Saturday, 4 October 2014

The act of remembrance: Mnemonic systems



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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