more on memory storage

The memory thing is especially interesting to me.

In my case, all the old stuff seems to be in there. It's just as if it's been put in a different place, and sometimes I have to look for it. I think that's why I have this one recurring image that replays through my dreams: that of the big house, with many rooms in it, and I'm looking through the rooms, the closets, the attics sometimes, taking stuff out, examining it, and putting it back again. It's a nice visual metaphor, and I like it.

It's not a unique metaphor, either. The idea of a house with many rooms was used frequently as a mnemonic aid during the Middle Ages, when, of course, you couldn't just jot down a little list of things you were supposed to remember to buy at the town market that day. Too expensive! No paper! Hi illiteracy rates!

So in the absence of writing you actually had to remember stuff.

All kinds of tricks and techniques were taught to people for helping them in this process, and there are plenty of surviving manuals on the "Art of Memory" still in print from the period today.

I find these manuals fascinating. One of the most common tricks was to imagine a large house, filled with many rooms. You would imagine yourself placing each thing you wanted to remember into a different room, so that when you needed to retrieve it, you'd simply walk into that room in your mind's eye to pick it back up again.

A couple of years ago I attended a seminar on memory techniques that pretty much repeated the same set of tricks, with the added twist that you supplied a bit of a storyline to help remind you of the order of the rooms to be entered. It helps to have a dynamic storyteller, as we did at the time, creating the drama for you as you go. I can't remember the precise details, but the story had to do with a series of misadventures that took our narrator through a variety of visual scenarios in this house, where he "picked up" each item to be remembered--usually off the floor, as I recall!--and did something with it. At the end of the story the narrator was able to rattle this list of some fifty-sixty random objects back to us, in the same order in which we had first presented it to him, all based on this linked storyline with its concomitant set of images and connections.

It was a pretty amazing show, and though I never mastered the techniques myself, I've been fascinated ever since by the idea that it's possible to train your memory in that kind of way.