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Once upon a time, Ed insisted, remembering was everything.
But then, in the fifteenth century, Gutenberg came along and turned books into mass-produced commodities, and eventually it was no longer all that important to remember what the printed page could remember for you.
To understand why this sort of mnemonic trick works, you need to know something about a strange kind of forgetfulness that psychologists have dubbed the “Baker/baker paradox.” The paradox goes like this: A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker. A couple days later, the researcher shows the same two guys the same photograph and asks for the accompanying word. The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname. Why
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Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
This phenomenon of unconscious remembering, known as priming, is evidence of an entire shadowy underworld of memories lurking beneath the surface of our conscious reckoning.
“The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,”
“We could start by learning something useful, like the Egyptian pharaohs or the terms of the American presidents,”
We could do the geological epochs, if you’d like.”
Virtually all the nitty-gritty details we have about classical memory training—indeed, nearly all the memory tricks in the mental athlete’s arsenal—were first described in a short, anonymously authored Latin rhetoric textbook called the Rhetorica ad Herennium, written sometime between 86 and 82 B.C. It is the only truly complete discussion of the memory techniques invented by Simonides to have survived into the Middle Ages.
Once upon a time, every literate person was versed in the techniques Ed was about to teach me. Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on a par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.
“Now, anthropomorphizing the bottles of wine is quite a good idea,” Ed suggested. “Animate images tend to be more memorable than inanimate images.”
The memory of last Wednesday’s lunch isn’t necessarily gone; it’s that you lack the right hook to pull it out of a sea of lunchtime memories. But a wine that talks: That’s unique. It’s a memory without rivals.
And since it’s often good to have a bit of supernatural crap going on, too, perhaps you can imagine that there is an elegant ghost inside the socks that is stretching and pulling them.
The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned.
Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them. There was no alphabet to transcribe them in, no paper to set them down upon. Anything that had to be preserved had to be preserved in memory. Any story that would be retold, any idea that would be transmitted, any piece of information that would be conveyed, first had to be remembered.
According to a survey conducted in 2007 by a neuropsychologist at Trinity College Dublin, fully a third of Brits under the age of thirty can’t remember even their own home land line number without pulling it up on their handsets. The same survey found that 30 percent of adults can’t remember the birthdays of more than three immediate family members. Our gadgets have eliminated the need to remember such things anymore.
He told me to find a metronome and to try to memorize a card every time it clicked. Once I figured out my limits, he instructed me to set the metronome 10 to 20 percent faster than that and keep trying at the quicker pace until I stopped making mistakes. Whenever I came across a card that was particularly troublesome, I was supposed to make a note of it, and see if I could figure out why it was giving me problems. It worked, and within a couple days I was off the OK plateau and my card times began falling again at a steady clip.
All serious mnemonists wear earmuffs. A few of the most serious competitors wear blinders to constrict their field of view and shut out peripheral distractions.
A computer program tested me and kept detailed records of my mistakes, so that we could analyze them later.
“The memorization of quotes allows a person to seem more legitimate,” he told them, while I sat in the back of his classroom. “Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?”
As I began looking into the complicated subject of mental math, I learned that just like mnemonics, the field has its own vast literature, and even its own world championship. Indeed, with a bit of Googling and a whole lot of practice, anyone can teach themselves how to multiply three-digit numbers in their head. It is by no means easy—believe me, I tried—but it’s a skill that can be learned
Calendar calculating, the only savant skill Daniel was willing to perform in front of me, turns out to be so simple that it really shouldn’t impress anyone. Savants like Kim, who can tell you the date of every Easter in the last thousand years, seem to have internalized the rhythms and rules of the calendar without explicitly understanding them. But anyone can learn them. There are several very simple calendar calculation formulas, published widely on the Internet. It only takes about an hour of practice to become fluent with them.
What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.
