Art of memory

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The Art of Memory or Ars memoriae (art of memory in Latin) or Mnemotechnics is a general term used to designate a loosely associated group of mnemonic principles and techniques which are used to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and 'invention' of ideas.^[1] It has existed as a recognized group of principles and techniques since at least as early as the middle of the first millennium BCE.^[2] It was usually associated with training in Rhetoric or Logic, but variants of the art were employed in other contexts, particularly the religious and the magical.

Techniques commonly employed in the art include the association of emotionally striking memory images within visualized locations, the chaining or association of groups of images, the association of text with images, and the association of images with schematic graphics or notae (signs). Any or all of these techniques were often used in combination with the contemplation or study of architecture, books, sculpture and painting, which were seen by practitioners of the art of memory as externalizations of internal memory images and/or organization.

Because of the variety of principles, techniques, and their various applications, some researchers refer to "the arts of memory", rather than to a single art.^[3]

Contents 1 Origins and History 2 Techniques 2.1 Architectural mnemonic 2.2 Graphical mnemonic 2.3 Textual mnemonic 3 Notes 4 References

[edit] Origins and History

It has been suggested that the art of memory originated among the Pythagoreans or perhaps even earlier among the ancient Egyptians, but no conclusive evidence exists to support these claims.^[4] However, it has existed as a recognized group of principles and techniques since at least as early at the middle of the first millennium BCE.

The primary classical sources for the art of memory which deal with the subject at length include the Rhetorica ad Herennium(Bk III), Cicero's De oratore (Bk II 350-360), and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (Bk XI). Additionally, the art is mentioned in fragments from earlier Greek works including the Dialexis, dated to approximately 400 BCE.^[5] Aristotle wrote extensively on the subject of memory, and mentions the technique of the placement of images to lend order to memory. Passages in his works On The Soul and On Memory and Reminiscence proved to be influential in the later revival of the art among medieval Scholastics.

The most common account of the creation of the art of memory centers around the story of Simonides of Ceos, a famous Greek poet, who was invited to chant a lyric poem in honor of his host, a nobleman of Thessaly. While praising his host, Simonides also mentioned the twin gods Castor and Pollux. When the recital was complete, the nobleman selfishly told Simonides that he would only pay him half of the agreed upon payment for the panegyric, and that he would have to get the balance of the payment from the two gods he had mentioned. A short time later, Simonides was told that two men were waiting for him outside. He left to meet the visitors but could find no one. Then, while he was outside the banquet hall, it collapsed, crushing everyone within. The bodies were so disfigured that they could not be identified for proper burial. But Simonides was able to remember where each of the guests had been sitting at the table, and so was able to identify them for burial. This experience suggested to Simonides the principles which were to become central to the later development of the art he reputedly invented.^[6]

He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and the images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written upon it.^[7]

The early Christian monks adapted techniques common in the art of memory as an art of composition and meditation, which was in keeping with the rhetorical and dialectical context in which it was originally taught. It became the basic method for reading and meditating upon the Bible after making the text secure within one's memory. Within this tradition, the art(s) of memory were passed along to the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance (or early Modern period). When Cicero, and Quintilian were revived after the thirteenth century, humanist scholars understood the language of these ancient writers within the context of the medieval traditions they knew best, which were profoundly altered by monastic practices of meditative reading and composition (Carruthers, 1990, 1998).

Saint Thomas Aquinas was an important influence in promoting the art when he defined it as a part of Prudence and recommended its use to meditate on the virtues and to improve one's piety. In scholasticism artificial memory came to be used as a method for recollecting the whole universe and the roads to Heaven and Hell (Carruthers, Ziolkowski 2002). The Dominicans were particularly important in promoting its uses (Bolzoni 2004), see for example Cosmos Rossellius. The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci - who from 1582 until his death in 1610, worked to introduce Christianity to China - described the system of places and images in his work, A Treatise On Mnemonics. However, he advanced it only as an aid to passing examinations (a kind of rote memorization) rather than as a means of new composition, though it had traditionally been taught, both in dialectics and in rhetoric, as a tool for such composition or 'invention'. Ricci was apparently trying to gain favour with the Chinese imperial service, which required a notoriously difficult entry examination (Spence 1984).

Perhaps following the example of Metrodorus of Scepsis, vaguely described in Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, Giordano Bruno, a defrocked Dominican, used a variation of the art in which the trained memory was based in some fashion upon the zodiac. His elaborate method was also based in part on the combinatoric concentric circles of Ramon Llull, in part upon schematic diagrams in keeping with medieval Ars Notoria traditions, in part upon groups of words and images associated with late antique Hermeticism, and in part upon the classical architectural mnemonic. His memory system was intended to fill the mind of the practitioner with images representing all knowledge of the world, and was to be used, in a magical sense, as an avenue to reach the intelligible world beyond appearances, and thus enable one to powerfully influence events in the real world. Such enthusiastic claims for the encyclopedic reach of the arts of memory are a feature of the early Renaissance, but they also gave rise to better-known developments in logic and scientific method during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Frances Yates, 1966). The art of memory eventually came to be defined as primarily a part of Dialectics, and was assimilated in the seventeenth century by Pierre Ramus and Rodolphus Agricola into the curriculum of Logic, where it survives to this day as a necessary foundation for the teaching of Argument (Rossi 2000, Bolzoni 2001}.

In 1584 a huge controversy over the method broke out in England when the Puritans attacked the art as impious because it was thought to call up absurd and obscene thoughts; this was a sensational, but ultimately not a fatal skirmish. Erasmus of Rotterdam and other humanists, Protestant and Catholic, had also chastised practitioners of the arts of memory for making extravagant claims for its efficacy, although they themselves believed firmly in a well-disposed, orderly memory as an essential tool of productive thought (Carruthers, Ziolkowski 2002; Rossi 2000).

The arts of memory as such were then largely dropped from the curriculum in schools and universities, and are now mostly taught and practiced informally, though, redefined as "argumentation", versions remain essential in college composition and logic courses. Simplified variants of the arts of memory were also taught through the nineteenth century as useful to public orators, including preachers and after-dinner speakers. One explanation for the steady decline of the arts of memory from the 16th to the 20th century is offered by the late Ioan P. Culianu, who argued that the arts of memory were suppressed during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation when Protestants and reactionary Catholics alike worked to suppress pagan influence and the lush visual imagery of the Renaissance.

[edit] Techniques

The art of memory employed a number of techniques which can be grouped as follows for purposes of discussion, however they were usually used in some combination:

Main article: Method of loci

It has been suggested that Method of loci be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

[edit] Architectural mnemonic

The architectural mnemonic was a key group of techniques employed in the art of memory. It is based on the use of places (Latin loci), which were memorized by practitioners as the framework or ordering structure that would 'contain' the images or signs 'placed' within it to record experience or knowledge. To utilize this method, one might walk through a building several times, viewing distinct places within it, in the same order each time. After the necessary repetitions of this process, one should be able to remember and visualize each of the places reliably and in order. If one wished to remember, for example, a speech, one could break up the content of the speech into images or signs used to memorize its parts, which would then be 'placed' in the locations previously memorized. The components of the speech could then be recalled in order by imagining that one is walking through the building again, visiting each of the loci in order, viewing the images there, and thereby recalling the elements of the speech in order. A reference to these techniques survives to this day in the common English phrases "in the first place", "in the second place", and so forth.

The primary source for the architectural mnemonic is the anonymous Ad Herennium, a Latin work on rhetoric from the first century BCE. It is unlikely that the technique originated with the author of the Ad Herennium. The technique is also mentioned by Cicero and Quintilian. According to the account in the Ad Herennium (Book III) backgrounds or 'places' are like wax tablets, and the images that are 'placed' on or within them are like writing. Real physical locations were apparently commonly used as the basis of memory places, as the author of the Ad Herennium suggests

"it will be more advantageous to obtain backgrounds in a deserted than in a populous region, because the crowding and passing to and fro of people confuse and weaken the impress of the images, while solitude keeps their outlines sharp." ^[8]

However, real physical locations were not the only source of places. The author goes on to suggest

"if we are not content with our ready-made supply of backgrounds, we may in our imagination create a region for ourselves and obtain a most serviceable distribution of appropriate backgrounds." ^[9]

Places or backgrounds hence require, and reciprocally impose, order (often deriving from the spatial characteristics of the physical location memorized, in cases where an actual physical structure provided the basis for the 'places'). This order itself organizes the images, preventing confusion during recall. The anonymous author also advises that places should be well-lit, with orderly intervals, and distinct from one another. He recommends a virtual 'viewing distance' sufficient to allow the viewer to encompass the space and the images it contains with a single glance.

Turning to images, the anonymous author asserts that they are of two kinds: those establishing a likeness based upon subject, and those establishing a likeness based upon a word. This was the basis for the subsequent distinction, commonly found in works on the art of memory, between 'memory for words' and 'memory for things'. He provides the following famous example of a likeness based upon subject:

"Often we encompass the record of an entire matter by one notation, a single image. For example, the prosecutor has said that the defendant killed a man by poison, has charged that the motive for the crime was an inheritance, and declared that there are many witnesses and accessories to this act. If in order to facilitate our defense we wish to remember this first point, we shall in our first background form an image of the whole matter. We shall picture the man in question as lying ill in bed, if we know his person. If we do not know him, we shall yet take some one to be our invalid, but not a man of the lowest class, so that he may come to mind at once. And we shall place the defendant at the bedside, holding in his right hand a cup, and in his left hand tablets, and on the fourth finger a ram's testicles (Latin testiculi suggests testes or witnesses). In this way we can record the man who was poisoned, the inheritance, and the witnesses." ^[10]

In order to memorize likenesses based on words he provides an example of a verse and describes how images may be placed, each of which corresponds to words in the verse. He notes however that the technique will not work without combination with rote memorization of the verse, so that the images call to mind the previously memorized words.

The architectural mnemonic was also related to the broader concept of learning and thinking. Aristotle considered the technique in relation to topica, or conceptual areas or issues. In his Topics he suggested

"For just as in a person with a trained memory, a memory of things themselves is immediately caused by the mere mention of their places, so these habits too will make a man readier in reasoning, because he has his premisses classified before his mind's eye, each under its number."^[11]

[edit] Graphical mnemonic

Because of the influence of the pioneering work of Frances Yates, the architectural mnemonic is often characterized as the art of memory itself. However, primary sources show that from very early in the development of the art, non-physical or abstract locations and/or spatial graphics were employed as memory 'places'. Perhaps the most famous example of such an abstract system of 'places' is the memory system of Metrodorus of Scepsis, who was said by Quintilian to have organized his memory using an system of backgrounds in which he "found three hundred and sixty places in the twelve signs of the zodiac through which the sun moves". Some researchers (L.A. Post and Frances Yates) believe it likely that Metorodorus organized his memory using places based in some way upon the signs of the zodiac.^[12] In any case Quintilian makes it clear that non-alphabetic signs can be employed as memory images, and even goes on to mention how 'shorthand' signs can be used to signify things that would otherwise be impossible to capture in the form of a definite image (he gives "conjunctions" as an example).^[13]

This makes it clear that though the architectural mnemonic with its buildings, niches and three dimensional images was a major theme of the art as practiced in classical times, it often employed signs or notae and sometimes even non-physical imagined spaces. During the period of migration of barbarian tribes and the transformation of the Roman empire the architectural mnemonic fell into disuse. However the use of tables, charts and signs appears to have continued and developed independently. Mary Carruthers has made it clear that a trained memory occupied a central place in late antique and medieval pedagogy, and has documented some of the ways in which the development of medieval memorial arts was intimately intertwined with the emergence of the book as we understand it today. Examples of the development of the potential inherent in the graphical mnemonic include the lists and combinatory wheels of the Majorcan Ramon Llull. The Art of Signs (Latin Ars Notoria) is also very likely a development of the graphical mnemonic. Yates mentions Apollonius of Tyana and his reputation for memory, as well as the association between trained memory, astrology and divination.^[14] She goes on to suggest

"It may have been out of this atmosphere that there was formed a tradition which, going underground for centuries and suffering transformations in the process, appeared in the Middle Ages as the Ars Notoria, a magical art of memory attributed to Apollonius or sometimes to Solomon. The practitioner of the Ars Notoria gazed at figures or diagrams curiously marked and called 'notae' whilst reciting magical prayers. He hoped to gain in this way knowledge, or memory, of all the arts and sciences, a different 'nota' being provided for each discipline. The Ars Notoria is perhaps a bastard descendant of the classical art of memory, or of that difficult branch of it which used the shorthand notae. It was regarded as a particularly black kind of magic and was severely condemned by Thomas Aquinas."^[15]

[edit] Textual mnemonic

Carruthers' excellent studies of memory suggest that the images and pictures employed in the medieval arts of memory were not representational in the sense we today understand that term. Rather, images were understood to function "textually", as a type of 'writing', and not as something different from it in kind. ^[16]

If such an assessment is correct, it suggests that the use of text to recollect memories was, for medieval practitioners, merely a variant of techniques employing notae, images and other non-textual devices. Carruthers quotes Pope Gregory I, in support of the idea that 'reading' pictures was considered to be a variation of reading itself.

"It is one thing to worship a picture, it is another by means of pictures to learn thoroughly the story that should be venerated. For what writing makes present to those reading, the same picturing makes present to the uneducated, to those perceiving visually, because in it the ignorant see what they ought to follow, in it they read who do not know letters. Wherefore, and especially for the common people, picturing is the equivalent of reading." ^[17]

Her work makes clear that for medieval readers the act of reading itself had an oral phase in which the text was read aloud or sub-vocalized (silent reading was a less common variant, and appears to have been the exception rather than the rule), then meditated upon and 'digested' hence making it one's own. She asserts that both 'textual' activities (picturing and reading) have as their goal the internalization of knowledge and experience in memory.

The use of manuscript illuminations to reinforce the memory of a particular textual passage, the use of visual alphabets such as those in which birds or tools represent letters, the use of illuminated capital letters at the openings of passages, and even the structure of the modern book (itself deriving from scholastic developments) with its index, table of contents and chapters reflect the fact that reading was a memorial practice, and the use of text was simply another technique in the arsenal of practitioners of the arts of memory.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Yates, Frances A. (1966). The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 10226950018. 
• Spence, Jonathan D. (1984). The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. New York: Viking Penguin. 0140080988. 
• Carruthers, Mary (1990). The Book of Memory. Cambridge University Press. 
• Carruthers, Mary (1998). The Craft of Thought. Cambridge University Press. 
• Rossi, Paolo (2000). Logic and the Art of Memory. University of Chicago Press. 
• Bolzoni, Lina (2001). The Gallery of Memory. University of Toronto Press. 
• Bolzoni, Lina (2004). The Web of Images. Ashgate Publishers. 
• Dudai, Yadin (2002). Memory from A to Z. Oxford University Press. 
• Small, Jocelyn P. (1997). Wax Tablets of the Mind. London: Routledge. 
• Carruthers, Mary; Ziolkowski, Jan (2002). The Medieval Craft of Memory: An anthology of texts and pictures. University of Pennsylvania Press. 
• Culianu, Ioan (1987). Eros and Magic In The Renaissance. University of Chicago Press.