Debate and the Art of Memory

Today I went to a debate club competition against one of the most highly-ranked debate teams in the nation, and listened as our kids debated their kids.  I’m not confident enough to say “we won”, but I believe we did better than just “holding our own”.  I think they were impressed by the quality of our thought processes, and our presentation skills and analytical skills.  We were impressed by their ability to listen, and their skill at refuting arguments. Things to practice for the future, for both teams, I think.

What surprised me is that neither their coach, nor my colleagues on the debate team from my school, had ever gone back to some of the original sources on public speaking and argument, like pseudo-Cicero’s commentary on memory in Ad Herennium. And so my opposite number was reduced to saying, “you’ve got to signpost your speech,” which was his method of saying, “you have to build in cues into your speech, that tell your audience where it is that you’re going.”

The signposts that he had in mind of course, were “I’d like to begin by refuting the three points that my opponent made, namely…” and then naming and refuting each of them, first the first principle of the opponent, and then the second, and then the third, and then … “now I’d like to lay our our own three principles, along with the examples that best illustrate them.”

And these signposts that he’s talking about, in fact, are rather like doorways between rooms in a Palace of Memory.

It thus aids the debater to think carefully about the space he or she builds in the imagination for storing the argument he or she intends to make.  Those signposts…

• Good morning, my name is… and we today are arguing….
• I’d like to refute my opponent’s several principles and examples
• I’d like now to make four arguments for our position
• that is why the position must fail/succeed.

actually suggest the structure of the mental framework that one builds in the Palace of Memory, namely:

1. A small anteroom, with a table or altar in the middle
2. A doorway passing from it to a dark and lonely room, with two niches in each wall, and a candle beside each niche.
3. A doorway passing from that room into a fine but long hallway with four pedestals each down the center, with a statue on each to be admired from every angle.
4. A doorway from there to a second small anteroom with two doors, and one key on a chain that can reach one door but not the other.

Here’s how one uses such a space.  Place the argument you wish to make on the pedestal in the first anteroom, and examine it from all sides.  Then proceed to the dark and lonely room, and walk from niche to niche, placing the principle arguments of one’s opponent in each niche, going clockwise around the room.  Then go around and light a candle beside each image, revealing each such argument to be a monstrous thing when exposed to the light.  Then proceed to the long hallway, and stop to admire each of the statues in the hallway from every angle, lovingly allowing your eye and your sense to pass over every detail of them.  Finally, proceed to the last room, the second antechamber, and carefully lock the door of one’s opponent, while unlocking, and passing through, the door that represents your own argument.

The signposts, then, are the doorways, and the major elements or statements that one must make (“Good morning, Mr. Speaker, allow me to introduce myself, and let me state that we categorically oppose/support the proposition”) may be inscribed or carved on a sign above the doorway, as a reminder not to go through the doorway until specific statements are made.  The niches and pedestals in each room are used as placeholders for the images that one must use to represent each point or example that must be offered or refuted, and the chambers themselves represent the generic elements of each argument.  The opening speaker may, for example, begin in the first room, proceed quickly through the second and go directly to the third; while the opposition speaker will want to linger in the second room, and spend only a little time in the third.  The amount of time spent in the fourth and last chamber will depend on whether one is starting the debate or closing it, but the difficulty of locking and locking those two locks will help the speaker remember the tasks which are at hand in their debate.

One of today’s presenters opened the argument with a short presentation lasting 45 seconds… out of a possible five minutes.  Yet a careful survey of these four rooms would have easily served to carry her through the full five minutes, and adequate practice in such a space would have well-prepared her to run out of time, rather than lose most of it to her opponents.

 

Palace of memory glyph

Palace of memory glyph
Originally uploaded by anselm23

More visitors to my blog seem to come for insight into Palace of Memory technique than anything else, so I figured it was time for an update. Reading through the scripts is not necessarily an easy way to learn the system, so on the train into New York City today I sketched this quick diagram of the “entry hall” of the system I’ve been using for a while, and that I try to teach my students.

You can see the tessellated pavement, and the two tables for math and architecture, with the globe and globe-stand between them. You can see the four walls painted different colors, and the four different doors. What I can’t include are the data points for each shelf, or the key figures atop each shelf, like the statue of William Shakespeare,

One of my students has used it so extensively that I’m planning an expansion for him, out the east door. It will be two rooms — a space rather like a Roman Atrium, and a space beyond that rather like a Renaissnce or Baroque-era library. I’ve gotten inspired by the library at the place where I’m staying in New York City, and I think it will be useful to you all.

Assuming you’re still interested. Are you?

The Angevins, Creative Explanations, and “Paper”

Today, in a study hall, a kid asked me the kind of question I live for.

Why did King John have Arthur the Duke of Brittany murdered?

I mean, what wanna-be medievalist teaching in a middle school doesn’t lust for a sixth grader to ask a question like that??  I mean, we can go YEARS between samples of those questions, if not a decade or more.  More often, the question is: “what’s the homework?” (page 97, exercise 13b).  or “why is my grade so low?” (maybe you should practice more).

But the Angevin Dynasty and its absolutely corrupt political machinations over the succession after the drowning of Prince Arthur on the Blanche Fleur in 1156 (Wow, it’s been years… I’m no longer sure of the date)?  OF COURSE, I want to answer that.

So I turn, as I will try to do hereafter, to the new iPad app from fiftythree, Paper.

Does it make sense?  Does it have to?

Ok, here’s Prince Arthur on the left.  His parents are the two wealthiest and powerful monarchs of the 1100s — Henry II, ruler of England, Wales, parts of Ireland and half of France, is his father.  His mother is Eleanor of Aquitaine, brilliant, good-looking and ruthless, the wealthiest woman in Europe.  And none of this matters a whit when your ship sinks with all hands in the middle of the English Channel.

This is where the Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn film, The Lion in Winter, fits.  RIchard III, Geoffrey Duke of Brittany and Prince John (a snot-nosed sixteen year-old) are all potential successors to their father, now that the heir to the throne is dead).  ELeanor wanted Richard to be king.  Henry wanted John to be king.  Nobody wanted Geoffrey.

Richard got the crown, and then promptly left England to go fight on Crusade.  He got captured in Germany on his way home, and held for ransom. Geoffrey died, but not before getting married and having a son.  Prince John became Regent of England.

This is where the Robin Hood story fits.

Richard eventually gets out of jail and comes home.  He briefly displaces John from the throne, rules England a little while, and then dies.  John becomes king —

— but Geoffrey, third son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, has a better claim to the throne.  And Arthur, as Geoffrey’s son, is the legal heir.

Prince John, now King John, has him murdered.

Which sets him up as a usurper, and an easy target for the English baronial class, who want the king off their backs. They chase him all over England, and eventually corner him outside Windsor Castle, at Runnymede, where they force him to sign and seal Magna Carta, the Great Charter — one of the main threads of the English common law system, and the basis for parliamentary-style government that came down to us in America, and helped serve as one of the principal documents for the formation of the U.S. Constitution.

So… that’s why John murdered Duke Arthur of Brittany.

Got any more questions like that?  I don’t want to wait a decade.

Hands on the Past

I was at the Smith College Art Museum, and snapped this picture with my cellphone in the Ancient Greek gallery on the second floor. They have a few nice red-figure ware pieces, a Cypriot geometric vase, some glass bottles, and some bits of jewelry — quite nice for a museum out in the country, far away from most anything.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, there are a large number of windows in the building, and some art pieces have been placed where they are in direct sunlight, including this kylix or drinking cup showing an athlete about to hurl the discus (or possibly playing a drum?).

Thanks to the sunlight, my face, my hands, my mala are all visible, reflected in the plexiglass of the case.  I took two such photographs, one where I didn’t notice the sunlit effect, and this one — where I took advantage of it to make the photograph show me trying to grab the mandala of the boy with his discus.  I wanted to explore the concept of reaching out across time-and-space, and through security measures, to put my hands on an object about 2500 years old.  BUT! Not only to put my hands on it, but to wrap my mind around the lives of the people who produced this object.

Let’s face it: the past is a foreign country. The mala on my wrist doesn’t get used to say OM NAMAH SHIVAYA 108 times a day.  The camera that’s taking the photograph, and the plexiglass case, would be foreign objects to the boy, though he might have a sense of how the mala would be used.  We both stand under the same sun, in a sense, but we belong to different eras, and different cultures. Ultimately, we have different mindsets, and we can’t possibly understand one another’s worlds.

In a Velveteen Rabbit sense, he’s far more enduring and real than I will ever be.  Which of us — he or me — is truly the shadow here?

Essays vs. Stories

Tim reminded me in a comment on my last entry that I should really be doing more writing about being a teacher, and I’ve had it in mind to do an entry about this assignment I gave my students in American history after the start of the new semester at the end of January.  The assignment was simple enough:

Write a story about a President, written in such a way that it would be understandable by a third grader, and appeal to them.

How deceptively simple this assignment appeared at first glance, and how much of a shibboleth it appears to be now!  I’ve spent a good deal of time reading these essays over the last week of vacation; I’ve been trying to read one or two of them a day, sometimes more.  I still have a good many to go through, and that’s dismaying.

What’s really dismaying, though, is how many of them are simply not stories.  It’s not that these writings are bad stories, or that they’re stories in need of a little (or a lot of) editing.  It’s that these writings are essays — short pieces of writing often based on the author’s personal point of view.  They’re full of the analytical detail and factual evidence that makes a good essay, of course.  But they’re short on the liveliness and personal detail that makes a good story.

Wikipedia explains to me that the definition of an essay is a little vague, probably for good reason.  It comes from the French verb essayer, meaning ‘to try’, and these bits of student writing are certainly trying to be stories.   The fact that they’re not stories is all the more frustrating.

Students certainly need to write essays. They’re going to be writing essays for most of their school careers.  But outside of journalism (magazines such as The Atlantic and Harper’s publish essays, and the Op-Ed pages of newspapers are full of essays), and academia, who else writes them?

I discussed this with a friend and colleague of mine who teaches at the college level, and she agreed. “The best historians write stories that happen to be factually true,” she said.  ”They don’t write a lot of essays… really more like non-fiction novels.” That suggests that as a history teacher, I should do a better job of teaching history students to write non-fiction short stories.

It’s clear that such instruction would be counter-intuitive, and go against the grain of the vast majority of American practice.  Would it put my students at an advantage or a disadvantage in their academic careers to learn how to write a different way?  How would I have to vary my instruction? Should I go 50-50% on essay vs. story instruction?  How would I change my reading assignments so they were better prepared to write stories rather than essays?

I’m not sure.  I am conscious that I have way more of these essays-for-third-graders to read, assess and grade before going out to dinner tonight, so it’s time to stop blogging for now, and do my duty as a teacher.

Your Brain Knows Where You Are

I found this video about the science of learning how your memory knows where your car is parked.  It’s rooted in the hippocampus (the part of the brain shaped like a seahorse), and it maps out the territory around you.  Some nerves are associated with boundary understandings, and some lay out a grid (a triangular grid, I note — the same sort of grid that Bucky Fuller, bless his heart, thought was the real coordinate system of the Universe… the notion that the brain actually marks things in a triangular grid is a post of its own someday soon).   But this is, of course, about… you guessed it…

Palace of Memory

You see, the visual-spatial parts of your brain are what we call, in shorthand, the “right brain” (even though they’re not all in your right brain).  And the “left brain” is more about language and deductive thought, and linear processing of information.  We contrast the two hemispheres of the brain by talking about one as more formal and organized (left), and one as more holistic and broad-brush and creative (right). But the hippocampus is neither — it’s in the brain stem, or at least attached to it, and doesn’t really look at the world from either point of view.  It’s more raw processing power, and at least some of that processing power is directed at knowing where you are in the world.

When you imagine your own Palace of Memory, though, your forebrain — your left brain and your right brain — are likely pinging a left-brain neuron for the information stored, and a right-brain neuron for the image associated with that stored information, and some grid-neurons and edge-neurons in the hippocampus.  You’re engaging four neurons (or possibly neuron-groups) for the price of one memory, and fixing it more completely in your mind.

This is the essence of the ancient technique, which pseudo-Cicero in Ad Herennium called the artificial memory, but which is in fact not artificial at all — it’s apparently rooted in a genuine brain function, and it’s possible to uncover that brain function through science — and then exploit that awareness through a technique of personal development that’s at least 2500 years old.  Brilliant.

Best of 2011 / sixty more pageviews?

I’d love to get sixty page views on my blog today.

It was kind of a big milestone for me to get 40,000 page views this year, and surprisingly, I’m about to hit 42,000 blog views. I’d love to meet that milestone.  But it’s not fair to just give you the request, and not give you the “Best of 2011″.  So here they are: the ten most frequently read posts of 2011.

1. Learning to draw the Tree of Life
2. Emotional Intelligence by Peter Salovey
3. Art of Memory
4. The Memory Palace
5. The horse may learn to talk…
6. From the sewing machine: notebooks
7. Guest Post: Stephen Downes on Fads
8. Anti-Teacher Upsurge
9. driven by data
10. Middletown Collapse

It’s not a bad list.  But it’s unclear to me why some of these posts have become so popular, and others have not.  Peter Salovey? Really?  Stephen Downes I understand.  The concerns about the anti-teacher upsurge, I get.  Palace of Memory, I get.

Incidentally, I bought the book, Memorize the Faith. It’s quite interesting, and it has exactly the thing that I thought I would do myself: It has illustrations of the different parts of various rooms in a house, and it shows how they’re connected, and it builds a model palace of memory for all of the various things that you might want to memorize in Catholic doctrine.  I’m not sure I want to memorize Catholic doctrine, but I may use it as the basis of my own learning process, and the process I teach my students, for the future.  Very cool.

The Hippocampus and Memory

Go read this bit about the Hippocampus and Memory at Wikipedia and then come back here.

I’ve long known about the way that the Hippocampus in London taxi cab drivers is always larger (up to 40% larger) than in regular people, because of the intense work they have to do to memorize the London street scene.  The London Knowledge is apparently the most sophisticated and complex set of information about urban navigation in the world, with most would-be taxi cab drivers sitting for the examination no fewer than 12 times after almost three years of preparation.

But this is why Palace of Memory works, of course.  If you build an artificial place in your memory that you navigate, then of course you’re hardwiring memories that you want to create artificially to the structure of a place which you’re navigating.  It doesn’t matter that you’re not ACTUALLY navigating it; it only matters that you’re navigating.  And that means that you’re making a neural map of imaginary places that contain data.  You’re building a database that involves the left and right brains and the hippocampus in storing information. The key then becomes, what information do you want to store? And what imaginary map of imaginary places do you want to store it in?

Returning to the Palace of Memory

Just before Thanksgiving break, my students and one of my colleagues organized a little playful program for our seventh grade.  Now, our whole seventh grade is in fact about the size of some of my colleagues’ individual sections in a public school.  And we only went around once — so no kid had to memorize more than one thing per person.

You’ve played this game before, or a variant of it: So each kid was going to a Thanksgiving dinner, and each was going to bring… 

A – apple sauce; B – butternut squash; C – cheese; D – dry ice;
E – eggplant parmesan; F – feta cheese; G – ____ ;
H – Hillshire Farms meats; I – ice; J – juice ; K – kangaroo;
L – lemons; M – macaroni and cheese ; N – Neapolitan ice cream;
O – ostrich; P – partridge ; Q – quail; R – roadkill ; S – stuffing ;
T – Turkey; U – uncooked Turkey; V – vegetables; W – water;
X – xylophone-themed cupcakes; Y – yams; and Z – zebra.

OK.  Two months later, I can remember all but one item on this particular list.  You can see that I missed the item in letter G. I can remember who said feta cheese, too, and who said “hillshire farms meats”… but not who was sitting between them.

There’s a hiccup here… and it’s because the palace of memory here was awkwardly constructed, on the fly, using the combination of letters, and the people’s names.  I can tell you who said most of the items in this list, and yet there are TWO people sitting between F and H in the circle — one who opted out of the game, who I can remember, and one whom I can’t remember.  (I also know that my own memories of Thanksgiving are trying to intrude on the list — ‘gourds’ wants to fill that place, and so does ‘garnish’, but neither of those is right, of course).

This is not bad, if the goal is memory improvement.  If the goal is to retain useful and important data, though, it’s not so useful.  But it turns out that most of us carry around the ability to make an alphabetical list, as a result of all those alphabet books we read as kids.  Is there a way to adapt this to children, to teach them how to use a Palace of Memory from a very young age?  And then how do we teach them to expand the palace as they get older, to include more complex concepts like number and timeline and locations on the globe?

The ancients used a system which Frances Yates tried to reconstruct in her book, The Palace of Memory, which I’m reading and enjoying (although it’s rather dry).  And Jonathan Spence in his book, the Palace of Memory of Matteo Ricci, also tried to reconstruct what it would be like to walk around in the palace of an 16th century Jesuit priest in China.  I’ve also just learned of this book, Memorize the Faith, which use the outline of the memory palace of Thomas Aquinas to teach the Christian gospels.

It seems to me that although my library chamber is a useful place to begin to create the places and things necessary to an effective memory palace, the real value of the system has to come from having an overarching theme of framework for the structure of the memories to be held.  This suggests short scripts or training podcasts, that guide you around small sections of the room(s) at first, and then gradually fill in various details.

One thing the ancients worried about, which I think we don’t have to worry about, is imagining spaces to be static and unchanging, with nothing closer together than thirty feet or so.  I think we can closely cram things together, and we can also have movies or tape loops playing in various places in our minds…

More on this after my plane flight today, or perhaps tomorrow.  It’s on my mind how to teach kids to build an effective memory palace, and my first efforts were good, but inadequate.  Read more, research more, practice more memory-building techniques.  Of course.

Keeping records of class discussions

I’ve attached a PDF to today’s entry, called the circle record.  It’s something I saw at a conference years and years ago… lost it, found it, forgot it, lost it again, and then rebuilt last week based on my own sketchy memories of it.  I wish I could tell you the origin point of it, but this one isn’t copyrighted. Use it as you wish.

In essence, it’s a large  circle labeled with sixteen positions — I suppose I could cut lines in half to raise the number to 32 posts, but I only need 16, for my largest class — and a key of symbols.  Using it today for the first time, I’m discovering that I really only need six symbols — a check mark, a plus sign, an exclamation point, a question mark, an X, a spiral — in order to track conversations.  The kids picked up on what I was doing right away, and then I made it explicit.  I showed it to them, so that they could see the kind of data I was gathering.

Some things became clear to them, and to me, quite rapidly.  We were much more aware of when our conversations spiraled out beyond the boundaries of our topics.  We were more conscious of who was and was not participating; and some students who normally don’t say much, made a genuine effort to join the conversation.

We also adapted the rubric of one of our language teachers to our history class:  Just as the Señora says, “To learn a language, read it and write it and say it and hear it,” we say of history now, “to learn history, read it and write it and tell it and listen to it,” with the caveat that seeing historical places in person can help a lot.

Our first day, our first class, was not very successful. Out of the ten kids present (several are out sick), seven can really be said to have participated solidly; and three of them were ‘spiraling us out’ from our main topic pretty rapidly. Three stayed mostly quiet, or talked only to each other about unrelated topics. But, by the end of class, we came up with a plan for tomorrow.  They’re re-reading last night’s pages, and they’re going to be paying attention to:

1. Seating arrangements in class (sit with people who will keep you on topic)
2. Think what you’re about to say before you say it;
3. take notes before class on a couple of questions and a couple of answers you want to discuss;
4. kick so-and-so out of class

Our fourth item wound up getting crossed off the list, even though several people suggested it (even of themselves) because we realized that nobody starts off being good at this. It’s a question of learning how to be better at it that matters, not how bad you are at the beginning.  It was great for them to realize it, and I felt proud that they both a) suggested it, and b) rejected it as an option without my help.  We all need help at staying focused during conversations, and this seems to help them understand how they might do it.