Art of memory
The art of memory is any of a number of loosely associated mnemonic principles and techniques used to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and 'invention' of ideas. An alternative term is "Ars Memorativa" which is also translated as "art of memory" although its more literal meaning is "Memorative Art". It is also referred to as mnemotechnics. It is an 'art' in the Aristotelian sense, which is to say a method or set of prescriptions that adds order and discipline to the pragmatic, natural activities of human beings. It has existed as a recognized group of principles and techniques since at least as early as the middle of the first millennium BCE, and 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 images with schematic graphics or notae, and the association of text with images. 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 and techniques, and their various applications, some researchers refer to "the arts of memory", rather than to a single art.
Similar mnemonic devices are used by contemporary savants such as Daniel Tammet, to recite up to 22,514 digits of pi from memory. Tammet describes seeing each number as a part of a landscape, and simply reading them off as he walks through it.
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 has been presented to support these claims.The primary classical sources for the art of memory which deal with the subject at length include the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria. Additionally, the art is mentioned in fragments from earlier Greek works including the Dialexis, dated to approximately 400 BCE. 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.
He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty 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.
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 of memory was passed along to the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The art of memory entered a sacred and Christian context in the 13th century book of magic called the Notory Art in which a devout Christian practitioner would inspect certain figures as part of the method of loci in order to imprint, store, and retrieve knowledge of certain subjects such as the seven liberal arts. When Cicero and Quintilian were revived after the 13th 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.
Saint Thomas Aquinas was an important influence in promoting the art when, in following Cicero's categorization, 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. The Dominicans were particularly important in promoting its uses, 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 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.
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. Apparently, his elaborate method was also based in part on the combinatoric concentric circles of Ramon Llull, in part upon schematic diagrams in keeping with the medieval book of magic, the Ars Notoria, in part upon groups of words and images associated with late antique Hermeticism, and in part upon the classical architectural mnemonic. According to one influential interpretation, 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 art of memory are a feature of the early Renaissance, but the art also gave rise to better-known developments in logic and scientific method during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
However, this transition was not without its difficulties, and during this period the belief in the effectiveness of the older methods of memory training steadily became occluded. In 1442, a huge controversy over the method broke out in England when the Puritans attacked the art as impious because it was thought to excite 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 art 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.
One explanation for the steady decline in the importance of the art of memory from the 16th to the 20th century is offered by the late Ioan P. Culianu, who argued that it was suppressed during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation when Protestants and reactionary Catholics alike worked to eradicate pagan influence and the lush visual imagery of the Renaissance.
Whatever the causes, in keeping with general developments, the art of memory eventually came to be defined primarily as a part of Dialectics, and was assimilated in the 17th century by Francis Bacon and René Descartes into the curriculum of Logic, where it survives to this day as a necessary foundation for the teaching of Argument. Simplified variants of the art of memory were also taught through the 19th century as useful to public orators, including preachers and after-dinner speakers.
Principles
Visual sense and spatial memory
Perhaps the most important principle of the art is the dominance of the visual sense in combination with the orientation of 'seen' objects within space. This principle is reflected in the early Dialexis fragment on memory, and is found throughout later texts on the art. Mary Carruthers, in a review of Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalion, emphasizes the importance of the visual sense as follows:
Even what we hear must be attached to a visual image. To help recall something we have heard rather than seen, we should attach to their words the appearance, facial expression, and gestures of the person speaking as well as the appearance of the room. The speaker should therefore create strong visual images, through expression and gesture, which will fix the impression of his words. All the rhetorical textbooks contain detailed advice on declamatory gesture and expression; this underscores the insistence of Aristotle, Avicenna, and other philosophers, on the primacy and security for memory of the visual over all other sensory modes, auditory, tactile, and the rest.
This passage emphasizes the association of the visual sense with spatial orientation. The image of the speaker is placed in a room. The importance of the visual sense in the art of memory would seem to lead naturally to the importance of a spatial context, given that our sight and depth-perception naturally position images seen within space.