Art of memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Page 1

Art of memory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Art of Memory or Ars Memorativa ("art of memory" in Latin) is a general term used to designate a loosely
associated group of mnemonic principles and techniques used to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and
assist in the combination and 'invention' of ideas. It is sometimes referred to as mnemotechnics.[1 ] 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.[2 ] It has existed as a recognized group of principles and techniques since at least
as early as the middle of the first millennium BCE,[3 ] 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 ("signs, markings , figures" in Latin), 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.[2]

Contents
1 Origins and history
2 Principles
2.1 Visual sense and spatial orientation
2.2 Order
2.3 Limited sets
2.4 Association
2.5 Affect
2.6 Repetition
3 Techniques
3.1 Architectural mnemonic
3.2 Graphical mnemonic Graphical memory devices from the
3.3 Textual mnemonic works of Giordano Bruno
4 Method of loci
5 Practitioners and Exponents
6 Notes
7 References

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.[4 ]

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.[6 ]

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.[7 ]

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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.[7 ]

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.[8 ]

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 (or Early Modern
period). 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.[9 ]

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.[10] The Dominicans were particularly important in promoting its uses ,[11 ] 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.[12 ]

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 medieval Ars Notoria traditions, in part upon groups of
words and images associated with late antique Hermeticism, [13] 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. [14]
Such enthusiastic claims for the encyclopedic reach of the art of memory are a feature of the early Renaissance, [15] but the art also gave rise to better-known
developments in logic and scientific method during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[16 ]

However, this transition was not without its difficulties, and during this period the belief in the effectiveness of the older methods of memory training (to say
nothing of the esteem in which its practitioners were held) steadily became occluded. 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 excite absurd and obscene thoughts; this was a sensational, but ultimately not a fatal
skirmish.[17] 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 .[18 ]

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.[19 ]

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. [20] 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 orientation
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." [21 ]

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

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This passage
asserts emphasizes
that both the association
'textual' activities of the
(picturing andvisual sensehave
reading) withasspatial orientation.
their goal The image of knowledge
the internalization the speaker and
is placed in a room.
experience The importance of the
in memory.
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
The use of
position manuscript
images illuminations
seen within space. 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
Order
technique in the arsenal of practitioners of the arts of memory.
The positioning of images in virtual space leads naturally to an order, furthermore, an order to which we are naturally accustomed as biological organisms,
deriving
Method as it does from the sense perceptions we use to orient ourselves in the world. This fact perhaps sheds light on the relationship between the artificial
of loci
and the natural memory, which were clearly distinguished in antiquity.
Main article: Method of loci
"It is possible for one with a well -trained memory to compose clearly in an organized fashion on several different subjects. Once one has the all-
important starting-place of the ordering scheme and the contents firmly in their places within it, it is quite possible to move back and forth from one
The 'method of loci' (plural of Latin locus for place or location ) is a general designation for mnemonic techniques that rely upon memorized spatial
distincttocomposition to another withoutmemorial
losing one's place The
or becoming confused." [22 ]
relationships establish, order and recollect content. term is most often found in specialized works on psychology, neurobiology and memory,
though it was usedHugh
Again discussing in the
ofsame generalworks
St. Victor's way atonleast as early
memory, as the first
Carruthers half of
clearly the the
notes nineteenth
critical century in works
importance on Rhetoric,
of order in memory:Logic and Philosophy. [38]

O'Keefe and Nadel refer to "'the method of loci', an imaginal technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and described by Yates (1966) in her book
"One must have a rigid, easily retained order, with a definite beginning. Into this order one places the components of what one wishes to memorize
The artand
of recall
memory . Asasawell as by Luria ("nummularium")
money-changer (1969). In this technique theand
separates subject memorizes
classifies theby
his coins layout
type of some
in his building,
money or the arrangement
bag ("sacculum," of shops on
"marsupium"), so athe
street, or
any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject literally 'walks' through
[23 ]
these
contents of wisdom's storehouse ("thesaurus," "archa"), which is the memory, must be classified according to a definite, orderly scheme."

Limited sets
Many works discussing the art of memory emphasize the importance of brevitas and divisio, or the breaking up of a long series into more manageable sets.
This is reflected in advice on forming images or groups of images which can be taken in at a single glance, as well as in discussions of memorizing lengthy
passages, "A long text must always be broken up into short segments, numbered, then memorized a few pieces at a time ."[24]

Association
loci and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any distinguishing feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by
walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items. The efficacy of this technique has been well established (Ross and Lawrence 1968,
Association
Crovitz 1969,was considered
1971, to be of critical
Briggs, Hawkins importance
and Crovitz for the
1970, Lea practice
1975), as is of
thethe art. However,
minimal it wasseen
interference clearly
with recognized
its use." [39 ]that associations in memory are
idiosyncratic, hence, what works for one will not automatically work for all. For this reason, the associative values given for images in memory texts are
usually
The intended isasnot
designation examples andstrict
used with are not intended to
consistency. In be
some"universally normative".
cases it refers broadly Yates
to what offers a passage
is otherwise from Aristotle
known as the art that briefly outlines
of memory, the principle
the origins of which ofare
association. In it, he mentions the importance of a starting point to initiate a chain of recollection , and the way in [40] which it serves as a stimulating cause.
related, according to tradition, in the story of Simonides of Ceos and the collapsing banquet hall discussed above. For example, after relating the story of
how Simonides relied on
"For this reason remembered
some use placesseating
for the arrangements to call to mind
purposes of recollecting . Thethe facesforofthis
reason recently
is thatdeceased
men passguests, Steven
rapidly M. Kosslyn
from one remarks
step to the "[t]his
next ; for insight
instance
led to the development of a technique the Greeks called the method of loci, which is a systematic way of improving one's memory by using imagery."[25 [41]
from milk to white , from white to air, from air to damp; after which one recollects autumn, supposing that one is trying to recollect the season." ]
Skoyles and Sagan indicate that "an ancient technique of memorization called Method of Loci, by which memories are referenced directly onto spatial maps"
originated with the story of Simonides .[42] Referring to mnemonic methods, Verlee Williams mentions, "One such strategy is the 'loci' method, which was
Affect
developed by Simonides, a Greek poet of the fifth and sixth centuries BC"[43] Loftus cites the foundation story of Simonides (more or less taken from Frances
Yates)
The and describes
importance someorofemotion
of affect the most
in basic
the artaspects of theisuse
of memory of space discussed.
frequently in the art of
Thememory.
role of She states,
emotion in "This
the artparticular mnemonic
can be divided technique
into two major has come tothe
groupings: be
first
calledis the "method of loci".in[44]
role of emotion theWhile
process of seating
place or fixing
or position images
certainly in theprominently
figured memory, thein second
ancient ismnemonic
the way intechniques,
which the no
recollection of equivalent
designation a memory image can
to "method
evoke
of loci"anwas
emotional response. to refer to mnemonic schemes relying upon space for organization.[45 ]
used exclusively

One of the
In other earliest
cases sources discussing
the designation the art
is generally , the Ad Herennium
consistent, emphasizes
but more specific: "Thethe importance
Method of Lociofisusing emotionally-striking
a Mnemonic imagery
Device involving the to ensure of
creation that the images
a Visual Map of
one's house."[46 ]

This term can be misleading : the ancient principles and techniques of the art of memory, hastily glossed in some of the works just cited, depended equally
upon images and places. The designator "method of loci" does not convey the equal weight placed on both elements. Training in the art or arts of memory as
a whole, as attested in classical antiquity , was far more inclusive and comprehensive in the treatment of this subject.

Practitioners and Exponents

Institutional:

Lodge Mother Kilwinning[47 ]

Individual:

Thomas Bradwardine
Giordano Bruno
Robert Fludd
Giovanni Fontana
William Fowler
Johannes Romberch
William Schaw
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