Remember, Remember

I’ve just had the mind-expanding experience of wandering up and down Elstree high steet with Big Brother evictee Sree, plotting how to improve his powers of memory and concentration. Sree turned out to be a thoroughly nice guy, and I thought he learned very fast- all despite the quite amazing number of interruptions from passers-by who’d seen him on the tele.

We worked on the same techniques of imagination and association that are covered in my book, Remember, Remember.

Sree and I will be appearing live tonight on Channel Four, where he will be given a difficult memory challenge in front of the live audience. My bet is, he’s going to stun the crowds.

These girls were spotted in Soho reciting all 44 American presidents according to the format of pingpong.

Deborah Orr, leading citizen, recites all the PMs while stroking her dog. A man, meanwhile, roars like a lion in the background.

Here’s Trudie Goodwin, who for 23 years played June Ackland onThe Bill reciting the Presidents

I bumped into a slightly tipsy Remember, Remember reader in a pub, and she kindly recited to me and my camera what she had learned from the book

“The great maxim in pedagogy is to knit every new piece of knowledge onto a pre-existing curiosity- i.e. to assimilate its matter to what is already well known. Hence the advantage of comparing all that is far off and foreign to something that is near home, of making the unknown known by the example of the known, and of connecting all the instruction with the personal experience of the pupil… If the teacher is to explain the distance of the sun from the earth, let him ask… ‘if anyone there in the sun fired off a cannon straight at you, what should you do?’… to which the answer would be ‘duck’. ‘No need of that’… the teacher might reply. ‘You may quietlky go to sleep in your room, and get up again, and learn a trade, and grow as old as i am, – then, then only, will the cannon ball be getting near, then you may jump to one side! See, as great as that is the sun’s distance’.” (From K. Lange “Ueber Appercetion”, 1879 p.76)

Despite the old school example, the thought here is absolutely right. And its truth runs much deeper than we normally would say.  As William James pointed out (also more than a century ago) it isn’t a merely motivational necessity, this relating-to-what-we-already-know, and neither is it specific to difficult abstract concepts. The reason to do it is cognitive, and reaches right down to the roots of our most basic perception.

Using the word ‘head’ to designate a distinctive attitute to the world, or way of gathering it up, James writes: “Every new experience must be disposed of under some old head. The great point is to find the head which has to be least altered to take it in. Certain Polynesian natives, seeing horses for the first time, called them pigs, that being the nearest head. My child of two, playing for a week with the first orange given him called it a ‘ball’. He called the first whole eggs he saw ‘potatoes’ having been accustomed to seeing his ‘eggs’ broken into a glass, and his potatoes without the skin. A folding poocket-corkscrew he unhesitatingly called ‘bad scissors’. Hardly any of us can make new heads easily when fresh experiences come…. genius, in truth, is the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way’.

I like the way Lange uses the word ‘curiosity’ when he talks of how the great pedagogical maxim is to knit every piece of new knowledge onto some ‘pre-existing curiosity’. We tend to think of curiosity as an attribute of a whole person, so we’ll say that Daisy is curious, not that her concepts are. The idea that a concept or cluster of concepts in which you have interest and over which you have some degree of mastery be a ‘curiosity’ suggests a powerful re-jigging of how we think of the spatial scales of our mental concepts, and therefore, finally, of the use we make of them.

It is as if we give our ideas, or in James’ language, our ‘heads’, back some of their autonomy. Rather than thinking, as we always do, of a head containing all of its capacities simultaneously, this way of thinking will say that a human is a very plural kind of thing, functionally different depending on its social and environmental context and internal state etc. That makes a difference, for it gives our thinking back some of its detail. If we conceive of our specific interests, and even the individual fragments of knowledge that pervade us, as competitive curiosities re-frames the whole picture. Instead of seeing information entering the brain, and then being matched up after having entered, one instead sees the thousands of different conceptual clusters ranging for the chance to engage in the elaboration of new experience. That chimes with the experience of learning a new fact or word: it causes us to see it in the word more, for it to dominate our perceptual experience.

From James, again ‘The victorious assimilation of the old to the new is in fact the type of intellectual pleasure’ while ‘The lust for it is curiosity’.

Combine the idea that curiosity is the lust to be victorious in assimilating the old to the new with the thought that the things we know are themselves curiosities- micro-lusts- and your picture of the human mind becomes a teeming mess of competitive micro-desires, a lovely thought.

Scientism: the illicit belief that the investigative methods of the physical sciences are applicable or justifiable in all fields of inquiry.

Now here is a concept we all need to have at the tips of our fingers! If anything characterizes our world-view it is an un-nuanced faith in the efficacy of ’science’. A belief that science is the ultimate arbiter of truth. People seem to choose to forget that science is a diverse set of loosely organized practices, overlapping considerably with every intellectual discipline. That it is by its nature slow and partial; that it is political and fashion-conscious; that it is severely limited in the scope of its operations; that ’science’ itself doesn’t say anything, but rather scientists do.

My friend Paul drew my attention to this abstract from an article in Science, one half of the world’s  two most prestigious scientific journals. Publication in this volume can make a scientific career.

The Psychology of Transcending the Here and Now

Nira Liberman¹ and Yaacov Trope² People directly experience only themselves here and now but often consider, evaluate, and plan situations that are removed in time or space, that pertain to others’ experiences, and that are hypothetical rather than real. People thus transcend the present and mentally traverse temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. We argue that this is made possible by the human capacity for abstract processing of information.

The merit of this “review” of “research” seems to be that it takes an old non-problem (the distinction between perception and imagination/memory), re-states it in trendy terms “transcending the here and now” and presents a circular solution to the non-problem by answering it in the currently fashionable vocabulary of “information-processing” (which happens to be intellectually bankrupt).

Psychology would be a much better science if it weren’t so keen to imitate other sciences (like physics) in its ‘objectivity’; if its particpants read more historically and knew some philosophy; if it spent more time thinking about what its concepts mean.

I often talk of the curious influence of language on perception, on how difficult it is to recognize something without having conceived of it previously; on how difficult it is to perceive without a prepared memory of what you want to perceive with which to organize and open up the meaning from the perceptual object. This is as true for ideas as it is for objects.

For instance, it is very difficult to perceive a vice in oneself that you cannot name. Hence my horror at rediscovering this old Goethe aphorism:

“A man puts himself on a level with those whom he praises”

I’ve often been guilty of this in the past, I’ll no doubt continue to be. But let me dilute my shame by calling upon the opposite vice -that of diminishing responsibly by appeal to association with a crowd- and say that this vice is pervasive, and is a regrettable characteristic of so much web-based writing.

I think that the thrill of subtly assimilating the merits of another to oneself by referencing and praising them is a secret tonic to the writer’s vanity too intense for most bloggers to resist.

If one finishes a sentence with something along the lines of “… and the incomparable Baudrillard” your aim seems sufficiently to be to inform your readers that it isn’t transparently self-aggrandizing. But there is no doubt -psychologically- that you immediately feel, by thus ganging up with a formidable intellectual talent, more secure, more confident and, and to the extent of the superlativeness of your compliment to that intellectual, more impressive. The character of the adjective with which you introduce the relevant authority (”incomparable”/ “intensely rewarding”/”very difficult”) helps define what elements of his or her gloriousness should percolate into your readers’ conception of the writer they read.

The web enourages this kind of humbug through its demands for brevity. In text meant to be read from a screen, writers haven’t the chance to demonstrate the presence of nuanced understanding in their thought, and certainly not its absence. And so they have free rein to chop around, calling on authority as a substitute for butressing their thoughts and self-assertions with argument or style.

Combine the psychological tendency to cash in on the merits of others by association both with the way search-engines make use of page-links to calculate page-ranks and the real virtue of citing where your ideas have come from, and you have a perfect recipe for crime: a motivation, an alibi, a lack of information you can rely on.

It makes one think just how impolite hyperlinking really is. How it’s almost a vice by design. You can’t see through what’s on the other side of the door, what you’re told about it tells you vert little abojut what you’ll find there; worst of all, when you pass through a hyperlink, the change in scenery is more often than not so brutal that you entirely forget what you were intending to read about and enter into that oscillating boredom that characterizes aimless web-surfing.

One can imagine a number of ways to improve this. Ways of making things a little more transparent.

Jacques Barzun, who as a nonagenarian wrote a splendid and massive history of Western culture that I intend to turn into a memory palace on second life, introduced in that work, From Dawn till Decadence found here on Amazon, a simple and excellent scheme: describe the use to be had from your references as you state them.

So he says “the book to read is….”, or “the book to peruse” or “the chapter to look at”. The convention is attractive -you’re left actually tempted to pursue the link because of the greater sense you have of what it entails- but it is also significantly less obtrusive.

Normally in academic writing, you are asked to have your brain go blind when something is referenced (Svartdal and Oelman, 2007).

No-one actually absorbs and fixes upon the reference except when actively involved with research. Why? Because it is so unclear what the reference entails. What is the full sentenec of which the bare link is the correlative?

This infromation comes from Svartdal and Oelman’s article from 2007?

Here’s an article someone else cited which is kind of relevant we believe: Svartdal and Oelman, 2007

“One sentence in the following article that you can find for yourself is key to my having first noticed, before developing and rephrasing, the ideas you’ll find buried within my thoughts: Svartdal and Oelman, 2007

This kind of anti-lucidity needs fixing. A kind of Barzunian formula would do the web the world of good. Ideally, of course, a perhaps colour and font-based visual code could serve the demands of brevity in communicating what links are for, what the target page contains, where and how the source and target relate and so on, would significantly aid the surfing experience, and work against the ugly habit of citation not so much for citation’s sake, but rather for the sake of page-rank or covert glory-assimilation.

On the subject of web-browsing, I would also like to see a kind of elastic mechanism to substitute for troubled memory when following links. I’d like to sucked back up to the page from which I’ve followed a link after having browsed beyond for a little while, so as actually to be able to sustain a coherent context of learning and understanding.

Jamie Onslow, a 12-yr-old South London resident, and keen reader of Remember, Remember, flawlessly recites his way through the updated list of the 44 presidents of the USA.

Dr. Yip is one of the most popular people at the yearly World Memory Championships. Aside from his great charm and generosity (and his formidable ping-pong skills- he was, at some point, some sort of regional champion in Malaysia), he is a quite phenomenal memoriser, even by the somewhat intense standards of international memory championships.

Here he is, in this video, demonstrating his comprehensive knowledge of a 1774 page English-Chinese dictionary.

Name any page in this dictionary and Dr. Yip can tell you all the words on that page, along with their definitions- in order, backwards or forwards. Name any word, and he’ll tell you what page it’s on, and where on that page, and what words follow and precede.Name him a word that doesn’t exist (such as scrome) and he’ll tell you it doesn’t exist in a split second.

The only English word that I ever found that wasn’t in his dictionary, and thus his head, was ‘peloton’- a pack of cyclists. He told me that the nearest word was ‘pelota’- a Basque ball-game and a kind of dance.

It’s immensely fun playing search-games with him. I was standing next to him at the (rather unending) prize ceremony at this year’s championships and he was entertaining me by successfully naming in real time the page in his dictionary on which every word spoken with more than two syllables lay. A stream of numbers ‘1452′  ‘367′  ‘530′ ‘27′  ‘1726′ spoken almost without time for pause attested to the flexibility and speed of his recall. Let’s face it, this is utterly spectacular random-access memory.

As I begin to explain in the video, he has done all this by using a classical spatial memory technique: that of Loci. The technique stems, in short, from the following elements of human cognition.

a) Humans, all of us, possess phenomenal powers of spatial and perceptual memory

b) Our memory for spaces is, by its very nature, incredibly well ordered: one never mixes up in what order the various elements of space are configured

c) This memory we have for spaces is, furthermore, exceptionally quickly navigable: if I mention a place to you- say, the gates of your first school- you can plant your mind there in much less than a second. Given that you probably know of more than a million such locations, that is a strikingly efficient process of search.

d) The final key thing to understand is that our memory for spaces is continuous with our memory for the things within them, including events- real or imagined.

To pull this altogether, we (all) have an immensely capaciously, perfectly well ordered, instantly accessible, and imaginatively manipulable store house in our minds based on our astonishing and long-evolved skills of spatial navigation.

For this reason, it is possible for a normal human mind to remember tens of thousands of items of information in a secure and randomly accessible fashion by imagining densely meaningful images around and into real-world spaces.

What Dr. Yip has done to remember a 1774 page, 57,000 word English-Chinese Dictionary in its entirety

Dr. Yip associates every number between 000 and 999 with an object. 444 might be a tea-cup, 152 a car. This is like a vocabulary of a thousand words in a foreign language. It takes about a month to learn up a system like this. One need only take the time to decide, according to one’s whim, what number correponds to what image.

This gives Dr Yip a kind of scheme by which to map the pages in his dictionary onto real-world spaces. Since 152 is a car, he can map page 152 onto a garage. Since 444 is a tea-cup, he can map page 444 to a tea-room. And so on. So when you say ‘page 444′ he thinks ‘444 is a tea cup’, and this vehicles him by association to the relevant tea room. Page 1444 is a different tea-room; page 1152 is a different garage or car sales-room.

Having arrived in his mind at the relevant location, Dr Yip will see, arrayed around that location, points corresponding to the various words on that page. So a page with 15 words on it will have 15 points. These are in a specific order (beginning generally on the street outside and working in a clockwise circle around the room).

At each point, an image will fuse together the word and its definition (which he has leanred in Chinese). He recounts, rather amusingly and revealingly how he learned the definition of the word ‘indecorum’ in the video. That page in the dictionary has placed him in a sweet shop. That particular word is placed in his imagination ontop of the sales person.

He knows what decorate means- to do up a room. The word for room in chinese is the same as the word for hole. In this way, he can make the link by power of imaginative association between the ‘decor’ part and holes. To get the meaning, he uses holes to inflect the scene to reflect indecorum, or indecency. He places holes, in his imagination, in the shop-keeper’s clothes. Her naked flesh shows through. That’s not very decent, so he remembers the meaning of the word.

Everyone implicitly performs these sorts of acts of meaning-making, especially when they are a child. All this may sound very complex, but, if you try it, you’ll be amazed by the ease with which you can proceed.

Learning this whole dictionary, with its 57,000 words (and so 57,000 points in space) took Dr Yip about a half hour per day for just six months. He just took out with him, in his pocket, 10 pages per day, ripped from a duplicate version of his dictionary. That left him around 300 words to store. So he’d have three minutes per individual room, allowing him around 10 seconds per image to find a link between the particular space, the sound and the meaning of the word. No doubt he was enormously helped by the alphabeticality of the thing- he could remember the sound and spelling part of the word almost by inference from its neighbours.

This year, Dr. Yip learned the bible. I asked him whether he was a Christian… ‘no’ he said ‘I was just interested by what it was about’.