Lynne Kelly - Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

IMPROVE YOUR MEMORY WITH THE MOST POWERFUL METHODS IN HISTORY

LYNNE KELLY

M EMORY C RAFT

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2020 by Lynne Kelly

First Pegasus Books hardcover edition January 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN: 978-1-64313-324-9

ISBN: 978-1-64313-381-2 (eBook)

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

For Damian Kelly
and Rebecca, Rudolph, Abigail and Leah Heitbaum .

And for the thousands of students who have been in my classrooms over my long career. From you I learned so much .

CONTENTS

I was blessed with an appallingly bad memory. I say blessed, because if it wasnt for this fact I would have never asked the question that changed my life: How the hell did they remember so much stuff?

About ten years ago, I wanted to write a book about animal behaviour and wondered how much more I might observe when watching birds and mammals and insects and my beloved spiders if I did so having read indigenous stories about these animals. La Trobe University had given me a PhD scholarship to research and write the book. My publisher was interested in publishing it. Lovely! Then I derailed the whole project by asking myself that simple question when I realised just how much practical stuff was stored in the memory of indigenous elders.

The Navajo kept a field guide to over 700 insects in memory. Only ten were critical, because they annoyed stock or messed with their crops. One they ate, the cicada. All the rest were known because the Navajo, like all humans, are curious and value knowledge for knowledges sake. In the Navajos stories the insects often act as metaphors to reflect upon human origins and behaviour. And thats just insects. Add the information about all the other animals, a thousand or so plants, complex genealogies, geology and astronomy, land management, navigation, timekeeping and weather and seasons the list goes on and on.

The important lesson for all of those wanting to memorise huge amounts of information is that the Navajo store this knowledge in their mythology. In stories. Vivid lively stories make information more memorable.

And then it gets even more astounding. Recent research on Australian Aboriginal stories about landscape changes shows that the knowledge can be reliably dated to at least 7000 or even 10,000 years ago, and probably even longer. Ten thousand years ago is a really long time before the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. Aboriginal stories tell exactly what happened to the landscape after the last ice age. I was astonished that they could retain information so accurately over such an incredibly long passage of time.

Indigenous cultures relied on their memories to store all the information on which they depended, both physically and culturally. Right into the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Western students were also taught to train their memories. It is only in the last few hundred years of Western society that we have lost the ability to memorise vast amounts of information. We use writing and technology to do the job for us. But memory, writing and technology can all enhance each other. This book is about how to do just that. I want to convince you that learning the memory arts is hugely worthwhile and great fun.

The memory methods used by indigenous cultures the world over have a great deal in common. If these memory methods are so effective and universal, they must be directly related to the way the brain works. It is the only common factor. And even more exciting, especially for someone over 60, as I am, is that current neuroscience research on the plasticity of the brain indicates that it doesnt have to decline with age.

I am convinced that we are very much poorer for not using our memories effectively anymore. Could this be a contributing factor to the prevalence of dementia and the general acceptance that memory fades with age? Or does it in fact fade with lack of use?

Early in my university research as a mature age student, I happened to visit Stonehenge with my husband, Damian, who was studying archaeology. I knew very little about it except that non-literate cultureswho had built ancient monuments all round the world, including Stonehenge, Easter Island moai, the Nasca Lines and the many monumental sites across the Americashad always used memory methods closely related to the way the brain works. It became clear to me that a significant proportion of the purpose of sacred places was to do with memorising and conveying critical knowledge.

Nearly a decade later, PhD in hand, my ideas on indigenous cultures and archaeology were published by Cambridge University Press as Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, memory and the transmission of culture (2015). The thorough examination by archaeologists, anthropologists and memory experts of both my thesis and the resulting book gave me the authority to take these ideas to the mainstream reader with the book The Memory Code (2016). Interested though readers were in the new ideas about archaeology and anthropology, by far the greatest interest was in the extraordinary memory techniques described and how these could be applied in everyday life.

I started experimenting with a huge range of memory methods over ten years ago, and in the few years since these last two books were published those experiments have dominated my life. I have memorised more than I would have conceived possible about pre-history, history, geography, birds, mammals, trees and the complex spider families. Ive memorised the periodic table, the history of writing, the history of timepieces and musical instruments. I have engaged with the lessons to be learned from the lives of the 130 historic figures I have chosen to be my ancestors. Ive used the memory methods to learn vocabulary for French and Mandarin and those difficult Chinese characters. Ive memorised the history of art and attended classes to create contemporary works that reflect ancient memory techniques. I dont know everything about all of these topicsfar from it. But Ive memorised structures on which I can build more and more intricate understanding throughout the rest of my life.

Oh, and I now memorise shuffled decks of cards and long lists of random numbers for fun and competition. It really is fun, although I would never have believed it possible if I hadnt tried it for myself.

Im not suggesting that you memorise the things that I have chosen. They are examples of how the vast range of memory techniques used throughout time and around the world can be implemented in our lives today.

That is what this book is about.

Common sense would tell you that the advent of writing would destroy the need for memory methods. But memory methods persisted, taught in ancient Greek and Roman schools, in the monasteries of the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance. Its from this time of early literacy that we get the easiest starting point for us to learn the memory arts. Well start with the critical role of the imagination. Ill show you how to use your playful and creative inventiveness to memorise information with very straightforward medieval techniques.