Malcolm and Ben hosted a workshop on the topic of Memory in which we memorized a list of 32 unrelated words. From the first meeting of RERC we wanted to look at alternative and historical educational practices and thought that memory might provide a good example of a skill and technique we no longer learn or even use.
Malcolm presented a method described in Frances Yates's classic on the topic, The Art of Memory, called the architecture of memory. It is described as the preferred technique of orators in the Greek Polis and Roman Senate, at a time when speeches were a central component of public and political life. The method requires that a person memorize the layout of a building and is able to visualize walking through it's rooms. In each room the person defines specific places where the signs or symbols of the object or idea that was to be remembered could be placed. Once the objects or ideas were placed in their rooms the person merely had to walk through the rooms to find the objects that had been placed there.
The members of RERC who chose to use this technique mostly used their childhood homes or another building that was intimately familiar to them.
Ben presented a method described as a linking mechanism that used visualization to combine two works in a single memory, instead of remembering each word individually. For example, instead of remembering bee and New York separately you would visualize a bee flying down 5th Avenue.
As it turned out, both methods depended heavily on the visual sense. According to Yates and other scholars, it is the most powerful sense and thus is most effective for the purpose of memorization.
Most of us were able to remember the list after several hours of conversation and even months later we could recall large sections of it.
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