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?

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?

Altering Consciousness

Today I was supposed to be writing comments.  Every quarter, I get to write reports for my students.  It’s an arduous task, but it’s one that I relish, too.  It’s a chance to report on the best in each student, to help them set goals for the future, and celebrate their accomplishments.  There’s some prevarication, and sweeping of faults under a rug, too — but that is as it should be.  We’re modeling what we want our students to become, and we encourage them to become what we focus on.  Ergo, our most pointed and poignant comments should be reserved to directing students along the higher roads toward a more glorious future.

But, my head isn’t in writing mode these days.  Nor is it in the reflective mode, either — looking back at the last few months of effort to understand what my students have done, and what it’s in their best interests to do, going forward.  It’s in a much more visual mindset, a more visual consciousness, than I can recall being in before.

In terms of getting work done, it’s been dismaying.  I had today as a writing day, and my brain was totally in the mindset of drawing.  I kept seeing images that I wanted to draw in the shapes of the letters… and I kept interrupting my official work to go draw.

The result of all this drawing has been the creation of some top-notch artwork in my sketchbook, but it’s also raised some interesting questions about the nature of consciousness in me.  We all know about this alleged left-brain/right-brain split, where the right brain does all sorts of visual processing, while the left brain does all sorts of language and linear process work (these are often reversed in left-handers, which means they’re probably reversed in me).

I’ve thought of myself as being a pretty left-brained sort of guy.  I write poetry, but lately it’s been difficult to do that.  I write short stories, or rather, I used to.  These days I’m mostly interested in line and color, not words.  I ask my brain to be creative with words, and it’s creative with shapes and lines and artwork instead.

The answer seems to be that I’ve shifted my consciousness somehow in the last few months.  As some of you, my readers, know, I get up daily to do 30-40 minutes of meditation and some tai chi and suchlike.  Frankly, without that work, I’d be lost.  I consider it essential to my well-being as a teacher and a teacher of teachers (when I have that privilege).  But in that meditation time, I’ve noticed that words have a tendency to slip away, and I get more caught up in the image of the candle-flame, and the shapes of shadows on the wall.

I’ve successfully altered my consciousness, somehow, and shifted from being mostly a linear, language processor to being a lot more whole-brained.  Actually, for the moment, I’ve shifted to being a lot more right-brained.  I’m hoping, that I can figure out how to shift from the current balance of consciousness to a more whole-brained position.  It’s hard for a blogger to be an exclusively visual thinker.

Good Old Books!

Yesterday in study hall, a student insisted that New Zealand was part of Australia. Someone else insisted it was part of Oceania. They went back and forth for a while, until I finally insisted that they look at the atlas.

Someone said they should go onto Google Earth, but no. I wouldn’t let them use the computer. Instead, we opened up a somewhat-dated National Geographic Atlas, and flipped to the section on Australia and Oceania. We also looked at the section dealing with plate tectonics.

And ultimately, we got a much better answer than Google Earth could have given us. First, we learned that while Australia is a continent, Oceania really is not — Oceania is simply a bunch of undersea mountain tops that happen to poke through the surface of the water. Second, we learned that New Zealand isn’t actually on the ‘same’ tectonic plate as Australia, and doesn’t even share a continental shelf. They might be “near” to each other, but New Zealand is the result of something else.

And that something else is volcanoes and earthquakes. The atlas showed clearly that New Zealand sits on the edges of the Australian plate and the Pacific Plate, where the two plates crash into one another and produce the uplift of New Zealand’s highlands and mountains (so ably shown off in the Lord of The Rings movie trilogy!).

We also learned that New Zealand is the southwestern edge of one of the three distinct cultural regions of Oceania: that of Polynesia, which is bounded by Rapa Nui/Easter Island in the southeast, and the Hawaiian Islands in the north. The other two regions were Melanesia and Micronesia. The folks at National Geographic, working within the limited space constraints of a book (even the large format of an atlas), did a great job of picking photos of Micronesians, Melanesians, and Polynesians that demonstrated cultural distinctions. And the photographs of the islands themselves — from the air, from the ground, from the water — also showed how these islands were geographically distinct.

It was all great material for a palace of memory exercise involving the globe. And it’s one of the things that the Internet — as wonderful as it is — does badly. To get all of that information, our kids would have had to visit a half-dozen websites, or I as their teacher would have had to KNOW and had bookmarked the perfect website to answer that question. Google makes it easier, and harder, both at the same time.

Do they have a perfect understanding of Oceania, Australia, and New Zealand? No. Will they be utterly aware of the differences and similarities between islands? No. Are they now aware of geological, geographical, and cultural differences in a part of the world that most Americans don’t know well? Yes, a little. And all of that, from a BOOK!

Sometimes, the best tool for answering an off-the-cuff question is having the right book on hand. That’s why the best study halls, and the best classrooms, are also miniature libraries. I have to do a better job of making my classroom into a jewel of a library for the subjects I teach, I think.

Why Memory is Important

I got reminded of this story today.

I also got reminded, via Facebook a few days ago, how much stuff you have to make that’s crap before you get to the good stuff.  We know this from Malcolm Gladwell — that we’re often 10,000 hours of effort away from being really good at anything.  I built five or six labyrinths before that one, none of them oriented to the stars.  And now I’m in a place where there’s blessedly few rocks at all, which makes it difficult to build labyrinths, and where I’m not really supposed to be building them at all.

But it’s still nothing compared with the SunWheel at UMASS Amherst.  And Stonehenge and other archaeoastronomy projects are far more impressive than my little circle, which is already showing its age, just a year or so after I left the school where it was built.  The story is forgotten, I suspect, and the caretakers in that class did not pass the lore on.

One of the things that upsets me is how fragile this digital culture is.  Around 1100 BC, the warriors of Mycenaean Greece faced the challenge of their day, and failed to meet it.  All of the palaces of their culture were destroyed (except maybe the one at Pylos), and the keepers of records died in the the paroxysm of fire and war that brought an end to one of the Mediterranean world’s early and high civilizations.  Greece entered a three-hundred-year-long dark age, and nothing survived of the literature or storytelling from before the fall.  In the 800s BC sometime, a poet traditionally named Homer began telling stories of the wars before the  collapse, but did so using (in part) the tropes and concerns of his own time.

If the power went out for an extended period of time… if the Internet went dark… what would survive? The contents of our public libraries and university libraries?  The contents of our own heads?

I wonder. And I worry.

Memory of Things vs. Memory of Words

Janet asked me in a recent comment about the difference between memorizing things, and memorizing words. As a computer programmer, she’s concerned with exact syntax, and the more vague visual images we’ve been discussing here are less useful.

I’ve been reading pseudo-Cicero’s book, Ad Herennium, about this, along with the elegant book by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, and I’ve gained a few brief insights into the process.  Pseudo-Cicero, the unknown grammarian wrote a book dealing with the memory art I’ve been describing, lived around 80 BC. Ad Herennium, that very book, eventually had its authorship attributed as the work of the great Roman statesman and man of letters, Cicero, who lived forty years later, around 40 BC (and the time of Julius Caesar’s murder).  His chapters on the art of artificial memory are a critical look into the mindset of the time, and those rules are succinctly summed up by Yates.  I won’t reproduce them here, but sum them up.

1. An artificial memory is established by combining places with images;
2. A place is a location easily grasped by the memory, such as a house, a place between pillars, a corner of a room, an arch, a piece of furniture.
3. Images are forms or pictures which can be static or in motion, of pieces of information which we wish to remember.
4. The art of memory is an inner writing.  Those who know the art of memory invent images, like letters or words, and set them in the appropriate places that they may be vigorously called to mind.
5. The more we wish to remember, the more places we must equip our minds to remember.  They must form a series, so they can be visited in order, or they must be spatially organized, so they can be visited at random, and so that we may go back and forth, either within the series or out of order as needed.
6. The mental images of the places are far more important than the images stored there; for the same places can be used again and again for remembering different material. The images fade with time and lack of use, but the places remain strong.
7. To make sure that we do not forget where we are in the palace of memory, it is good to put a marker at every fifth and tenth place, to remind ourselves of what goes there.
8. Form one’s memory of a desolate or solitary place; crowds of people passing through the place tend to weaken one’s impressions of the space.
9. Memory places should not too closely resemble each other.  They should be distinguished by color, shape, texture and more to make them clear.  They should not be too brightly lit, nor too dark.  Images should not be too closely stacked on one another.
10. A person of large experience, with many images to store, can start with a fictional room, or a real room, and gradually invent more and more places to serve his (or her) need. These places can be based on real or fictitious locations, especially as the memorizer gains more experience.
11. It is easier to remember more striking or grotesque images than it is to remember pretty or ordinary images.  Ridiculous or unbelievable or even disgusting images are easier to call to mind.
12. Images of things — of the sort of historical or social events that I’ve been dealing with in this blog, and in this series of posts — are a lot easier than images of words…
13. One still has to remember precise images of words “in the usual way” — that is to say, by rote memory — but they can be stored in a specific place in the memory, and called to mind by this kind of precise attention to detail.
14. If a visual image can be constructed that ‘puns’ the opening line of a verse of poetry or a line of syntax that must be remembered, so much the better.

And this is what I find, as well.  I can construct the room, and I can put an image of Henry Hudson being set adrift with his loyal ship mates among the floating icebergs of Hudson’s bay in 1610, the map of Manhattan and the Hudson River on the back side of the mainsail of his ship the Half Moon (along with the date, 1609), with the English red-crossed Banner of St. George waving from the quarterdeck…

… but I still had to memorize Beowulf line by line.  (“So, the Spear-Danes, in days gone by, had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes heroic campaigns. There was Shield Sheafson, scourge…”) I can more easily recall Beowulf to mind, now that I know that it sits on the top right shelf of the east wall, the third book in (after the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the Holy Bible [KJV] ), and just before the memorized section of The Canterbury Tales that I know (“Wan that aprille with his showres soocthe// the drochte of marche hath percéd to the roochte”) [And the weird thing about Canterbury Tales is that it's an audio recording from when I was in high school... I can't tell you how the Middle English is spelled, but I can hear it in my mind, and repeat it aloud for you. Which suggests that the memory is a very complex thing, indeed.]

After that is English Poets, and in the Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834) section of that is “Kubla Khan.”

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
a stately pleasure-dome decree
where Alph, the sacred river ran,

through caverns measureless to man,

down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

with walls and towers were girdled round:

and there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

and here were forests ancient as the hills,

enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted

down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover.

A savage place! As holy and enchanted

as e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

by woman wailing for her demon-lover…”

And so on.  I could go on, but then you might suspect me of cutting-and-pasting, rather than remembering.  I learned this poem last week, to practice on, and because it’s well suited for visualization.  And if you double-check, I suspect that you’ll find that the punctuation is likely incorrect, although the spelling and actual text probably are right on, or at least close.

It did not take me nearly as long to memorize a new poem as a guy my age should expect.  And I think that’s part of the point that Yates and pseudo-Cicero wanted to make — that when you train your brain to remember images-of-things, that the memory of images-of-words becomes stronger too.  Yates tells a story that a friend of St. Augustine of Hippo’s, a rhetoric teacher named Simplicius, could recite the whole of Virgil’s Aeneid backwards.  And Seneca, the master moralist and teacher of grammar, could recite a list of 200+ names backwards after hearing the list once, or recite poems backwards after hearing them once — by storing each verse in his palace of memory as he heard them.

I take from all of this that memory is plastic in a variety of ways.  It has an easier time holding images that represent things or ideas, as my initial image of Henry Hudson in the longboat in 1610.  It can be used to fix specific texts in memory, and make them readily and permanently available… but one must still memorize them by rote, repeating them several times until they become clear in the mind and easily recalled.

I hope this helps, Janet.

A Palace of Memory assignment

Some of you new readers (wow there are quite a few!) are trying to develop the skills to develop your own Palace of Memory, but you may not really grasp how important it is to develop a strong visual image of the thing you’re trying to remember. It’s one thing to memorize a poem through rote repetition, but it’s another to remember a whole web of facts and fingers as if it were a complete and thorough visual image.

Along those lines, I’m asking my readers to develop a script or a text or an image for the Palace of Memory, to share here in comments, of a specific thing that can or should be remembered.  Read on for a sample script, or go straight to comments for a chance to see what people are doing.