
mental environment for recollection; detailing the size of the mental building
but also the details of it including its distance in the mind down to the
colouring.
This memory technique is one I was already familiar with and
have used myself as the process of mentally ‘placing’ a number of thoughts in a
specific mental location allowed me to better recall them through the journey
to that spot. It even made it into mainstream pop-culture recently through the
BBC’s new Sherlock Holmes’s ‘mind palace’.
Memory, or the lack thereof, has been a preoccupation for
centuries and if there’s one thing that history can teach us, it’s that very
few things are actually new and cutting edge. Instead, they are often simply
re-discovered, re-branded or re-fined.
Notes
Whitehead, C. Castles
of the Mind (Cardiff, University of Wales: 2003) pp. 28-38
http://www.independent.co.uk/student/student-life/how-to-sherlock-your-degree-the-art-of-building-a-memory-palace-9087779.html
http://www.mindtools.com/memory.html
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