A post by Daniel Kilov

About eleven years ago, I competed in a very unusual competition. This is how I remember one of the events:

“Ready…” the judge called out. “Go!”

I bolted from my starting point and barreled through my front door, narrowly dodging a sumo wrestler swan-diving into a giant dish of noodles. I made my way upstairs, noting a panda bear juggling pineapples on the landing. As I reached the top of the stairs, I paused as a steam engine barreled past, curving down tracks leading into my bedroom. I went in the opposite direction, where I found a gecko swimming in a bathtub filled with custard.

Anyone watching me, however, would only have seen me sitting quietly at a desk, head down, my hands shuffling through a deck of cards. I was at the Australian Memory Championships, using a technique known as “the method of loci” to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards.

The method of loci is a mnemonic technique that involves mentally traversing a well-known landscape and laying down images that represent whatever the mnemonist is trying to remember. This version of the technique originated in the fifth century B.C. and was (putatively) invented by a famous Greek poet, Simonides of Ceos.

Today, this technique is used by memory athletes at competitions around the world to memorize information at dazzling speeds. For instance, Zou Lujian can memorize a shuffled deck of cards in thirteen seconds. Akira Haraguchi memorized 100,000 digits of Pi. Evidence from history and anthropology show that the use of these techniques is widespread across cultures and time. They are used by indigenous peoples to keep track of thousands of data points regarding flora and fauna to know what is safe and what will kill you (Kelly, 2015). They have been used by medieval scholars to memorise hundreds of speeches, enabling the scholars to understand and synthesise vast quantities of text (Carruthers, 1992). They were even used by Renaissance thinkers like Gottfried Leibniz and Francis Bacon in the invention of ideas and the pursuit of science (Rossi, 2000). Crucially, these expert mnemonists insist their extraordinary abilities are acquired, not innate. Many mnemonists emphasize that their memories were average or below-average before encountering mnemonic techniques (e.g. Foer, 2012; O’Brien, 2013; Kelly, 2017). We should take their claims seriously.

Given that many of us recognize the benefits of a better memory, one might expect widespread interest in mnemonic techniques. But this is not the case. Research on mnemonic systems rarely appears in psychology journals. Why? The Art of Memory, a tradition of mnemonic techniques that originated in Ancient Greece and was widespread well into the 16th Century, became a target of religious persecution during the protestant reformation, leading to a decline in interest in memory in the Western world (Yates, 2013). Although inquiry into the nature of memory was revitalized by the pioneering work of Ebbinghaus (1885), the rise of psychology further displaced the Art of Memory from its seat of mnemonic authority (Young, 1985).

Psychologists neglected mnemonics, instead investigating the various sub-systems of memory by analyzing brain injuries. The rise and dominance of behaviorism subsequently made it unacceptable to talk about internal states of the kind necessary to understand mnemonic techniques (Worthen & Hunt, 2011). Although the present environment is no longer hostile to mnemonic research, there is, in a sense, a gap in the institutional memory.

This, I hope to persuade you, is a pity, since researchers have largely neglected a useful source of evidence about our cognitive architecture (a notable exception to this has been the work of the philosopher and cognitive scientist, John Sutton). Any successful mnemonic technique provides a window into basic cognitive functions. For instance, research on mnemonic skills has already given rise to influential theories of expertise and memory (See, for example, Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). In addition, research on mnemonics could shed light on a range of issues of philosophical interest. For instance, philosophers interested the evolution of human cognition have stressed the importance of cultural evolution, as well as gene/culture co-evolution (Sterelny 2012, Heyes 2018). Cultural evolution produced techniques that enhance cultural learning, resulting in feedback loops that led to behavioral modernity. Among these techniques are sophisticated mnemonic systems.

Kelly (2017) emphasizes the interaction of mnemonic artifacts and pedagogies with the organization of social life. Her work, however, raises questions. She presents evidence for the encyclopedic memories of oral cultures, but it is unclear how to identify mnemonic technologies in the archaeological record. Kelly identifies all organized signaling as evidence of mnemonics, but rituals and artifacts also serve other functions. As Sterelny (2019) notes, evidence of ritual is not itself evidence of mnemonics. We thus need criteria for identifying mnemonics, a task that philosophers are well placed to take up.

Work on indigenous mnemonic systems could also have an ethical dimension, clarifying the moral significance of the ongoing alienation of contemporary indigenous societies from their mnemonic knowledge systems. Many indigenous mnemonic systems require access to specific geographic locations. If such systems are part of the extended mind, then destroying indigenous memory systems is not just a property crime but a form of assault (Carter & Palermos 2016).

Further, as Robins (Forthcoming; see also her Junkyard post) persuasively argues, mnemonic techniques may shed light on the debate between continuists, who hold that remembering is a form of imagining, and discontinuists, who think that memory and imagination are distinct capacities. 

Although I’m not an expert on the philosophy of memory, I am an expert mnemonist. I won a silver medal at the event I described above, a feat I’ve twice since replicated at the Australian Memory Championships, and I set a national record for the memorization of abstract images that I hold to this day. My experiences as a memory athlete have nudged me towards the continuist side of the debate. Indeed, many mnemonists, I think, see memory, creativity, and imagination as essentially the same thing. I once heard Tony Buzan, the founder of the world memory championships, describe the events as “competitions in high-speed imagining”. This is an idea he attributed to the Ancient Greeks. Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, was the mother of the muses, the goddesses of imagination and creativity.

Mnemonics are fascinating - a worthy topic of investigation in their own right - but they may also help us crack old philosophical chestnuts, or at least appreciate them in new ways.

References:

Carruthers, M. J. (1992). The book of memory: A study of memory in medieval culture (No. 10). Cambridge University Press.

Carter, J. A., & Palermos, S. O. (2016). Is having your computer compromised a personal assault? The ethics of extended cognition. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2(4), 542-560.

Chase, W. G., & Ericsson, K. A. (1981). Skilled memory. Cognitive skills and their acquisition, 141-189.

Ebbinghaus, H. (1964). In H. A. Ruger & C. E. Bussenius (Trans.), On memory: A contribution to experimental psychology. New York: Dover. (Original work published 1885)

Ericsson, K. A., & Kintsch, W. (1995). Long-term working memory. Psychological review, 102(2), 211.

Foer, J. (2012). Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering everything. Penguin.

Heyes, C. M. (2018). Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Harvard University Press.

Kelly, L. (2015). Knowledge and power in prehistoric societies: Orality, memory, and the transmission of culture. Cambridge University Press.

Kelly, L. (2017). The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments. Pegasus Books.

O'brien, D. (2013). How to develop a brilliant memory week by week: 52 proven ways to enhance your memory skills. Watkins Media Limited.

Robins, S.K. (Forthcoming). The Method of Loci and the Role of Constructive Imagination in Remembering. In A. Berninger & & I. Vendrell-Ferran (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination. Routledge.

Rossi, P. (2000). The Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Sterelny, K. (2012). The evolved apprentice. MIT press.

Sterelny, K. (2019). The archaeology of the extended mind. Andy Clark and his critics, 143.

Worthen, J. B., & Hunt, R. R. (2011). Mnemonology: Mnemonics for the 21st century. Psychology Press.

Yates, F. A. (2013). Art of Memory. London, Routledge.

Young, R. K. (1985) Ebbinghaus: Some consequences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 11, 491–