According to the ancient Greeks, only the union of memory and power could create knowledge. The goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, with Zeus, created the nine Muses, who ruled over the arts and sciences. In this myth, it can be seen that memory was instrumental and fundamental to civilization. Memory itself can be an art, something that a person can be trained in, and improve upon, and as history shows, people have returned again and again to this feature of our brain, fascinated by something so integral to the human experience.
In the ancient world, perhaps the most important contributor to the art of memory was Simonides of Ceos, a lyric poet. Simonides once astounded investigators by being able to name every member of a banquet where he had entertained. After he left, the hall had collapsed, mangling the bodies so badly that identification was impossible. Simonidies readily provided a list of the guests as well as where they had been sitting. As the poet explained, he had concentrated on the images of each person at the table where they sat. With this concrete picture in his mind, he was able to bring up the names and faces of every person in the doomed banquet hall.
Simonides method was called the method of loci, and was the traditional method for memorization in ancient Greece. Essentially, when an individual was called upon to remember something, he was to “place” the memory in an object or place he was familiar with, like a room of his house, or a particular table. Then, when the information was needed, summoning up a picture of the room or drawer would summon forth the memory as well. This is a memory aid that is know in modern times as Visual Imagery Mnemonics. This ordered process can be easily learned and improve an individual’s memory immensely.
In the classic work, Ad Herennium, by an unknown author, the concept of the memory palace was introduced. This beautifully simple idea involves the person in question creating a structure in his or her head and then storing the memory in that place. For novices, it was recommended that they visualize an existing structure, but someone more practiced could create a palace from thin air. Each memory that needed to be retained would be associated with an object or location inside the palace. Essentially, the memory palace was a foundation.
For example, the great Roman orator Cicero in the first century B.C. was known as much for his impressive memorization as he was for his impassioned speeches. He used the memory palace technique for his speeches. Each paragraph was associated with an object in his mental palace, and to recall the speech, he merely walked through the structure in his mind. As he came upon each object, he was reminded of the paragraph of his speech.
Five hundred years after the death of Cicero, the philosopher Augustine commented on memory in his work, Confessions. Augustine speaks admiringly of memory being the force through which physical sensation is ordered. Memory stores the sensation, as well as the skills and the ideas which are not necessarily associated through the senses. Mathematics, for instances, are purely abstract but can be understood through memory and emotions as well, though they have no life outside of the mind. Augustine points out that humans remember emotions, not feel them again. For Augustine, the art of memory brought one closer to God, moving on the crudely immediate physical awareness.
Guilio Camillo Delmino, an Italian born in the late 1400s was renowned for the creation of the wooden “Memory Theatre.” This small wooden structure would allow one or two spectators to enter. When they did, they would be confronted with a variety of images and drawers painted closely on the walls around them. There were notes stuffed into every possible corner, reminders written closely on the walls and symbols and shorthand everywhere. The premise of this invention was that anyone accessing this device would be able to discourse with “the skill of Cicero” on any topic.
On one hand, Delmino’s Memory Theatre was merely a physical memory palace, a sort of rudimentary encyclopedia, but it was enough to make the previously obscure scholar the talk of Europe. Delmino’s attempt to create a physical memory aid might seem to defeat the purpose of the art of memory, but don’t forget that it also deals with the storage of knowledge. Delmino’s Memory Theatre is the predecessor of the more linear categorically-arranged encyclopedias that came later. While Delmino’s Memory Theatre is lost to time, it still remains a fascinating example of a man’s attempt to gain absolute control over the contents of his own mind.
Less than a hundred years after Delmino’s theatre, Giordano Bruno, another Italian, would put forward ideas that would prove deadly to his own body but immortal themselves in nature. Bruno made use of the idea of the memory theatre in extremely elaborate and complex structures that were intricately interrelated. He believed in a unity of the arts and sciences, indeed, in a convergence of the prose and visual arts and his memory structures. Because of this, his memory structures were vast, looping, and above all, interrelated. Bruno took the memory theatre one step further and sought a space for all knowledge. Bruno himself met a bad end, as the Church captured him, tortured him for eight years and then burned him for heresy when he refused to recant his beliefs.
The history of memory is one that is full of thinkers who were ahead of their time and has more to do than with memorizing long lists. As they explored the nature of memory, these thinkers could reflect not only on what had happened, but also, most importantly, what it meant.
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