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from the soylentils-minds-are-more-like-memory-gutters dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
There's been a long-standing debate about whether memory athletes are born with superior memories, or whether their abilities are due to their training regimens. These tend to include an ancient memorization strategy called the method of loci, which involves visualizing important pieces of information placed at key stops along a mental journey. This journey can be an imaginary walk through your house or a local park, or your drive to work. The important thing is that you can mentally move back through it to retrieve the pieces of information you stored. (The ancient Greeks are said to have used it to remember important texts.)
To find out what's going on in top-level rememberers' brains, Konrad teamed up with neuroscientist Martin Dresler at Radboud University in the Netherlands. They recruited 23 of the top 50 memory competitors in the world. All were between the ages of 20 and 36. Then, the scientists scanned the memory athletes' brains while they were just relaxing, and also while they memorized a list of 72 words.
The team, and their co-investigators at Stanford University, found that the memory athletes' brains don't appear to be built any differently from yours or mine, according to results they published in the journal Neuron. "That was quite surprising, since these are really the best memorizers in the world," Dresler says. "And still, they didn't show a single memory structure, any single region or collection of regions that was anatomically strikingly different from normal control subjects."
Even so, their brains don't work the way yours or mine does. The athletes were able to recall at least 70 of the 72 words they studied — compared to an average of only 39 words for the non-athletes they were compared to. What's more, while the professional rememberers' brains were structurally similar to the control group, the memory athletes' brain scans showed unique patterns of activity, where brain regions that are involved in memory and cognition were statistically more likely to fire together.
The method of loci is also known as the memory palace, and Konrad says the first step is to make up a set of locations. The place doesn't matter as much as your familiarity with it. Then you create a map in your mind with a series of stops. The first stop might be your front door. The second could be the table next to it where you put down your sunglasses. Then, when you're given a list of words to memorize, you visualize scenes that link the words with each stop.
[Editor's Note: there is a nice TED talk on the memory palace method and memory competitors here]
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 21 2017, @09:21PM (2 children)
TFA links an old book by Frances Yates on the history of this practice, but I'd only recommend that if you want to learn a lot about Renaissance occultism too (itself a fascinating field, but that was really Yates's focus). I first encountered the history of this practice in Mary Carruthers's The Book of Memory, which came out in 1990. (Admittedly, Yates is a bit more of an "easy read" than Carruthers, which is more academic and dry.) At the time, it was a true revolution in understanding of historical memory, because Carruthers talked about these accounts we have of people like Thomas Aquinas, who supposedly could dictate texts to 3 different scribes at the same time.
Many modern scholars had dismissed this as historical exaggeration, until you actually understand how medieval memory techniques worked. In an era when books and manuscripts were rare, scholars actually memorized entire texts basically verbatim. It's only a few more steps to realize it's then possible to compose a text in your head and memorize it, and then have it prepared to dictate to a scribe (which was always a slow experience at that time). It's then not quite as outlandish to think a major intellectual figure like Aquinas might even have multiple "rooms" in his memory palace, allowing him to go back-and-forth to dictate multiple things at once.
Anyhow, reading that book a couple decades ago was a revelation to me and I suspect to many other scholars who simply couldn't understand the habits of intellectuals during the medieval period. They had often worked hard to train themselves to memorize books and (almost literally) "digest" them over time, making all those marginalia drawings in medieval manuscripts of people eating books make a little more sense. I personally never invested the time to perfect the technique and memorize large texts, but I've used it on quite a few occasions for more minor things.
One thing it also gave me an appreciation of is the lost value of "rote memorization." Today, that concept seems synonymous in educational theory with "bad teaching" that's ultimately useless. But spend some time memorizing a bunch of poems or speeches or whatever, and they quite literally "become your own." You can draw on them as resources -- enriching your writing, your conversation, adding rhetorical strategies and allusions. Once you understand this, it's no wonder that most medieval treatises seem like a bunch of strung-together allusions or quotations to various authorities. They had these things all in their heads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @10:06PM (1 child)
Today, that concept seems synonymous in educational theory with "bad teaching" that's ultimately useless.
Is it now? It's used extensively by nearly every K-12 school and college in existence, so I somewhat doubt that. And it is bad teaching when you waste time forcing people to memorize information instead of trying to get them to understand the material. Our standardized tests can almost entirely be bypassed with rote memorization alone.
Please don't try to make the problem worse. If you want to memorize a bunch of poems, go ahead and do it yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @10:52PM
The issue tends to be when people make poor decisions about what to memorize and how to memorize it. If you're learning a language, you're going to be memorizing a ton of things by rote in the beginning before you can start to learn by context. But, memorizing a large number of dates and places is of relatively little utility ever. The sequencing and relationship between the events is far more useful.
From personal experience, you need to be somewhat thoughtful about what you memorize as it just clutters up your brain otherwise. In some cases it's better to not bother to memorize the facts, but instead to memorize their derivation. If you need it often enough, you'll remember anyways and if not, it's often faster to memorize the derivation than the actual specifics.
I completely agree with you about memorizing texts word for word, that's rarely useful in modern society where we don't just have a plethora of books, but also of places to get text. It's frequently more than adequate to just memorize the series of points and examples rather than memorizing the specific word choice. If you need the specific word choice, you're probably better off with text anyways where you can highlight and annotate.
The big issue in the schools tends to be not just the amount of rote memorization, but the fact that the students aren't typically given effective methods of committing the material to memory, which just adds to the problems.