How to Develop a Perfect Memory (26 page)

ranging from Simonides in the sixth century BC to Leslie Welch in the 1950s.

Some were professional mnemonists, earning a living from their skills, others used memory for grander ends, such as understanding the universe. In this chapter, I describe twelve of the best-known memory men. Most of them had trained memories, a few were born with more inexplicable powers.

METRODORUS OF SCEPSIS

Metrodorus was a Greek man of letters, who turned away from philosophy to pursue a political life and to teach rhetoric. He lived in the first century BC and was a worthy successor to Simonides, widely considered as the founder of the art of memory. (For more on Simonides, see Chapter 26.)

One of Metrodorus's favourite tricks was to memorize conversations. Later on, he would repeat them back to people, verbatim. We think he did this by employing shorthand images for words or groups of words. (Sadly, his written works have all been lost.)

Instead of using a journey, Metrodorus placed images in the zodiac. He

divided up the twelve signs (Aries, Taurus, etc.) into thirty-six decans, each one represented by thirty-six associated images. In turn, he used every degree (all 360 of them) as a stage
(locus),
providing him with one long and ordered journey.

PETER OF RAVENNA

Peter of Ravenna was a fifteenth century entrepreneur who spotted a gap in the market for mnemonics. Trained as a jurist in Padua, he published a memory book in 1491, which in today's terms was an international bestseller.
The
Phoenix
was translated into many languages, went through numerous editions and was considered a bible for anyone who wanted to improve their memory.

Peter removed memory from the religious context that Thomas Aquinas and

the thirteenth-century Scholastics had given it, and set about introducing mnemonics to the lay masses. He encouraged people to look out for suitable journeys on their holidays and recommended the use of sexual images. The practical handbook was publicized by his own memory feats: he memorized

20,000 legal points, 200 speeches of Cicero, and the entire canon law. (Give me
Trivial Pursuit
any day.)

GIULO CAMILLO

Camillo was one of the most-famous men in the sixteenth century. Largely forgotten now, he was known at the time as the 'divine Camillo'. His fame spread throughout Italy and France, thanks entirely to a creation of his known as a

'memory theatre.' Initially financed by the king of France, Camillo set about building a wooden model theatre, big enough for two people to enter. He

claimed that it contained everything the human mind could conceive.

We know that Camillo was a neo-platonist and believed in archetypes, but sadly he never got around to writing down in detail the theory behind his memory theatre. Furthermore, he had a terrible stutter and his explanations weren't as intelligible as they might have been.

The celebrated wooden theatre caused a stir wherever Camillo took it. On one occasion in Paris, his awesome reputation was further enhanced by a trip to see some wild animals. A lion escaped, scattering people in all directions.

Camillo stood his ground, and the animal walked slowly around him, even

caressing him, until a keeper chased it back to its cage.

The theatre itself was based on some of the classical principles of memory.

Its purpose was to help people remember the entire universe; information and ideas were translated into images, and 'placed' in ordered points
(loci)
around the auditorium.

The individual stood on the stage and looked out at the images. The most important information (the planets) was 'seated', appropriately enough, in the stalls; the cheaper seats contained less significant data, graded according to their place in the order of creation.

GIORDANO BRUNO

Bruno started off in life as a Dominican friar, and ended up being burnt at the stake in 1600. (Such are the hazards of the job.) In between times, he was an Italian philosopher. Twentieth-century admirers of his work include James Joyce, who made occasional references to 'the Nolan', which baffled his

friends. (Bruno was born in Nola.)

Bruno joined the Dominican order when he was fifteen, and familiarized

himself with the classical art of memory, through the works of Thomas

Aquinas. He soon became widely known for his memory skills and performed in front of the pope, among others, before quitting the order.

As Camillo had done before him, he went to France, where he promised to

reveal his memory secrets to the king (Henry III). To show willing, he

dedicated his first book on memory to the king.
De Umbris Idearum
is another attempt to order the entire universe, thereby making it more memorable and understandable. It consists of a series of imaginary rotating 'memory wheels'

and is mind-bogglingly complicated.

Frances Yates, an expert on the Renaissance magical tradition, has bravely pieced together this extraordinary concept
(The Art of Memory,
Chapter 9).

She suggests that there was a central wheel containing the signs of the Zodiac, which worked the other wheels, each of which was divided up into 150 images!

As far as I can gather, there were five wheels in total; they rotated like a kalei-doscope, generating any number of images.

MATTEO RICCI

Ricci was a sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit missionary who dedicated his life to converting the Chinese to Catholicism. Using principles that he attributed to Simonides, he trained his mind to create vast memory palaces. Concepts, people, objects could all be stored in these mental buildings if they were translated into images and placed inside.

Ever the ingenious missionary, he performed endless feats of memory, hoping that the Chinese would want to discover more about the religion of such a gifted man. He could recite a list of 500 Chinese ideograms and repeat them in reverse order. If he was given a volume from a Chinese classic, he could repeat it after one brief reading. (Ricci probably studied under Francesco Panigarola in Rome, who was able to 'walk' around over 100,000 placed images.)

More craftily, he encouraged his Chinese students to remember the tenth

position of a journey by including the ideograph for 'ten' in their image, which happened to be in the shape of a crucifix.

In 1596, twelve years after he had settled in China, he wrote a short book on memory in Chinese, and donated it to Lu Wangai, the Governor of Jiangxi.

Lu's three sons were studying for government exams. They had to pass them if they were to make a success of their lives. Ricci's book was a timely

introduction to mnemonics, which they could use while studying.

S

One of the most-analysed memories this century belonged to a Russian called Shereshevsky, otherwise known as S. He aspired to be a violinist, became a journalist and ended up earning his living as a professional mnemonist.

According to the famous neuropsychologist Professor Luria, who studied S

over a period of thirty years, there were no distinct limits to his memory.

Luria presented him with 70-digit matrices, complex scientific formulae, even poems in foreign languages, all of which he could memorize in a matter of minutes. He was even able to recall the information perfectly fifteen years later.

S's experience of the world around him was quite different from ours. He was born with a condition known as synaesthesia: the stimulation of one sense produces a reaction in another. (Alexander Scriabin the composer was also synaesthetic. The condition is often induced by hallucinogenic drugs.)

In S's case, he automatically translated the world around him into vivid mental images that lasted for years. He couldn't help but have a good memory.

If he was asked to memorize a word, he would not only hear it, but he would also see a colour. On some occasions, he would also experience a taste in his mouth and a feeling on his skin. Later on, when he was asked to repeat the word, he had a number of triggers to remind him.

He also used images to remember numbers:

'Take the number 1. This is a proud, well-built man; 2 is a high-spirited woman; 3 a gloomy person (why, I don't know); 6 a man with a swollen foot; 7 a man with a moustache; 8 a very stout woman - a sack within a sack. As for the number 87, what I see is a fat woman and a man twirling his

moustache.'

Synaesthesia created tragic problems in other areas of his life. The sound of a word would often generate an image quite different from the word's meaning:

'One time I went to buy some ice cream... I walked over to the vender and asked her what kind of ice cream she had. 'Fruit ice cream,' she said. But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn't bring myself to buy any ice cream after she had answered in that way... Another thing: if I read when I eat, I have a hard time understanding what I am reading — the taste of the food drowns out the sense.'

Metaphors, idioms, poetry (particularly Boris Pasternak!), anything that wasn't literal in meaning was hard for him to grasp. If he had spoken English, for example, and you had accused him of 'driving a hard bargain', he would have been overwhelmed with images, not all of them very helpful. Driving a car...

something hard like a rock...a scene in a market.

If he couldn't visualize something, he was slumped. His wife had to explain what 'nothing' meant. And reading was a problem, because of all the images that the words generated. 'Other people think as they read, but I see it all...The things I see when I read aren't real, they don't fit the context.'

Needless to say, S had a phenomenal imagination. Luria believed that he

spent a large part of his life living in the world of his images. As a child, he would visualize the hands on his clock staying at 7.30 so he could stay in bed.

He could increase his pulse from 70 beats a minute to 100, simply by imagining he was running for a train. In one experiment, he raised the temperature of his left hand and lowered the temperature of the other (both by two degrees) just by imagining he had one hand on a stove while the other was holding a block of ice. He could even get his pupils to contract by imagining a bright light!

For a while, the only way he could forget things was by writing them down and burning the paper, but he could still see the letters in the embers. Towards the end of his life, he realized he could forget things only if he had a conscious desire to erase them.

Ironically, people's faces were a constant source of trouble.

'They're so changeable. A person's expression depends on his mood and on the circumstances under which you happen to meet him. People's faces are constantly changing; its the different shades of expression that confuse me and make it so hard to remember faces.'

Finally, a brief word about his use of random location. When he first became a mnemonist, and had to memorize a list of words, he would 'visit' a place that was associated with each word. He appeared to have no control over his mental movements, toing and froing everywhere.

'I had just started out from Mayakovsky Square when they gave me the word

'Kremlin', so I had to get myself off to the Kremlin. Okay, I can throw a rope across to it... But right after that they gave me the word 'poetry' and once again I found myself on Pushkin Square. If I had been given 'American

Indian', I'd have had to get to America. I could, of course, throw a rope across the ocean, but it's so exhausting travelling...'

Later, he began to use regular journeys and placed each image at a particular point. Just as the Greeks had recommended two thousand years earlier, he appreciated the need for well-lit scenes and would often erect street lamps above images if they were on a dark stretch of his journey.

(For anyone who wants to know more about the fascinating life of S, I recommend Professor Luna's absorbing book
The Mind of a Mnemonist.)

IRENO FUNES

The sole documentor of the unusual life of Ireno Funes was the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, which will set the alarm bells ringing in anyone who is concerned solely with historical truths. Borges enjoyed mixing fact with fiction in his writing, developing a style that came to be known as magical realism. His account of Funes is found in
Ficiones,
a collection of short stories that, as the title suggests, owed more than a little to Borges' imagination.

However, it is more than likely that Funes was based on someone Borges

knew, or had heard about. We know that other characters in Borges' work were modelled on people drawn from real life. Having said that, there are some patent absurdities in his account, which I will come to later.

Borges is not sure who Funes's parents were, but his father might have been an Englishman called O'Connor. He lived in Fray Bentos (of corned beef fame) and was known for his ability to tell the time without consulting a watch.

Borges visited him twice. On the second occasion, in 1887, he learnt that when Funes was nineteen years old had fallen off his horse, crippling him for life.

The near fatal accident, however, had a plus side: he woke up with a perfect memory!

Funes could suddenly recall every day of his life, and even claimed to

remember the cloud formation on a particular day five years earlier. (This is something that I find a little hard to believe; his ability to compare the formation with water spray before the 'battle of Quebracho' smacks of pure literary invention.) He learnt English, French, Portugese, and Latin with ease, and dismissed his physical disabilities as unimportant in the light of his exceptional memory.

On close examination of the text, it would appear that Borges is presenting us with an accurate case study of someone who had synaesthesia, coupled with a heightened sense of visual imagery - just like S, in fact. 'We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table,' writes Borges; 'Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine.' Borges describes a man whose senses picked up the minutest details about the world (which were then stored in his memory), but who was 'incapable of general, platonic ideas'.