The Art of Memory - Linking System

Now that my fan base is expanding towards infinity (I'm sure you would need as much as two hands to count my fans, actually never mind, suggesting that you count on your fingers is an insult), I think I'll go on a rant about memory. Why? I like memory. I consider myself above average in things that have to do with memory (but then again, 80% of all people consider themselves above average, but then again, 91.7 % of all statistics are made up), and although I have never taken any active steps to improve or manipulate my memory, I was kind of forced to after reading a part of Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind (which you will find to the left in the amazing widget powered by Goodreads). I am terrible at creating suspense, so I am going to throw the climax of the story in your face, in medias res, just like that, without warning (apart from the fact that you have been amply warned by now). I memorised a list of 20 words in only a couple of minutes, and without further efforts managed to recite it from first to last, or last to first. Do you want to know how? There is no payment involved, and you don't have to subscribe to some sort of scam website, but I do require that you give me your credit card information (or not).

    

The technique is known as the linking system. You see once upon a time, in Ancient Greece (should I have capitalised that A?), The Art of Memory was part of the school syllabus. Mnemonics were viewed as an essential tool to facilitate the acquisition and retention of new information, which is understandable considering how knowledge was mostly recited orally, and had been for centuries. However, once the more silly versions of religion (don't worry, they're all silly) became fashionable, and witchery and devil-worship was no longer fashionable, The Art of Memory had to go.

    

Oh yeah, the linking system. Well, basically it's a way of organising information centered around your ability to visualise "things". It's particularly helpful for remembering long lists of words, but can also be developed to store large networks of information, so says the Gospel according to Derren Brown. For anyone out there reading this blog (yes, you - hello!) who has ever tried memorising a long list of words, for instance one of 20 words in length (I'm going to stick with that number), in under a minute, you might find that your first reaction would have gone something along these lines (yes, this is a hypothetical anecdote, so it will be privileged with the colour green). By the way, I used to have a blue car. OK let's move on, don't be silly.

"Uhm. OK, let's see here. 20 words per minute, that's what? 3 seconds for each word. This thought has taken 10 seconds to think, so that leaves me 50 seconds, or 2.5 seconds for each. Wait, I could go on like this forever and not remember a single word. Shut up, and start memorising! OK, first word is... Wait a second. How am I supposed to memorise these words? I'll try the first 5 and see if I can manage. Damnit, I forgot the first one. I'll spend a bit more time on that one, oh and there goes the third one as well. How many words were there again? 20? Right, well I have about 10 seconds left, so I guess I'll just have to take a glance at each word then pray to the deity I don't worship that I'll be able to remember more than just a few."

In psychology, there has been research done on our ability to memorise lists. Basically, if you are given a series of words appearing one by one, you are more likely to remember the first words (the primacy effect) and the last words (the recency effect), whereas the words in the middle are either mixed with other words that your wonderful reconstructional memory has placed there, or that you have just completely forgotten. So let's face it, we suck at memorising lists. We just screw it up at some point and panic. At best we might remember around 7 words out of 20, sometimes less, maybe sometimes more. In any case, our natural way of memorising lists is not only painful and stressing, but it is more importantly unreliable. Sure you can remember 6, or sometimes 7, but we need to achieve 20 words consistently if we are to disprove the silly psychologists treating us like lab rats.

I am going to type a list of 20 arbitrarily chosen words, then I will write a small paragraph connecting each set of neighbouring words as follows: 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5 and so on. All you need to do is to remember the first word, and the next word should come naturally. As you may recall, I mentioned visualising. Well yes, the process is simple, your task is to make a vivid, recognisable mental picture linking two words. Grab the first picture that comes to mind, as that is most likely the most natural picture you can get, which will be easiest to remember, and start decorating it with crazy details, bright colours etc. Make it stick, and make it as ridiculously absurd as possible. The more nonsensical, the better. You will find that you will remember it precisely because it is so ludicrous.

Well, this is what you are going to do in the future. What I just wrote is indeed pretty much the framework of the linking system in general, but what we are about to do now is an easy initiation ritual. I will take care of the crazy visualisation process for you. All you need to do is read my scenarios, and the list should come naturally. In fact, let's make this easy. 10 words, how is that? Good? OK. Here we go (no, I am just going to write the list, don't rush it).

Jesus

Cup

Tree

Laptop

Owl

Yoghurt

Telephone

Chair

Terrorist

Peanuts

Now, make sure you remember Jesus (no, I'm not advocating Christianity here), because if you forget Jesus, you won't be able to remember the next 9 words (nor am I referring to the decalogue or the Ten Commandments). Form a bright image of the following descriptions in your head. After each paragraph, close your eyes and take a look at the picture that has formed in your head for a few seconds, then move on.

Jesus/Cup

Jesus is drying out on the cross. The Sun is shining bright, but the Sun is also in the shape of a cross. And it has sunglasses. So does Jesus. Jesus shouts "fuck the police!" and rips one hand from the cross, grabbing a cup of milk. The cup is massive, in fact it is larger than Jesus, so the cup ends up drinking Jesus instead.

Cup/Tree

A red-leafed tree is in the middle of the ocean, but instead of bearing fruit, millions and millions of cups are dangling from its branches. When the cups fall and touch the water, they turn into boats that row themselves towards land with a spoon instead of an oar. The cups become bigger and bigger, and the tree becomes smaller and smaller as it runs out of cups.

Tree/Laptop

The previous tree having vanished, a new tree grows in the same place, this time carrying apples. But the apples all have a bite mark on the left side, and as they fall, they land in an Apple factory producing Mac laptops. The apples are used to form the laptops' logo.

Laptop/Owl

The laptops decide to fly away, shaped as a set of wings, with no body. As they fly out of the factory, they immediately turn into mechanical owls eating computer mice.

Owl/Yoghurt

Owls are sitting on a branch eating Danone Yoghurt, but the Yoghurt is far larger than any of the owls, who look ridiculous trying to handle a spoon with their beak, which ironically makes it impossible to take in any food without dropping the spoon. Some owls find this hilarious and fall off their branches into a carton containing Yoghurt.

Yoghurt/Telephone

A man answers the telephone while eating yoghurt, but instead of a voice coming out of the device, there is yoghurt running down onto the floor and into his ears. An army of telephones break into his house and start vomiting yoghurt everywhere. The man desperately tries to eat it all, but needs to phone an ambulance because he is lactose intolerant.

Telephone/Chair

A man is writing an essay about the history of telephones on his iPhone. The phone rings and his essay is deleted because he forgot to save it. In rage and protest he throws his chair out of the window, and phones the local store to order a new chair.

Chair/Terrorist

You are taken hostage, and are strapped to a chair. Outside there is nothing but desert and camels. A terrorist is hitting you on the head with a chair, but suddenly a chair storms into the room and blows itself up in the name of some deity.

Terrorist/Peanuts

A terrorist has successfully blown himself up, and has been granted access to heaven, where he is given peanuts at the gates. In fact, the gates themselves are made of peanuts, and people are throwing peanuts at each other, trying to catch them in their mouths. Rivers are filled with terrorists blowing themselves up and exploding into a massive rain of peanuts, which the people nearby try to catch in their mouths as well.

Now close your eyes, and try to recall the list. If you can't remember the first word, it's not important. I'll help you out. Here, it's Jesus. Why are you still reading? Close your eyes and go through the list.

How did it go? Try it backwards. I'll help you out, although you will indubitably (Hei, Andreas) remember the last word. Peanuts! Go! I mean close your eyes. Now go.

Comment on this post telling me how much you love me, and how you would polish my shoes for free. No seriously, how did it go? I'll catch you in my next rant.

Evening thoughts on blindness

This is essentially an anecdote, so I'm afraid I will have to spoil you with more green text printed in italics.

On the way back from town I was combining several thoughts that have been occupying my mind for a while. Two days ago I picked up Derren Brown's "Tricks of the Mind" in which I started learning about the "Linkage system", "Loci system", "Memory palace" as well as some other fascinating strategies for memorising networks of information. Without boring you with the details (though I can assure you they are all worth studying) what links all of the strategies is visualising words. It made me really think about whether the mind actually does work mostly in terms of the visual perception we have of events; how else could these memory systems work so incredibly well? I was thinking of evolution, and how most information we actually take in does come from the sensory stimuli picked up by the eyes; only on occasion did a car drive by. In fact there really was very little that went on in the realm of sound.
     And so I decided to force myself to adapt myself to the world of the blind. I am fairly certain some Asian people are able to sense their surroundings using secret meditative processes involving the ears, while keeping their eyes closed, and whether or not this outrageous stereotype holds any truth, I wanted to attempt it myself. First I needed to calibrate my sense of distance with the length of my steps. For every distinct feature along my path, such as a shadow, or a bush, or a crack in the tarmac, I would guess how many steps it would take to reach it, close my eyes, walk the prescribed number of steps, then judge the result. Obviously my judgement was fairly erroneous at first, but I am getting used to the sensation and in a few years time I can cut my eyes out for good and move to a mountain top in Asia and dye my hair white.
     In any case, this very eccentric practice should definitely alarm people passing me in the streets, but more importantly it takes my mind away from the dreary task of mentally assessing how long time it will take to get home. Frankly, though, I usually tend to counter that boredom by pretending to be fascinated by mundane things such as passing cars and bright office windows, imagining all the silly people who haven't yet asked themselves whether they are justified in being annoyed by the rain, and who haven't yet tried to walk blindly at the risk of being ridiculed by passers by.

Why?

On my Facebook profile, this is one of the quotations which quietly sits in my personal information, overlooked by most and understood by few:

"Why?"
- the single, most important question with respect to human knowledge.

This is not a complicated quotation, and in its obvious simplicity I can imagine it is hard to grab someone's attention with it. Usually quotations are the perfect verbal manifestations of what we know as the appeal to authority. In terms of pure logic, it does not matter who said what you quoted; the truth and validity of a statement must be assessed independent of its author. The reason why one always gives the source of the quotation is understandable, though: it is a sign of respect towards the author, a referential aid for those who wish to verify the quotation's source, and a necessity if one is to avoid being accused of plagiarism, should it be in an academic or social context. Beyond those formalities, however, a source is a surreptitious invitation to commit the logical fallacy I mentioned, either in a negative or positive light.

This is the very reason I did not attach a source to the quotation. Doing so would be to imply that its meaning should be dependent on who said it, but also that it in fact had a specific author. By avoiding the source I want the reader to somehow end up thinking "Wait a second, it doesn't matter who said it. In fact not only could anyone have asked that question, but most people do every day!". The meaning of a statement is a product of the reader, not the writer whose intended meaning will hopefully be accurately identified by the reader.

As you will no doubt (or as my friend likes to say "indubitably") have started to ask yourself, where am I taking this train of thought? And isn't this in any case a very complicated way to arrive at the conclusion, while the sand of your life's hourglass is slowly trickling?

At the risk of seeming inarticulate and unstructured - a risk I have faced many times throughout the writing of this text alone - I am going to conclude with a very vulgar and desperate opener. Wait for it...

The point is that by asking the question "Why?" with respect to everything you can imagine, you will either become completely obsessed, if insane, or come closer to a true understanding or at least appreciation (or deprecation) of the world around you. Because I feel I am beginning to bore you, I am going to present you with an example. But why do I feel that I am beginning to bore you? Because I myself am trying to envisage a writer, entirely by prejudice, who can identify the same sensation of structural chaos that I am identifying when writing this text. Technically that was an example, but here is another one (in the form of an anecdote).

One day I was walking home from university, as I often - or should I say always - do after having been at university for a given amount of time. It was raining, and being a very sensible person I forgot to bring an umbrella. The first sensation I felt as the water established contact with my hair and skin was one of annoyance. My entire life, I had developed an association between water and annoyance - unless of course I was swimming. Did wearing clothes justify my annoyance? Well I guess they would have to dry once I reached my flat, but when qualifying that consequence as annoying, I needed to justify the qualification. Was drying clothes annoying? Well the action itself involved exactly the same movement as that required to hang up dry clothes, so it shouldn't be. Maybe it was the knowledge that water might be dripping or evaporating away from the clothes, and raise the humidity in my room? I don't see how that in itself is excessively annoying, and even if it were, why should that distant action need to alter my mental state in the present? What an unnecessary way of becoming in a bad mood. I concluded that there must be something else: some other justifiable, rational reason for me being annoyed, seeing as there doesn't seem to be any real practical issue with being slightly wet.
     Perhaps it is an accumulation of impressions from my entire life, where I have heard people complaining about being wet, and myself beginning to form a mental network combining the events, the emotions, the sensations, to end up to this day becoming genuinely annoyed at water touching my skin. I can't help but feeling gullible, because that is what human beings are. Not in terms of being easily persuaded, but because the entire human mind is based on our inherent openness to external stimuli. Without such a quality, there can't be mental development. The only reason why I employ "gullible" in this context, is because it expresses my feeling of helplessness and stupidity, having just realised that everything I am is a completely irrational heap of mental networks synthesised in an attempt to make sense of the world around me.

     And so I decided to rebel against my values. At no point in my life had I consciously decided that I wanted to be annoyed by water touching my skin, so why should it put me in a bad mood at the present moment? I pulled up my sleeves, and smiled as I pointed face towards sky and embraced the previously annoying sensation of water touching my skin, landing on my eye. At this point the annoyance was just a result of evolution, and the body's natural response to pain related to self-preservation, but I knew that this is all it was. I had simplified the situation by repeating the simple question "Why?", and it had brought me a feeling of independence, of superiority, at least giving me the power to acknowledge that I am indeed a product of stimuli.

Now ask yourself how much of your identity does not have any rational foundation? Ask yourself how much is personal choice, and how much is an unconscious result of the surroundings? I challenge you to take any aspect of your life, and travel through the infinite regress of causality, and if necessary restructure your perspective.

For instance, when the professor holding a lecture does not meet my standards, I ask myself why my education should be in any way affected by the skills of the professor. Why should I silently complain about it, when I know that I will have to sit through this lecture anyway, and that whether the information I was learning should be used for the exam, or even later in life, the only significant goal is to indeed obtain this information. It is at this point that I decide to attempt to separate myself from my preconceptions and preferences, and embrace the fact that he is a lousy professor, and use it to reinforce my memory of the information he is presenting. I attempt to use the lousy nature of the professor as a facilitation of my learning, instead of putting myself in a state of disappointment and lesser receptivity of information.

In fact I intend to write another post about this fascinating aspect of memory, so I should probably end this post now before I sabotage my own work. But remember to always ask yourself "WHY?".