Art of Memory

An Anthropologist’s Peek into the World of Memory Athletes

Happy New Year, fellow mnemonists. I wish you all a memorable year.

I’m thrilled to be able to share this article with you. This is the first article of 2016 for DanielKilov.com AND my post by a guest author. This piece was written by my friend and research collaborator, Emily Colonna, on her experiences as an ethnographer at the 2015 Australian Memory Championships.

By Emily Colonna

“Neurons at the ready!”

The athletes seated around the lecture room flipped over their competition papers and stared intently at them. The jovial atmosphere in which they had interacted before the competition had dissipated. Each competitor sat, poised in concentrated tension. Some with their fingertips to their temples, others with arms folded on the desk in front of them. Only the quiet rustle of competition papers disrupted the silence, although, some competitors went further to ensure it by wearing noise-cancelling headphones.

I, too, had to work to preserve the silence. Otherwise, this would be the first and last time the Australian Memory Championships would allow an anthropologist to sit in on an event. It was important that I preserve observation rights. The Championships was the perfect place to begin my academic exploration of the world of competitive memory.

The competitors at the championships were not born with super-memories. They had all trained, using a set of mnemonic techniques, to improve their memory. These techniques, known as the ‘art of memory,’ were not invented by memory athletes. In fact, they have a history of over two thousand years. Since ancient Greece, people have made use of the ‘art of memory’ to improve their memories. In each historical period, different arenas applied the art, with different goals. Ancient Greeks made use of the art in oration, to assist in the memorisation of speeches. Centuries later, early Christian monks used the memory techniques as tools of meditation and reflection. During the Renaissance, the mnemonic techniques inspired art and architecture. In each period, the application of the art reflected the values of the time.

So in our modern world, why is the current usage of the ‘art of memory’ in competition? What does it say of our culture and values that the ‘art of memory’ finds expression in competition? To explore this question, I arrived in Melbourne on the 7th and 8th of November to conduct observation and interviews with the competitors of the Australian Memory Championships.

The Australian Championships have been running since 2001. The competitive memorisers – often referred to as ‘mental athletes’ in the sports-lingo of the competition – go head-to-head in a decathlon of memory. The Ten Memory Disciplines are:

Names and Faces
Binary Numbers
Random Numbers
Abstract Images
Speed Numbers
Historic/Future Dates
Random Cards
Random Words
Spoken Numbers
Speed Cards

In each event, athletes have a period to memorise as much as possible of the given category. There is a short break and then a period of recall.

“Stop Memorisation”

After five minutes, memorisation time ended for the first event: Names and Faces. The competitors turned their competition papers face down and the arbiters collected them. Most athletes kept their eyes trained down. Some covered their faces with their hands, as if to hold the names and faces in their heads by physical force.

“Begin recall”

Again there was a flurry of page-flipping as the competitors opened the recall papers. The room was much less still during recall. Competitors looked around the room, tapped their fingers on the desk, shook their heads, and pulled faces. The scratching sounds of pencils on paper reverberated around the room.

Looking down at my copy of the competition papers, I baulked at the names. In earlier years, national competitions only used national names. However, with increasing emphasis on equality and with an eye to training for the World Championships, competitors now had to memorise names from all around the world. I wondered, how does one go about remembering names like Oona Bosse, Eshita Vidosic and Rakanja Ghayaza?

“Pens down”

Recall time was over. The competition papers were swiftly couriered to the Arbiter’s Room for marking. As soon as the papers left the room, each athlete relaxed and sound bubbled up to the surface again. Competitors turned to each other and shared their struggles and triumphs. Many looked to Tansel Ali, the reigning champion, to see how he felt he went.

It was amazing to witness the competitors shift so completely between relaxed comradery and silent, isolating focus. It was like they were flipping a switch. Over the two days of the competition I saw this happen 10 times, once for each event.

The Arbiter’s room seemed an alternate universe, the flip side of the coin to the competition room. During events the arbiters joked, relaxed, and chatted. Sometimes it was reminiscent of a TAB. Arbiters discussed the favourites, past wins, rankings, and performances. Once the competition papers arrived the noise dropped. Arbiter’s took their seats and followed the detailed set of rules for marking. They awarded points for each first or last name spelled correctly, and penalties for the repetition of names, then; they tallied the scores and entered them into the database. Results were printed and blu-tacked to the wall of the competition room. Competitors gathered around to see where their efforts placed them in the race for the title of Australian Memory Champion.

By the end of the second day, the athletes were exhausted. One man joked that he thinks these competitions make him less smart! Tired as they were, a buzz of excitement went through the room as came time to announce the final results.

Competitors clapped enthusiastically for their fellow competitors and their achievements as the scores were announced in ascending order. As it got down to the top 3, the room was tense again- would the reigning champ take out the title again? Or would international competitor Luis Angel trump him?

In third place came Daniel Mayes- high school teacher and first time competitor with a score of 1917. Only 119 points ahead, in second place, was visiting memory expert Luis Angel, from the USA. In first place Tansel Ali successfully defended his title, achieved 2198 points.

Notable also, were the records broken. The junior athletes broke a record each. Aviv Dolan broke the national Names and Faces record at 14 points. Rory-Clay Edwards broke the Random Words national record at 25 words.

With all the official proceedings finished, competitors made the final switch into relaxed comradery. Over the weekend, I had witnessed an impressive display of determination, focus and skill; yet it was the community which the competition built which was most striking to me.

The Championships had brought together people from all across the country, most of who had never met before. Veterans of the memory world, published authors, teachers, high-school students, a bank teller, and a competitive Rubik’s cuber gathered for one weekend to test their mental metal. These athletes shared not only a hobby or a set of skills. They shared a commitment to training hard, a desire to set and achieve personal goals, and a passion for improving their memory. It was these goals that made the day a win not only for Tansel, but for each competitor.

Full Results Available http://world-memory-statistics.com/competition.php?id=auomc2015

AoM story from the Northern Territory News

In 2015 we launched the AoM Schools project with the aim of collecting data on the effects of the techniques of the Art of Memory on academic outcomes. This pilot program began with the training of a select group of school teachers in Darwin, Australia and will encompass a number of different research projects. The story was covered by the NT News (among others) and can be read below. More information on the research project can be found here.

A manifesto for memory

This article was written by Kathy Graham and originally published on the Happy + Well blog here under the title “The art of memory”.

I don’t remember a lot of things. I have a shelf full of books I’ve read that I could easily read again and experience as if I was picking them up for the first time. I can look at old diaries and find it incredible that I have no recollection of many of the events I’ve described that once clearly had a big impact on me. I can spend a week or two researching to death a topic that I have to write about and then once the piece is published, forget it entirely.

In other words, I have a crap memory though I would love dearly to change this state of affairs. Hence I’m very interested in hearing about any techniques that might help me do this, including those described here by accomplished memory athlete Daniel Kilov, who presented at our Mind & Its Potential conference.

But Kilov wasn’t always a star at remembering stuff. He says that at school, his teachers despaired of his sieve-like mind. Now, though, they wouldn’t recognise their former student. In 2011, Kilov competed in the World Memory Championships and secured second place behind his coach and mentor Tansel Ali, as well as broke the Australian record for the abstract images event, having memorised the order of 99 abstract shapes. He says this was only after a few months of practice, and convinced him of the power of what he describes as “a small set of very simple techniques.”

Kilov says that when he tells people he’s a memory athlete, many wonder why he bothers given it’s so easy in today’s world to retrieve whatever information we want by clicking on Google or Wikipedia. He believes their question goes to the “heart of the conception we have of memory and of the relationship that we think it has to learning”, a conception that’s formed when we’re at school and asked to memorise through boring repetition. “It’s a conception of memory as being a dull, impersonal and ineffective parroting,” he says.

His preferred conception of memory is that it’s creative, personal, fun and highly effective. Moreover, he espouses the value of memory techniques as a potential revolution in education. Not that this would be the first time excellent recall skills have enjoyed high status in academia. As a matter of historical fact, the art of memory has its origins in ancient Greece where, says Kilov, it was practiced universally by the great thinkers of the time who “recognised that creativity, focus and critical analysis were the kinds of things that could only happen in the minds of well-trained mnemonics.”

Kilov explains that such techniques, for example, the use of imagination to create links and associations, continued to be used right up until the time of the Renaissance “where they formed a cornerstone of the education system and were taught alongside grammar, rhetoric and logic. In fact, it was only with the Protestant Reformation that the art of memory was driven underground and replaced with the kinds of rote methods of memorisation that we know today.”

The good news is these techniques can be easily resurrected for use in the 21st century. Kilov says, “I think it’s time for the art of memory to make a return to our classrooms. Of course, learning isn’t just about memorising. It’s about being able to retrieve information, to critically assess it, to analyse it and to synthesise it. But none of these things can occur unless you have that information at your fingertips, unless you can see how it fits into a bigger picture and that can’t be done unless that information is stored in your memory.”

From the Archives: Daniel Kilov and Tansel Ali on ABC’s HUNGRY BEAST

Many of you enjoyed my interview with Tansel Ali, the 3x Australian Memory Champion and human phone book. Did you know that Tansel and I have been good friends for many years? In fact, it was Tansel who first taught me memory techniques. Below is a clip from back when I’d only just started training with Tansel. Enjoy!

A giant of the competitive memory world

This article was originally printed in Issue 416 (March/April) of the Australian Mensa magazine, TableAus.

Boris Nikolai Konrad is a giant of the competitive memory world. In 2009, he set two world records by memorizing 280 words and 195 names and faces (each in 15 minutes). In 2010, he beat his own record by memorizing 201 names and faces. Like all memory athletes, Boris utilizes a number of ancient mnemonic techniques known collectively as the Art of Memory. However, Boris is also an expert in the science of memory and is one of the few people in the world to have subjected these mnemonic techniques to serious empirical investigation. On top of all that, Boris is a member of the
Global Speakers Federation and travels the world as keynote speaker on memory and the brain. Somehow, he still managed to find time to answer some questions I had about his research as well as his personal journey with memory.

Daniel Kilov: You are, so far as I am aware, unique in the memory world, having reached the highest heights with the Art of Memory (currently ranked 9th in the world) but also having a deep passion for, and understanding of, the science of memory. Today, you work as Postdoc at Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen. How and when did you first develop your interest in memory?

Boris Konrad: It was in 2002 that I saw the multiple times German memory champion Gunther Karsten on German national TV. This was shortly before I finished high school. In the show Gunther trained a German actress in a mnemonic method that enabled her to triple her memory on a short word list learning task. I wondered, if these mnemonics could be worth a look, why no one had ever told me about them and if I should have a look into them before my final exam. I ordered a book and practised the mnemonics a bit and was highly fascinated by how well they worked. After high school and before university I trained those intensively to optimize their use at university, where they ended up helping me finish two degrees in the time of one with high distinction.

Already back then I had the question in mind, how it can be, that I can apply a somewhat artificial method to improve my memory. Shouldn’t memory work best by itself? I studies physics and computer sciences and when I was close to finishing my master’s degree, I had to decide how to proceed. A PhD student position was offered to me working at the LHC project of Cern, which most physics students would happily take, but I could not see myself spending my career in physics.
Coincidentally I was asked to be a participant in a study on superior memory at the Munich Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry that involved MRI investigations. I gladly joined but also addressed the studies` primary investigator, who also was a physicist by training, if he saw a chance for me to join these studies as PhD student. He did and that is how I ended up in the field, which I am most grateful for.

Even better, ongoing success also in the field of memory sports and professional speaking, allowed me to combine my scientific work with a secondary self-employed job as keynote-speaker, “tv personality”, memory trainer and author.

Daniel Kilov: Even the earliest manuals on the Art of Memory, such as the Rhetorica Ad Herenium (which dates back to at least 90 BC), stress the importance of creating vivid mental images when memorizing. However, your research has suggested that visualization abilities, as measured by the VVIQ, are largely irrelevant to one’s skill with mnemonics. This is a radical and surprising result – at least for the world of competitive memorizing! How did you react to this finding? By contrast, what traits or abilities do correlate with success with mnemonics?

Boris Konrad: It certainly did not meet my hypothesis. The VVIQ as you say is a widely applied tool to evaluate mental imagery abilities. I had many of the best memory athletes in the world fill it out and compared that to match (by age, gender, IQ) controls. My hypothesis was, that the
groups differ and that among the memory athletes, ability to visualize clearly correlates with memory sports success. But both were not the case. Additionally in a training study on mnemonics, the VVIQ score did not change much by training and also was non-predictive of success. A further look into that seems to indicate, that actually the activity of visualizing itself activates relevant areas of the brain that in sequence get involved in the memorization process. The perceived vividness of these images than is not important. Some memorizers actually have more narrative or even logical “images” rather than pretty visual ones. One downside remains: People with perceived low visualization ability are more hesitant to use mnemonics that is based on imagery – but my findings say they should not be, as they would profit highly anyway.

The only trait-like factor that was indeed correlated to the mnemonic success was processing speed. On the other hand, IQ was non-predictive of training success. While in general high IQ does correlate with memory and also memory champions (highest achieving participants of the memory competitions) on average were of high intelligence, regardless of IQ everyone who practised mnemonics benefited from them, even in comparable degree. In short that means, that highly intelligent people were also memorizing the most before and after training, but everyone
benefitted.

Daniel Kilov: Brain training is very popular nowadays with websites like Lumosity enjoying great commercial success. The evidence that these so-called brain-training games improve general cognitive abilities is almost non-existent, however. Although people get better at the specific games they play, the problem seems to be in achieving transfer effects to new tasks. One of the interesting findings of your research is that mnemonic training does seem to benefit other areas (e.g. processing speed). Could you elaborate on this?

Boris Konrad: My study was not designed to test this hypothesis, therefore my findings are only indicative and need further work. I only had one measure of processing speed tested, but on that one in the training study I indeed found significant improvements by mnemonic training compared to a control group. However, relevant criticism to brain-training games studies also apply to my training regime, as subjects obviously were not blind to it and Placebo effects probably played a role.

In my opinion however, regardless of a possible transfer to processing speed, since mnemonic training actually trains a relevant ability and not a specific game, I would still advocate for this form of training even if transfer to untrained domains does not persist. For some it might be disappointing to read that even general memory ability did not improve. Even the world’s best memory champions do not outperform regular controls on tasks of working memory capacity or actually any memory task not suited to their mnemonics when not being granted time to thing about to apply their methods, for example when presented nonsense syllables or sequences of letters. A former study (Maguire 2003) also found that in visual memory for snowflakes. While the memory athletes usually state they would do well in this task when having had the chance to prepare for an hour or two, if they cannot rely on mnemonics, their memory is totally average.

But on the positive side, staying on an anecdotal level, it is highly interesting to me, that well more of the memory athletes reported to benefit from their skills in their studies and work-life than often perceived. General media and even some scientific articles often stress the statements of a very small number of early day memory athletes who stated, they would not use the mnemonics outside of the sport and would not benefit from them. This does not hold in regards of the data I collected. This also includes the fact that, most of the memory athletes doing well in competition, are also doing very well in their job or studies.

This also matches my personal experiences: The mnemonics never became automatic. I do have to apply them. But I can do that rather instantly on a good number of tasks and problems and make use of them nearly every day.

Daniel Kilov: Your research supports a number of the theories of K. Anders Erricson (whose research was popularized in the book ‘Outliers’ by Malcom Gladwell as the ’10,000 hour rule’). What insights does your work on memory training tell us about skill and expertise more generally?

Boris Konrad: I found that memory champions indeed made use of their long-term memories even in very short term memory tasks, when applying their mnemonics. This fits well to Ericssons model of the Log-term working memory. By training the mnemonics, a reference model is built in long-term memory that can be used to store new memories rapidly. According to Ericssons theory, experts in different domains also build up these structures related to their field of expertise. As a chess expert can store new chess games and positions rapidly but nothing else, memory experts can store any material they can apply their mnemonics upon.

Daniel Kilov: How do you train for memory competitions? How has your research influenced your training methods?
Boris Konrad: I use a web platform called Memocamp for my training which mostly consists of doing the events and training to gain speed. Additionally I work on my mnemonic codes, so that I know my images for numbers or playing cards even faster. The same is true for the locations I have in mind that I use for the method of loci. Actually my research did not influence my training too much; I only reduced my training on improving the clarity of my visualization as I do not see this as beneficial anymore.

Daniel Kilov: Conversely, how have your experiences with the Art of Memory influenced how you study in an academic context?

Boris Konrad: Certainly it did. The work on superior memory in the past to my experience often missed some points on how memory athletes actually use their methods. Some papers in the field misunderstood this clearly. My own experience also allows me to design tasks matched to the skills a memory athlete has. Of course I have to keep in mind that I might be unconsciously biased and keep discussing my assumptions with memory researchers that know but do not apply mnemonics and constantly do so.

Ancient memory tips for modern businesses

This article was originally posted at the HAPPY + WELL blog here.

images The Art of Memory is a collection of techniques and methods that can quickly and dramatically improve one’s memory. These techniques originated in ancient Greece but today their leading proponents are competitors at the World Memory Championships and associated national competitions.

In part one of this three part series, I explained the principles and techniques by which memory athletes perform their feats of high-speed learning. Part two explored the potential for these techniques in a modern educational setting and made the case for their return.

In this concluding post, I’ll demonstrate how modern businesses can benefit from the ancient Art of Memory. In particular, I’ll explain how the techniques of memory athletes can be used to learn more at higher speeds, to communicate more effectively and memorably, and how they can be used to drive innovation and creativity.

Memory athletes are super learners. The world record for memorising (fictional) historic dates stands at 132 dates over five minutes. The record for memorising cards in 10 minutes, held by a different athlete, is 370 cards. And yet any of us could, with the same techniques and training, perform these feats.

Although no-one needs to be able to learn fictional dates or the order of a deck of cards, all of us could stand to upgrade our mental software. Today, almost all professions require us to continually absorb and assimilate new information. This increased volume of learning leaves us with two options: we can either spend more time trying to learn or we can accumulate techniques which allow us to learn faster. For most of us, already time poor, the former is not an option.

The solution, then, is to adopt the techniques of memory athletes; to become more mindful, to create visual mental images of what we are trying to remember and then to organise that information by creating mental associations.

Taking the principles of mindfulness, visual encoding and organisation seriously has additional benefits beyond our own learning. Understanding the kinds of things that make information ‘sticky’ means we can also use these techniques to communicate in more memorable ways, an essential skill in the world of business. While many good presenters are entertaining, engaging and humorous, it is all to no avail if their message is forgotten. They may even communicate very clearly, but if they fail to engage your imagination and mind’s eye, their message is soon lost and forgotten.

Contrast these two messages:

In 2009, 8277 people died from dementia in Australia. This is a potentially important figure, but not particularly memorable.

Now, picture yourself sitting at home or at your favourite café with three of your close friends or siblings at the table with you. Really make an effort to visualise this scene. A fortune teller walks in. She takes a seat and begins to tell you your future. To your horror, she reveals that, should you all survive into old age (85yrs old), one of you will have Alzheimer’s, and two more will be cognitively impaired.

Test yourself. Do you remember the number of people who died from dementia in Australia in 2009? Probably not. However, you probably remember the story above. This is the same information, but by creating mental pictures, we transform mundane statistics into memorable images.

The modern business world places a particular premium on creativity and innovation. Here too, memory techniques could be of enormous benefit. These techniques were almost universally practiced by the thinkers of the ancient world who believed that mnemonic training was essential to the cultivation of one’s memory, focus and creativity. Creativity was an act of synthesis that could only occur within the mental playground of a trained mnemonist.

The techniques of the Art of Memory all involve the creation of colourful mental stories. The most effective of these capitalise on a cognitive bias known to modern psychologists as the ‘Von Restorff effect’. According to this, we are more likely to remember something if it is distinctive and creative. The more unusual or original a mnemonic image, the more likely it is to be remembered. The relationship between memory and creativity was something the Ancient Greeks knew well; In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses, the goddesses of creativity.

Divergent thinking, an essential part of the creative process, is a skill that can be consciously developed through mental training. The practice of coming up with creative associations in an effort to memorise information increases the ability to generate new ideas and synthesise old ones, to create and innovate in a professional environment.

We are all mental athletes; in a competitive world, we all need to be able to remember more, to be more creative, innovative and focused. In this sense, the techniques used by memory athletes should be available to everyone.

Daniel Kilov, a presenter at Mind & Its Potential 2013, is a Memory Athlete. He was the silver medallist at the 2011 and 2012 Australian Memory Championships and holds a national record for memorising abstract images. Daniel is also currently completing a PhD in philosophy at ANU and working as a memory coach and consultant.

Review of Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein

This review was originally printed in Reinvention: an International Journal of Undergraduate Research, Volume 6, Issue 1, www.warwick.ac.uk/reinventionjournal/issues/volume6issue1/conwaykilov/

In his captivating book Moonwalking with Einstein Joshua Foer details his journey from journalist to memory master during his research for an article on the US memory championships. Moonwalking with Einstein explores the world of memory, setting out on a journey that takes the reader from the bizarre world of memory sports through the relevant cognitive science and all the way back to Ancient Greece to the birth of mnemonic techniques. This is a popular, rather than scholarly, book, and the historical and scientific details are gleaned from Foer’s journalistic investigations, rather than original research.

There was a time, Foer reflects, when it was more practical to remember information than it was to record it. In ancient times, recording information was a lengthy and expensive process. Consequently, students in the ancient world were taught, ‘not just what to remember, but how to remember it’ (p. 96) using mnemonic techniques referred to collectively as the Art of Memory. The techniques of the Art of Memory all revolve around the composition of elaborate and colourful mental images. In one instance, for example, Foer memorises a shopping list by conjuring mental images of Claudia Schiffer swimming in cottage cheese and anthropomorphic bottles of wine getting into a punch-up.

During the Middle Ages, books were not considered substitutes for memorisation but rather as aides-memoire. Books of this period were written without punctuation or spacing, in an unending stream known as scripto continua (p. 139). Without punctuation or paragraphs, page numbers or an index, referring to a work written in scripto continua required an intimate knowledge of the text. As Foer puts it, these works existed ‘not to hold its contents externally, but rather to help its reader navigate its contents internally’ (p. 141). By the time of the Enlightenment, improvements in technologies designed to externalise memory resulted in a decline in the popularity and practice of mnemonic techniques.

Even during the Enlightenment the idea of using memory techniques to preserve information was beginning to appear outdated; how much more so now in the age of smartphones and smarter search engines? Foer explores the idea that we might be ‘moving toward a future, it seems, in which we will have all-encompassing external memories’ (p. 155) by introducing us to an engineer named Gordon Bell, who has taken to recording everything he does via a miniature camera he designed to act as a surrogate memory. Bell can search through his recorded ‘memories’ using customised software to ‘recall’ particular details which are all downloaded and stored on his computer.

Bell’s internal and external memories do not yet interface seamlessly; his external memory does not allow for the same speed and ease of recall as his biological memory, yet his project raises crucial questions about the role and nature of our memories. It is these questions that motivate Moonwalking with Einstein.

Given that it is so easy to relegate so many of our memory tasks to external devices, what is the point of remembering anything? For a person who has invested hundreds of hours in developing his memory (by the end of his journey, Foer is capable of memorising a deck of shuffled playing cards in one minute and forty seconds) Foer’s answer is a surprising one.

Foer’s answer as to why we ought to train our biological memories rather than rely on external systems is not, as one might expect, inspired by any of the prodigious memorisers he introduces us to in the course of his book. Instead, His most compelling argument is one he ‘received unwittingly from EP’, an amnesiac who is entirely unable to form new memories and ‘whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to other people’ (p. 268). Without his memory, Foer writes, ‘EP has fallen out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate’ (p. 74).

For Foer, to be human is to remember. Our memories are not perfect reproductions of past events that we pull up like files on a computer when we need them. Rather, our perception of the world is constantly coloured by the things we think, believe and know, all of which resides in our memories. There is no clear line between remembering and creating. Cultivating a better memory is not (or not merely) about storage or efficiency: in these respects, external recording technologies are either already superior to our biological memories or might be so one day soon. Our ability to notice connections between previously unconnected ideas, to find humour in the world and to share in a common culture are all essentially human acts that depend on memory (p. 269).

Foer deals a blow to the fantasy of cultivating a faultless memory (a fantasy which motivated his entry into the world of memory sports) but does so with such sensitivity and enthusiasm for his topic that one comes away feeling inspired rather than disillusioned. His argument that memory is the seat of identity is compelling, but does not, on its own, clearly justify the training of memory. Foer’s experiences, however, provide another argument for practising the ancient techniques of the Art of Memory: memory training is fun. The mental images that Foer and his fellow mnemonists create are playful and the process of remembering is as much an exercise in creativity as it is in fidelity. The final lesson of Moonwalking is that we ought to approach our memories with a sense of playfulness, because that is how they work best.

The Memory Systems of Mark Twain

Twain This article was originally printed in Issue 411 (May/June 2014) of the Australian Mensa magazine, TableAus.

In 1883, Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, began work on a game designed to teach his children to remember the names of the English monarchs. The game involved using the garden path around his home to spatially represent the relative reigns of the kings and queens. As both a family activity and as a memory aid the game was a great success, and the idea began to take on new configurations in Twain’s mind. He began to reimagine and redesign the game and even stopped working on Huckleberry Finn so that he could devote more time to his new project. In 1885, he patented “Mark Twain’s Memory Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates.” Twain believed that all of human knowledge could be learnt through his game and his notebooks reveal plans to organize national clubs and competitions organised around his game, as well as an accompanying book and periodicals. The game, however, was a failure and Twain (fortunately) returned to writing, stating to a friend that “If you haven’t ever tried to invent an indoor historical game, don’t.”

Twain had a tortured relationship with his memory throughout his life. In “Old Times on the Missisippi”, Twain identified memory as the “one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to perfection” and regarded a well-developed memory as “the most wonderful thing in the world”. Twain’s own memory, however, was famously bad. Albert Paine, a well-known biographer of Twain’s, wrote that, even as a young man, Twain would lose his way in familiar neighbourhoods, or fail to recognize pictures that had been hanging in his own home for years. Clearly, Mark Twain, the writer-lecturer, was in serious need of an aide de memoire.

In 1887, Twain crossed paths with Professor Loisette a ‘memory doctor’ who made a living peddling a system of memory techniques bearing his name. Inductees into the “Loisette system” were sworn to secrecy, and charged the modern equivalent of five hundred dollars to learn the “natural laws of memory” which the doctor claimed to have discovered. Twain enrolled in a several-week-long course and at first was deeply impressed, even going so far as to publish a testimonial in favour of the Loisette system. He was soon to regret this; only one year later a book was published titled “Loisette” Exposed” which revealed him to have invented not only his academic degree but also his name. ‘Alphonse Loisette’ was born Marcus Dwight Larrowe and had no qualifications to speak of. His entire system, it turned out, had been either plagiarised from other sources or oversold as to its effectiveness.

Eventually, Twain discovered a system that worked for him. As he wrote, “It was now that the idea of pictures occurred to me; then my troubles passed away…The lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years ago, but I could rewrite it from the pictures – for they remain.” In 1880 he shared his system of mental “hieroglyphics” with his friend William Dean Howells. After Twain’s death, Howells revealed the method which Twain used to memorize his speeches:

“It was his custom to think out his speeches, mentally working them out and then memorizing them by a peculiar system of mnemonics which he had invented. On the dinner-table, a certain succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter plate symbolized a train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue and a piece of chalk served the same purpose.”

Essentially, the dinner table and billiard table served as loci to which his mental pictures were affixed. Although Howells believed that Twain had invented the system, Twain was actually drawing from a two thousand year old tradition of memory training known as the “Art of Memory” and employing one of its oldest techniques: The method of loci.

The invention of the Art of Memory is usually attributed to the Ancient Greek poet, Simonides, and although the art was mentioned in writings by Aristotle, the earliest known systematic account of the memory techniques come from the anonymously written Rhetorica Ad Herennium as well as works by Cicero and Quintillian, all of which were penned around four hundred years later. We know that these techniques were almost universally practiced by thinkers of the ancient world precisely because of the shallow way in which writers treat the subject. Just as a modern writer about, say, the various uses of the internet, wouldn’t bother to spend much time explaining what the internet is or, for instance, what Google is, writers of ancient memory treatises simply took knowledge of the Art of Memory for granted.

Although the Art was originally developed to help aspiring students of rhetoric to remember the content of their speeches, the techniques of the Art of memory, and in particular the method of loci, was widely influential and found expression in a surprising number of ways. During the Middle Ages the Art of Memory was incorporated into the ethics of Thomas Aquinas. Another persuasive hypothesis put forward by modern historians is that Dante’s Divine Comedy is properly understood as a memory system with its striking images organized along a series of loci.

During the Renaissance period, the influence of the Art of Memory was ubiquitous in art, religion, philosophy and science, and its practitioners included Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Giordano Bruno and probably Shakespeare.

Mark Twain’s memory building game was an externalized version of the internal spatial mnemonic used in the Art of Memory. However, although he almost certainly didn’t know it, he was certainly not the first to do so.

In 1550, Italian thinker Giulio Camillo Delmino published an eighty-seven page book outlining plans for the construction of what he called a memory theatre.

The theatre was designed to act as a physical repository of memories and consisted of a small pulpit which opened onto an auditorium divided into seven sections. In each section, various images and messages would be inscribed, which Camillo claimed would allow the occupant of the pulpit to “be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero”.

Although hailed as a genius during his lifetime, Camillo and his work fell into obscurity after his death. It wasn’t until historian Frances Yates published “The Art of Memory” in 1966 that Camillo’s work once again caught the public imagination. Yates identified Camillo’s ideas as being a continuation of a much older tradition of the the method of loci. This mental technique is often considered the crowning jewel of the art of memory, and, like Twain, Camillo believed his personal contributions towards the memory theatre were a giant leap forwards in mnemonic techniques and in learning. Just like Twain, Camillo was wrong. His memory theatre was not the revolution he had hoped for. Indeed, it was never constructed.

Unlike the mysterious and mystical memory theatre of Camillo, however, Twain’s memory techniques were remarkably simple and were designed so that they could even be adopted by children. Consider his advice to children for learning historic dates:

“Dates are difficult things to acquire… But they are very valuable” wrote Twain in his article How to make history dates stick. Dates are hard to remember, he lamented, because “they consist of figures; figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance”. To aid memory Twain advised that would-be historians create vivid mental pictures; “Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick. They can make nearly anything stick”

The ‘trick’ to Twain’s memory system was to create mental simulacra and then organize them in locations, as described above. The distance between these locations encoded the comparative length of their reigns. To remember the reign of William I, for instance, Twain recommended using the image of a whale; “We choose the whale for several reasons: its name and William’s begin with the same letter; it is the biggest fish that swims, and William is the most conspicuous figure in English history…” Henry II was to be remembered as a hen and Richard the Lion-heart as a lion.

The Art of Memory, Twain believed, also benefited his writing: “The effort of inventing such things will not only help your memory, but will develop originality in art. See what it has done for me.”

Twain’s memory game was a financial failure. His dream of transfiguring education never came to fruition and his writings on memory techniques weren’t published until after his death. Nonetheless, his techniques supported a successful lecturing career, helped him conquer his chronically poor memory, inspired his literature and transformed his children’s attitudes towards their own learning; in their biographies both Susan and Clara Clemens recall fondly the outdoor memory game. Although our own memories may not be as bad as Twain’s, we could probably all nonetheless benefit from some of his memory techniques.

Mental Athlete

Daniel Kilov's stories of a mnemonist