The Big Idea

As I continue to learn and experiment with memory methods here are core principles that have started to surface for me.

Reference: 1—Index- Memory and Remembering - Loose Resources

I began this project rather by accident. I have always been someone who has disliked memorization. In school it was boring and repetitive. Not to mention can become overwhelming and disappointing. There is nothing worse than working really hard to remember something just for it to fly away right when you really need it.

And so it was with a great amount of bewildered curiosity that I heard the Storyteller Martin Shaw describe memorizing the entire Odyssey of Homer and that it takes multiple days to retell it in its entirety. That kind of scale just boggled my imagination.

I was raised on the computer metaphor of memory. Learning is like “downloading” information that you store on the “hard drive” of your mind. The memories in you mind are therefore a kind of collection of random bits and pieces you hope you can find enough space. Surely somewhere along the road you will run out of space just like that old broken down laptop shoved in the closet. But even if you have “good memory” and won’t run out of space, then surely something as massive as a whole book will get fuzzy and forgotten quickly?

I have realized that our modern minds are becoming increasingly claustrophobic. We think less and less of our internal world in favor of more and more external technology. How have we come to live in a world that sees the Second Council of Nicaea’s (787 AD) requirement for bishops as near impossible:

“_Candidates for a bishop’s orders must know the Psalter by heart and must have read thoroughly, not cursorily, all the sacred Scriptures.”

What follows is partially a journal, partially an invitation, to begin to rethink the way we treat our memory in teaching and study. In a world ever more flooded with distractions and noise, our understanding and practice of memory seems to have atrophied in favor of heaping resources and praise on the machines we increasingly rely on.

So if the computer metaphor of memory has done us dirty, what are some core principles to rethink the way our memory works?

As I have taken a dive into memory techniques I have started to realize a few constantly emerging principles that help make sense of things.

It is all about Associations

Memory is all about associations. It is the core mechanic that makes things stick in your mind.
1. Example is a cow or any animal you know well. You know a sound, a name, associated colors, can picture it at least roughly, maybe even a texture and smells associated. All that constellation of things make the animal cow easy to remember and call to mind. Compare that with an animal you do not know well or have only seen a few times.
Memory’s basic unit is association not space as we normally think of it. It is easier to remember many unique things that connect with others we are familiar with than many similar ones.
All memory systems and techniques are really just ways to find and form associations in a consistent and easily recallable manner.
1. Some major types of associations are:
  1. Things that are similar.
  2. Things that are opposites.
  3. Things that flow together (Example, Animals at a zoo)
  4. Kinesthetic - Sense of Touch
    1. Actions
    2. Texture, weight, etc.
  5. Auditory - Sense of Hearing
    1. Sounds similar
    2. Melodic (singing) association
    3. Starts with same letter
    4. Rhymes
  6. Visual - Sense of Sight
    1. Looks similar, etc.
    2. Color, material, shadows, light, etc.
  7. Emotional
  8. Conceptual
    1. Reminds you of something similar (Example: the word “For” reminds me of someone golfing and yelling “FOUR”)
    2. Belongs together - concepts, ideas, scenes, environments (i.e. farm), etc.
    3. For example, Cow makes you think of moo makes you think of milk, etc.
  9. Olfactory - Sense of Smell
  10. Gustatory - Sense of Taste
  11. Spatial
  12. People
2. Aristotle categorized the main types of associations as similarity, contrast and contiguity. Not sure I am locked into that but worth keeping in mind.
Memory and Associations do not run on “space” as much as on “hooks”.
1. For example, connecting a new name to a similar sound, object, and action. May seem like it would take more “space” but in reality it has more “hooks” that hold the new name in your mind. Without strong associative hooks new things will float away no matter how much “space” you are “saving” in your memory.
2. The more you associate and anchor in your mind. The more you can continue to pull in new information and associate it. This process of using what you know to learn more is commonly called “laddering.”
  1. In other words, there is a bit of an exponential effect. The more you have anchored, the more options you have for forming associations to anchor new things and the more firmly rooted old things become.
New Associations are only formed working from known to unknown.
1. Associations only “hook” in new information when they connect to something already in your mind. If you try to remember a bunch of new things and associate them all together you will get overwhelmed and nothing is really connected into your mind as it is now.
2. Use what is already in your mind to help pull in new things you want to remember. Any and everything already there can be leveraged to help make associations with the new thing you want to learn. The more associations the better. This could be songs, places, concepts, people, animals, sounds, experiences, literally everything already in you mind can be used in one way or another to form associations with something new.
Memory is more like painting than computer processing.
1. Memory needs to work in layers and chunks. Just like an artist painting with one color at a time or creating one texture at a time. Memory can be build by focusing on particular aspects one after another. Layering then can create a robust memory and understanding of a thing. Rather than a one dimensional rote memorization of something.
  1. Example: The lords prayer is often memorized by rote initially. This is great because it means it is “on board” someone’s memory. But this is just one layer of memorization and with larger things to memorize, rote may not even get someone to the same point. When I had only a rote layer of the Lord’s Prayer, I could not tell you the divisions of the petitions, or the main verbs in each petition, or how the flow of the prayer changes from the first three petitions to the last four. But over time, I have worked to layer on additional associations to help make the prayer more than one singular block of text that is rattled off. Instead, it has increasingly become the big beautiful prayer it is that connects to all kinds of things across Scripture and daily life. This process of layering on new associations is never truly finished.
Lower mental load makes any strategy more effective and easier to use.
1. If you have to spend all your attention trying to figure out a method or mnemonic it will not actually be helpful. The only way to fix that is find a less mentally taxing method or focus on memorizing the method itself before using it. The best methods help to lower how hard it is to work with things you are trying to memorize.
2. The key principle as always is leverage what is already in your mind, don’t go looking for some “secret key” that is not. Even if that “key” may be helpful eventually, you still need to pull it into memory with what you have first.
Every memory, or set of things memorized, has an entry point(s)
1. Every memory, or set of things memorized, has certain paths of travel. The minimum is one (start to finish) but there are ways to think about different paths of travel through memories, front to back, back to front, leap frog (or odds evens), random access, slicing across similar line numbers, etc.
  1. Memory Palaces are one of the most effective ways to create a mental “super structure” that can be navigated in all of these various ways. Other forms of organization can achieve similar navigation but in my experience is not nearly as robust or “sticky.”
2. Be intentional about where you work to place these points so you can access what you remember easily and well. If you have to recite or go through a bunch of stuff to get to the phrase or part of what you want you need more entry points.
Increased associations increases the access points to a thing in memory.
1. Rote memorization starts with one access point and just runs through. If you can’t find that one point you often can’t find anything else that comes after it.
2. More robust associations allow for searching when a particular point refuses to come to mind. You can start with what you do remember that is related and walk yourself into what you are looking for. This process itself greatly strengthens a memory rather than always looking something up.
There are only two primary “operations” you can do while forming an association connecting and placing.
1. Connecting is when you take an old thing in your mind and connect it to the new thing using some form of association.
2. Placing is a particular form of connecting where you want to “leave” new information in “containers” of buildings or things already in your mind. It basically gives the new thing a home in your mind rather than letting it float in the “void.” There are various ways to accomplish this:
  1. Placed Spatially like in a memory palace.
  2. Placed Logically like in an outline, Ramist tree, or flow chart.
  3. Placed Sequentially like in lines for a play or using the Story or Link methods.
If there is no intentional structure to memorization projects they will get out of hand quickly.
1. Need a peg system or a Memory Palace or something to allow you to traverse the project at a high level in your mind and then access specific things.
  1. For example, Luther pictured all Scripture as a “Great Tree” with all the words as “little branches.” This paints a clear conceptual picture of how he navigated from the big picture to the small picture.
2. Without this kind of ability to zoom in and out you end up having to start at the beginning of a huge book or block of information not being able to access things that are near the end well which then makes them easy to forget. The concept of forgetting things in the middle and near the end is often call the “Primacy Effect.”
What you are trying to remember should affect the approach you take to forming associations.
1. Symbols and Words
  1. Numbers - Phone numbers or other significant numbers
  2. Words - Vocabulary, spelling, or foreign language words
2. Abstract Constructs
  1. Concepts - abstract ideas, facts (Trivia night anyone?), etc.
  2. Frameworks, and Theories, etc.
3. Verbatim Text
  1. Phrases/Sentences/Longer Quotations - Bible verses, quotes, etc.
  2. Word for word recitation of play lines or story.
4. Skeleton Memorization (Remember the skeleton and major details fill in the rest naturally as you recite)
  1. Stories - Personal, Biblical, or Historical
  2. Speeches and presentations
Well structured memory can allow for mental manipulation of information not otherwise possible.
1. Working memory only has so much space. You need to be able to pull things in and out of working memory well to be able to work with a large amount of information.
2. A good structure allows you to traverse up and down the tree of chucks, or to zoom in and out. To work with all of them at once or down to an individual pair of digits or a word. Allowing for many more individual pieces of information to be handled than possible in an unassisted working memory.
  1. One example is being able to string together related lines of psalms across many psalms. You are not just locked into one particular psalm at a time, but can start to make a chain of related lines and metaphors. Like 8 and 19 both picturing creation’s praise of God.

Warning

As anyone starts to look into memory, it should be observe right away that there is a line of memory philosophy that thinks the human mind can contain all the knowledge in the universe. The basic idea is that if you can just get the right structure of the cosmos in your mind. Then all of the sudden the “mysteries of the universe” will start to open to you. That should be discarded for the human pride and self deception it is.

On the other hand modern people tend to go the exact opposite to view our memories as small, unreliable and incapable of holding on to much at all. That is also a huge error that fails to see the great tooling God has given everyone of us.

Basic Process of Memorization

Attend - You have to first attend to something. If you ignore it or are distracted, you will remember much less than if you are fully focused on something.
Hold in Short-Term - In order to start memorizing something, you first need to pull it into your short term memory.
1. Short-term/Working Memory is a limited resource. Everyone has a limit to what can be held in short term memory at once. Ideas that talk about this are: your mental load, or digit span.
  1. Classical Psych research says the average digit span of an individual is about 7 to 9 digits that can be held in short term memory. Beyond that things start dropping off. This applies to words, images and any “item” you might want to hold in short term memory.
  2. Online digit span test: https://www.memorylosstest.com/digit-span/ I have lower digit span and start struggling at 6.
2. This is why chunking is so effective. It takes what would otherwise be way too many individual items to hold in working memory and groups them into manageable sections. Strategies that help you do this quickly and effectively are way better than ones that just keep piling things on.
  1. An Example of this is a PAO system. It takes three things (a Person, Action, and Object) and attaches a pair of digits to each. You can then make 1 image by imagining the person doing the action with the object. Each part of the image is hooked to two digits. So right off the bat you are reducing the working memory load by half. Going from 6 individual digits to three “things.” You then reduce the load even more when you put them all together into a single image. Now you have one item in working memory that allows you to hold on to 6 individual digits! Memory athletes use strategies like this to make long numbers or decks of cards manageable.
Save to Long Term memory
1. Once you can “fit” something into your working memory then you can actually work on hooking it into long-term memory and recalling it. Every time a memory successfully is pulled back out of long-term into working it will grow in strength.
2. Reading and reviewing engages a related, but not the same part of your brain as recalling something from memory. Cited: Verbatim Memory Tool for Memorizing Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians
  1. The fastest way to cement something in long term memory is to practice recalling from your own mind not just reading or interacting with it. Strategies that get you recalling right away will be way more effective than the “read it 20 times” or “listen to it 100 times” stuff. Those are good for familiarity but are not really focused on memorization proper. In other words, You do interact with the material with those strategies but it does not build the exact neural pathways you need for direct recall while actually recalling the content does.
  2. You can think about it like the difference between a first person and second person story. If you are familiar with a story and can get the gist of it, it is like telling a story with “have you heard about…” in the second person. If you can recall it directly it is more like telling someone a story about something that happened to you directly in the first person.
3. Actually recalling something to mind from what is already there is how you cement it into long term memory. If you are always checking the original or just trying to read and reread it. You will become more familiar with it but you will not be pushing it verbatim into long term memory.
4. Once something is truly in long term memory there is unlimited space to add more. Your long term memory does not run out of space the same way a hard drive does. It is more a questions of if you have indeed put it into long term and firmly connected it with other things, or only had it in short term.
5. Additionally, if you just shove something into long term memory with no plan or strategy for how to retrieve it you will eventually run into trouble accessing things reliably.
Recall or Recollection
1. Different from just the way memories randomly pop into your mind, recall is the intentional process of bringing something to mind when you need it.
2. Practicing recall allows you to self test memories and evaluate how well they are anchored. Times when things do not stick are not times to freak out and beat yourself up. They are opportunities the strengthen that memory. Often I find that the experience of slowing down to strengthen a weak memory like this ends up making it much stronger than those that “stuck” the first or second time.
3. Recall needs to happen on some kind of spaced basis. There are many systems or suggestions for how long but the big things is you actually need to value and want to remember and come back to what is being memorized. Otherwise it will eventually fade from disuse. It basically goes back to the idea of associations. If it is important it should be connected all across your mind and brought up in all kinds of situations. If it is not, it will be isolated and easy to forget.

Explorer

The Aspen Grove

Core Memory Principles

It is all about Associations

Basic Process of Memorization

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