Writes Richard Restak in "The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind," pointing to this visualization:
Restak continues:
In Camillo’s theatre, the spectator—representing the practitioner of the art of memory—stands on a stage facing the seats that are arranged as a seven-tiered structure with seven aisles extending from top to bottom. On each of the seven aisles are doors representing the seven planets. These doors are decorated with images of Cabalistic, Hermetic, and astral figures.
On the underside of each of the seats in the theatre are drawers containing cards that detail everything that was known at that time or even potentially knowable. Camillo wrote of his theatre that “by means of the doctrine of loci and images, we can hold in the mind and master human concepts and all things that are in the entire world.”
In describing his memory theatre, Camillo compares the process of achieving wisdom via the cultivation of memory to the experience of being immersed in a dense forest. At first, the desire to see the whole extent of the forest is frustrated by the surrounding trees. But if a way can be found of ascending along the slope, it becomes possible to see a large part of the forest’s form. When the top of the hill is reached, the entire forest can be seen. Camillo suggests that “the wood is our inferior world; the slope is the super celestial world.”...
In this process, images drawn from religion are imprinted on the mind with sufficient strength, that when a person bearing this imprint returns to the everyday world, the external appearances of that world became spiritually unified through the power of memory.
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Camillo may have created an extensive memory palace that he found very powerful and it might be helpful to others, but the memory palace itself has been around for 2,500 years. Its invention (discovery?) is attributed to Simonides of Ceos.
"Memory palaces" seem to turn up more in the movies than in real life (unless "real life" has changed a lot).
@tim.
That’s in the book too
“ The key discovery can be traced to the collapse of a banquet hall. The poet Simonides (556–468 B.C.) was performing at a banquet and survived the collapse of the building (luckily he had been called outside a few moments before the collapse). Using his memory, Simonides was able to identify the dead based on his recall of the places where each of them had been sitting during the banquet. Traditionally, many have claimed that he was not only able to envision and name the positions of the attendees, but could identify what they were wearing and other indicators that differentiated one attendee from another. This remarkable performance suggested some of the principles of the art of memory. Here is Cicero’s description of Simonides’s insight: “He inferred that persons desiring to train the faculty of memory must select places [the seats at the banquet hall] and form mental images of the things that they wish to remember [the identity of the banqueters]”.”
Or you could just Google it.
If I want to remember a list of things, I place each in a room along a long corridor. I find it actually helps a lot.
Sounds like Simonides was a bit like Dr. Bell, the model for Sherlock Holmes, if memory serves. I'll check after I post this.
Bonaparte supposedly remembered things by filing them in a mental cabinet or chest, and could retrieve the info like he could a letter.
And one of Mark Twain's side hustles was a Memory Builder Game.
There was an entire episode of "Sherlock" based on this...
A 1984 book, "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci", describes how a a polymath Jesuit, sent to China in the 1500's to introduce Christianity and Western thought, used the same technique to learn Chinese, then wrote a book in Chinese to teach Ming Dynasty elites how to use it.
He was obviously a remarkable guy.
I'm a big fan of writing it down if I want to remember it. This includes typing into a computer file.
Practicing techniques to strengthen memory may help delay the onset of Alzheimer's, I have read.
Nemonics served me best in engineering school, like Mohs hardness, Texas Girls Can Flirt and other Curious Things Can Do. Talc, gypsum calcite fluorite etc. and the notorious evil resistor color code, which I won’t repeat.
My favorite memory methods are stories, like in “The Dirty Dozen”.
1. Down to the road block, we've just begun 2. The guards are through 3. The Major's men are on a spree 4. Major and Wladislaw go through the door 5. Pinkley stays out in the drive 6. The Major gives the rope a fix 7. Wladislaw throws the hook to heaven 8. Jimenez has got a date 9. The other guys go up the line 10. Sawyer and Lever are in the pen 11. Posey guards points five and seven 12. Wladislaw and the Major go down to delve 13. Franko goes up without being seen 14. Zero-hour - Jimenez cuts the cable, Franko cuts the phone 15. Franko goes in where the others have been 16. We all come out like it's Halloween.
A memory palace is a feature of the Thomas Harris novel Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. Harris's villain Hannibal Lecter makes use of the memory palace, which he constructed before being imprisoned.
Ann Althouse said...@tim. That’s in the book too
Then that was a very strange claim for Richard Restak to make if he refutes it himself elsewhere in the book.
"Then that was a very strange claim for Richard Restak to make if he refutes it himself elsewhere in the book."
It's only strange to you because you are imagining a "claim" that he doesn't make. The original "memory palace" is one thing, and Camillo's "memory *theater*" is a later development. It's far more elaborate (and it's also flawed in ways that Restak goes on to explain). There is a *history* of human understanding of memory and how to enhance it.
Restak wrote: ""By 1532, Giulio Camillo, a professor at Bologna, suggested a means for transforming the mind through a uniquely powerful memory system of his own creation. The Memory Theater of Giulo Camillo, as it came to be known throughout sixteenth-century Europe, consisted of a wooden memory palace shaped in the form of a Roman amphitheater."
The concept "memory palace" already existed. His powerful innovation was in the form form of a Roman amphitheater. It's not just that it's a specific sort of building — a theater rather than a "palace." Please watch the video. It's more like inventing the Dewey Decimal System. All knowledge is organized and ordered into little boxes at each of the points in the theater.
It's not the "memory palace" that you may have learned where if you want to remember any set of things, you imagine going through a familiar house and visualize the things one at a time, each in a particular place in the building, like the guests at that ancient banquet.
That "memory palace" idea, still recommended today, involves connecting the thing you want to remember with something else and forming a distinctive memory almost because the 2 things didn't fit together. That's related to the modern understanding of the role of emotion in memory. Organizing the things logically is a different approach, and it misses the emotion that's needed.
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