Photographic Memory Is a Teachable Skill
In virtually every instance of exceptional memory, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists are able to identify a specific strategy (not gene) that accounts for an apparently photographic memory. Hiding in plain sight (like a silent m), some of these mnemonic strategies have been around for millennia. Work in contemporary memory studies, however, has both validated and advanced the field of mnemonic encoding (memorization). At once ancient and modern, mnemonics is the Novum Organum, the “new instrument” of human knowledge.
All Learning Rests on Memory
When we “cram” for tests and forget most of what we “learned” over the subsequent days, we cannot claim to have “learned” anything in the first instance. The most common, default methods of studying violate virtually all principles of mnemonic encoding. Despite its importance, most of us have not learned to use our faculty of memory. With a trained memory, one can encode new knowledge at will. That is, with a single interaction with new knowledge, it can become retrievable for months. And with a minimum of spaced review, it can be stored for a lifetime.
Memory Is the Foundation of Critical Thinking
Because we are not trained to use our memories, conventional wisdom equates memorization with rote learning. And because rote memorization is robotic, onerous, and devoid of understanding…we have made understandable efforts to eliminate it from our education system. It is uncontroversial to identify “critical thinking” as the ultimate aim of education. This, however, puts the proverbial cart before the horse. Thoughts are made of memory, and the greater our stores of retrievable knowledge the greater our powers to think critically and creatively will be. Imagine thinking without any memories. Now imagine thinking with greater resources of knowledge. Our classes lay the foundation for powerful thinking skills, drawing from the encyclopedic knowledge we impart to our students.
What is “new” about this instrument of learning?
There is nothing new about mnemonics. Indeed, mnemonic strategies are older than writing, and by a lot. In fact, it is writing that diminished the importance of mnemonics…almost to the point of oblivion. In the absence of writing, for instance, epic poetry “recorded” history and passed it down for centuries (and with surprising accuracy it turns out). Because rhymes, rhythm, and evocative imagery are easier to remember, poetry proved to be an exceptionally good way to store and transmit oral history. Stepping back, and looking at writing as a memory technology (which it most certainly is), we can see all kinds of advantages inherent to printed materials. It’s so much easier for Homer to pass around a book than it is to recite a poem for 8 days straight. If you have the book, you have access to the information. Books are portable, so disseminating knowledge is as simple as handing it to another person. But notice the radical difference between these sources of access: one requires external access (the text) and the other is “internal access,” a person’s biological memory. This difference gets precisely to the purpose of education: only knowledge stored in the mind has the ability to improve our perception of problems. If you didn’t have all of the words of this paragraph stored in your memory, then this paragraph would have no meaning for you. And this basic principle applies to all learning. Being able to think and perceive like a doctor, scientist, lawyer, or any other professional or expert is almost entirely a function of the memories that shape perception. Today, because external access to knowledge is so convenient, education has largely abandoned efforts to impart foundational knowledge- presupposing that we can think critically without it being stored in our minds.
If you were to investigate mnemonics today, what you would probably find is a large number of books and programs that teach you how to employ mnemonic strategies- tracking the proverbial reasoning that teaching a person to fish is more valuable than giving that person a fish to eat for a day. The claims of these books and programs are often quite grand…but they aren’t wrong! The probably reason why the techniques that they teach are not more widely used, however, is because to devise a mnemonic scheme for any given material takes almost as much time and energy as it does to prepare for a test in the first instance. For our part, this calls for a new genre of media, albeit, with a name that is not: in the fullest sense of the expression we are doing art of memory. Informed by neuroscience, philosophy, cognitive psychology, information theory, and artificial intelligence (among several others), mnemonic theory is a deeply transdisciplinary subject that promises to radically reinvent the way we construct our edifice of knowledge. There is too much to say about this for a landing page; there is a whole course devoted to establishing the foundations of mnemonic theory.