Moonwalking With Einstein (15 page)

After moving to Harvard and becoming an assistant professor, Parry took an unconventional turn in his work. Rather than hunkering down with old Greek texts, the young classicist took off for Yugoslavia in search of the last bards who still practiced a form of oral poetry resembling the Homeric arts. He returned to Cambridge with thousands of recordings that formed the basis for a new branch of academic research into oral traditions.

In his fieldwork, Parry found that rather than transmitting the text itself from bard to bard and generation to generation, the contemporary Balkan rhapsodists (presumably like their ancient Homeric predecessors) would impart a set of formulaic rules and constraints that allowed the bard—any bard—to reconstruct the poem each time he recited it. Each retelling of the story was not exactly like the one that came before, but it was close.

When the Slavic bards were asked whether they repeated their songs exactly, they responded, “Word for word, and line for line.” And yet when recordings of two performances were held up against each other, they clearly were different. Words changed, lines moved around, passages disappeared. The Slavic bards weren’t being overconfident; they simply had no concept of verbatim recall. Not that this should have been surprising. Without writing, there is no way to check whether something has been repeated exactly.

The variability that is built into the poetry of oral traditions allows the bard to adapt the material to the audience, but it also allows more memorable versions of the poem to arise. Folklorists have compared oral poems to pebbles worn down by the water. They’re made smooth over many retellings as the harder-to-remember pieces get chipped away, or made easier to retain and repeat. Irrelevant digressions are forgotten. Long or rare words are avoided. Between imagery, alliteration, and having to fit the meter of the line, the epic bard usually doesn’t have that many possible words to choose from. The structure writes the poem. Indeed, work by Parry’s successors has found that virtually every word in the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad
fits into some sort of schema, or pattern, that made the poems easier to remember.

It’s no coincidence that
the art of memory was supposedly invented by Simonides at exactly the moment when the use of writing was on the rise in ancient Greece, around the fifth century B.C. Memory was no longer something that could be taken for granted, as it had been during Greece’s preliterate epoch. The old techniques of the Homeric bards, of rhythm and formula, were no longer adequate to holding in mind the new and complex thoughts that people were beginning to think. “The original oral performance with its poetry was stripped of functional purpose and relegated to the secondary role of entertainment, one which it always had but which now became its sole purpose,” writes Havelock. No longer burdened by the requirements of oral transmission, poetry was free to become art.

By the time the author of the
Ad Herennium s
at down to compose his handbook on oration in the first century B.C., writing was already a centuries-old craft, as fundamental a part of the Roman world as computers are a part of our own. The poems produced by his contemporaries—Virgil, Horace, and Ovid all wrote their masterworks within a century of the
Ad Herennium
—lived on the page. Each word was painstakingly selected, the product of a single artist expressing his singular vision. And once set down, those words were considered inviolable. If you were going to try to commit such poetry to memory,
memoria verborum
was what was called for.
Rerum
simply wouldn’t do.

The anonymous author of the
Ad Herrenium
suggests that the best method for remembering poetry
ad verbum
is to repeat a line two or three times before trying to see it as a series of images. This is more or less the method that Gunther Karsten uses in the poem competition. He assigns every single word to a route point. But this method has a glaring problem: There are lots of words that simply can’t be visualized. What does an “and” look like? Or a “the”? Some two thousand years ago, Metrodorus of Scepsis, a Greek contemporary of Cicero’s, offered a solution to the quandary of how to see the unseeable. Metrodorus developed a system of shorthand images that would stand in for conjunctions, articles, and other syntactical connectors. It allowed him to memorize anything he read or heard verbatim. Indeed, Metrodorus’s library of symbols seems to have been widely used in ancient Greece. The
Ad Herennium
mentions that “most of the Greeks who have written on memory have taken the course of listing images that correspond to a great many words, so that persons who wished to learn these images by heart would have them ready without expending effort in search of them.” Though Gunther doesn’t use Metrodorus’s symbols, which unfortunately have been lost to history, he has created his own dictionary of images for each of the two hundred most common words that can’t easily be visualized. “And” is a circle (“and” rhymes with
rund
, which means round in German). “The” is someone walking on his knees (
die
, a German word for “the,” rhymes with
Knie
, the German word for “knee”). When the poem reaches a period, he hammers a nail into that locus.

Gunther could just as easily be memorizing a VCR repair manual as a Shakespearean sonnet. In fact, a VCR repair manual would probably be a good deal easier, since it is filled with concrete, easily visualized words like “button,” “television,” and “plug.” The challenge of memorizing poetry is its abstractness. What do you do with words like “ephemeral” or “self” that are impossible to
see
?

Gunther’s method of creating an image for the un-imageable is a very old one: to visualize a similarly sounding, or punning, word in its place. The fourteenth-century English theologian and mathematician Thomas Bradwardine, who was later appointed archbishop of Canterbury, took this kind of verbatim memorization to its highest and most absurd level of development. He described a means of
memoria sillabarum
, or “memory by syllables,” which could be used to memorize words that were hard to visualize. Bradwardine’s system involved breaking the word into its constituent syllables and then creating an image for each syllable based on another word that begins with that syllable. For example, if one wanted to remember the syllable “ab-,” one would picture an abbot. For “ba-” one might visualize a crossbowman (a
balistarius
). When strung together, a chain of these syllables becomes a kind of rebus puzzle. (The Swedish pop group Abba could be recalled as an abbot getting shot by a crossbow.) This process of transforming words into images involves a kind of remembering by forgetting: In order to memorize a word by its sound, its meaning has to be completely dismissed. Bradwardine could translate even the most pious benediction into a preposterous scene. To remember the topic sentence of a sermon that begins “Benedictus Dominus qui per,” he’d see “the sainted Benedictine dancing to his left with a white cow with super-red teats who holds a partridge, while with his right hand he either mangles or caresses St. Dominic.”

The art of memory was, from its origins, always a bit risqué. Preoccupied with Gothic and sometimes downright lewd imagery, it was bound to come in for harsh criticism from the prudes eventually. It’s amazing, in a way, that the casual marriage of the reverent and irreverent that Bradwardine practiced in his imagination was not more upsetting to some of the more priggish clergy. When the moralistic attack finally came, it was led by the sixteenth-century Puritan reverend William Perkins of Cambridge. He decried the art of memory as idolatrous and “impious, because it calls up absurd thoughts, insolent, prodigious, and the like which stimulate and light up depraved carnal affections.” Carnal indeed. Perkins was particularly steamed by Peter of Ravenna’s admission that he used the lustful image of a young woman to excite his memory.

Of the ten events in the World Memory Championship, the poem has bred the greatest number of different strategies. But broadly speaking, mental athletes take two general tacks, which happen to segregate the pool of competitors fairly neatly by gender. While Gunther and most of the other men on the circuit subscribe to a methodical strategy, the women tend to approach the challenge in a more emotional way. Fifteen-year-old Corinna Draschl, an Austrian in a red T-shirt and matching red socks and red baseball cap, told me she can’t memorize a text unless she understands what it means. Even more than that, she has to understand how it feels. She breaks the poem into small chunks and then assigns a series of emotions to each short segment. Rather than associate the words with images, she associates them with feelings.

“I feel how the writer feels, what he is meaning. I imagine whether he’s happy or sad,” she told me in the hallway outside the competition hall. This is not dissimilar from how actors are taught to memorize scripts. Many actors will tell you that they break their lines into units they call “beats,” each of which involves some specific intention or goal on the character’s part, which they train themselves to empathize with. This technique, known as Method acting, was pioneered in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavski around the turn of the last century. Stanislavski was interested in these techniques not for their mnemonic potential but rather as tools to help the actor more realistically depict his character. But Method acting is a technique for giving a line more associational hooks to hang on by embedding it in a context of both emotional and physical cues. Method acting is a way of making words memorable. Indeed, studies have found that if you ask someone to memorize a sentence like “Pick up a pen,” it’s much more likely to stick if the person literally picks up a pen as they’re learning the sentence.

Ultimately, Gunther ended up losing the poetry event to Corinna Draschl, and losing the championship as well. The top prize went to one of his protégés, a quiet and intensely focused eighteen-year-old Bavarian law student named Clemens Mayer, who spoke only choppy English and made it clear that he had no interest in practicing the language on me. After botching the spoken numbers and names-and-faces events, Ben Pridmore landed in fourth place overall, lowered the brim of his black hat, and walked out the door alone, vowing that he would begin preparing the next day to reclaim his title one year hence.

Ed fared even worse. Of the three dozen competitors, he was one of only eleven who failed to memorize an entire deck of cards in either of the two speed cards trials, which is like a place kicker missing an extra point twice in a row. He’d been gunning for an especially low time that would take him to the upper ranks, but he’d lost control and burned too hard. He ended up finishing a disappointing eleventh place overall, and sulked out the door, sodden with sweat. I ran after him and grabbed him to ask what had happened. “Too much ambition,” was all he would say, shaking his head. “I’ll see you back at the house.”

He walked across the Magdalen Bridge to go find a pub where he could watch some cricket and drink Guinness until he’d forgotten his failure.

Standing at the front of the Oxford examination hall, watching the competitors scratch their heads and twiddle their pens as they struggled to recall “Miserare,” I felt acutely aware of how odd it was that we’ve come to this: that the only place left where the ancient art of memory is being practiced, or at least celebrated, is in this rarefied competition, and among this quirky subculture. Here in one of the world’s most storied centers of learning were the last vestiges of a glorious Golden Age of Memory.

It is hard not to feel as though a tremendous devolution has taken place between that Golden Age and our own comparatively leaden one. People used to labor to furnish their minds. They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things. But today, beyond the Oxford examination hall’s oaken doors, the vast majority of us don’t trust our memories. We find shortcuts to avoid relying on them. We complain about them endlessly, and see even their smallest lapses as evidence that they’re starting to fail us entirely. How did memory, once so essential, end up so marginalized? Why did these techniques disappear? How, I wondered, did our culture end up forgetting how to remember?

SEVEN

THE END OF REMEMBERING

O
nce upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them. There was no alphabet to transcribe them in, no paper to set them down upon. Anything that had to be preserved had to be preserved in memory. Any story that would be retold, any idea that would be transmitted, any piece of information that would be conveyed, first had to be remembered.

Today it often seems we remember very little. When I wake up, the first thing I do is check my day planner, which remembers my schedule so that I don’t have to. When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. When I sit down to work, I hit the play button on a digital voice recorder or open up a notebook that holds the contents of my interviews. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge, and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind’s collective memory. Growing up, in the days when you still had to punch seven buttons, or turn a clunky rotary dial, to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I’m not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that’s probably more than most. According to a survey conducted in 2007 by a neuropsychologist at Trinity College Dublin, fully a third of Brits under the age of thirty can’t remember even their
own
home land line number without pulling it up on their handsets. The same survey found that 30 percent of adults can’t remember the birthdays of more than three immediate family members. Our gadgets have eliminated the need to remember such things anymore.

Forgotten phone numbers and birthdays represent minor erosions of our everyday memory, but they are part of a much larger story of how we’ve supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological crutches—from the alphabet to the BlackBerry. These technologies of storing information outside our minds have helped make our modern world possible, but they’ve also changed how we think and how we use our brains.

In Plato’s
Phaedrus
, Socrates describes how the Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of writing, came to Thamus, the king of Egypt, and offered to bestow his wonderful invention upon the Egyptian people. “Here is a branch of learning that will ... improve their memories,” Theuth said to the Egyptian king. “My discovery provides a recipe for both memory and wisdom.” But Thamus was reluctant to accept the gift. “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls,” he told the god. “They will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.”

Socrates goes on to disparage the idea of passing on his own knowledge through writing, saying it would be “singularly simple-minded to believe that written words can do anything more than remind one of what one already knows.” Writing, for Socrates, could never be anything more than a cue for memory—a way of calling to mind information already in one’s head. Socrates feared that writing would lead the culture down a treacherous path toward intellectual and moral decay, because even while the quantity of knowledge available to people might increase, they themselves would come to resemble empty vessels. I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It’s only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today.

Socrates lived in the fifth century B.C., at a time when writing was ascendant in Greece, and his own views were already becoming antiquated. Why was he so put off by the idea of putting pen to paper? Securing memories on the page would seem to be an immensely superior way of retaining knowledge compared to trying to hold it in the brain. The brain is always making mistakes, forgetting, misremembering. Writing is how we overcome those essential biological constraints. It allows our memories to be pulled out of the fallible wetware of the brain and secured on the less fallible page, where they can be made permanent and (one sometimes hopes) disseminated far, wide, and across time. Writing allows ideas to be passed across generations, without fear of the kind of natural mutation that is necessarily a part of oral traditions.

To understand why memory was so important in the world of Socrates, we have to understand something about the evolution of writing, and how different early books were in both form and function. We have to go back to an age before printing, before indexes and tables of contents, before the codex parceled texts into pages and bound them at the edge, before punctuation marks, before lowercase letters, even before there were spaces between words.

Today we write things down precisely so we don’t have to hold them in our memories. But through at least the late Middle Ages, books served not as replacements for memory, but rather as memory aids. As Thomas Aquinas put it, “Things are written down in material books to help the memory.” One read in order to remember, and books were the best available tools for impressing information into the mind. In fact, manuscripts were often copied for no reason other than to help their copier memorize them.

In the time of Socrates, Greek texts were written on long, continuous scrolls—some stretching up to sixty feet—pasted together from sheets of pressed papyrus reeds imported from the Nile Delta. These texts were cumbersome to read, and even more cumbersome to write. It would be tough to invent a less user-friendly way of accessing information. In fact, it wasn’t until about 200 B.C. that the most basic punctuation marks were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, the director of the Library of Alexandria, and all they consisted of was a single dot at either the bottom, middle, or top of the line letting readers know how long to pause between sentences. Instead, words ran together in an unending stream of capital letters known as
scriptio continua
, broken up by neither spaces nor punctuation. Words that started on one line would spill over onto the next without even a hyphen.

ASYOUCANSEEITSNOTVERYEASYTOREADTE XTWRITTENWITHOUTSPACESORPUNCTUATI ONOFANYKINDOREVENHELPFULLYPOSITIO NEDLINEBREAKSANDYETTHISWASEXACTLY THEFORMOFINSCRIPTIONUSEDINANCIENT GREECE

Unlike the letters in this book, which form words that carry semantic meaning, letters written in
scriptio continua
functioned more like musical notes. They signified the sounds that were meant to come out of one’s mouth. Reconstituting those sounds into discrete packets of words that could be understood first required hearing them. And just as it is difficult for all but the most gifted musicians to read musical notes without actually singing them, so too was it difficult to read texts written in
scriptio continua
without speaking them aloud. In fact, we know that well into the Middle Ages, reading was an activity almost always carried out aloud, a kind of performance, and one most often given before an audience. “Lend ears” is a phrase often repeated in medieval texts. When St. Augustine, in the fourth century A.D., observed his teacher St. Ambrose reading to himself without moving his tongue or murmuring, he thought the unusual behavior so noteworthy as to record it in his
Confessions
. It was probably not until about the ninth century, around the same time that spacing became common and the catalog of punctuation marks grew richer, that the page provided enough information for silent reading to become common.

The difficulties associated with reading such texts meant that there was a very different relationship between reading and memory than the one we know today. Since sight-reading
scriptio continua
was difficult, reciting a text aloud with fluency required a reader to have a degree of familiarity with it. He—and it was mostly he’s—had to prepare with it, punctuate it in his mind, memorize it—in part, if not in full—because turning a string of sounds into meaning was not something you could do easily on the fly. The text had to be learned before it could be performed. After all, the way one punctuated a text written in
scriptio continua
could make all the difference in the world. As the historian Jocelyn Penny Small pointed out, GODISNOWHERE comes out a lot differently when rendered as GOD IS NOW HERE versus GOD IS NOWHERE.

What’s more, a scroll written in
scriptio continua
had to be read top to bottom if anything was to be taken from it. A scroll has just a single point of entry, the first word. Because it has to be unwound to be read, and because there are no punctuation marks or paragraphs to break up the text—to say nothing of page numbers, a table of contents, chapter divisions, and an index—it is impossible to find a specific piece of information without scanning the whole thing, head to toe. It is not a text that can be easily consulted—until it is memorized. This is a key point. Ancient texts couldn’t be readily scanned. You couldn’t pull a scroll off the shelf and quickly find a specific excerpt unless you had some baseline familiarity with the entire text. The scroll existed not to hold its contents externally, but rather to help its reader navigate its contents internally.

One of the last places where this tradition of recitation still survives is in the reading of the Torah, an ancient handwritten scroll that can take upward of a year to inscribe. The Torah is written without vowels or punctuation (though it does have spaces, an innovation that came to Hebrew before Greek), which means it’s extremely difficult to sight-read. Though Jews are specifically commanded not to recite the Torah from memory, there’s no way to read a section of the Torah
without
having invested a lot of time familiarizing yourself with it, as any oncebar-mitzvahed boy can tell you. I can personally vouch for this. On the day I became a man, I was really just a parrot in a yarmulke.

Though years of language use condition us not to notice,
scriptio continua
has more in common with the way we actually speak than the artificial word divisions on this page. Spoken sentences flow together seamlessly as one long, blurry drawn-out sound. We don’t speak with spaces. Where one word ends and another begins is a relatively arbitrary linguistic convention. If you look at a sonographic chart visualizing the sound waves of someone speaking English, it’s practically impossible to tell where the spaces are, which is one of the reasons why it’s proven so difficult to train computers to recognize speech. Without sophisticated artificial intelligence capable of figuring out context, a computer has no way of telling the difference between “The stuffy nose may dim liquor” and “The stuff he knows made him lick her.”

For a period, Latin scribes actually did try separating words with dots, but in the second century A.D., there was a reversion—a giant and very curious step backward, it would seem—to the old continuous script used by the Greeks. Spaces weren’t seen again in Western writing for another nine hundred years. From our vantage point today, separating words seems like a no-brainer. But the fact that it was tried and rejected says a lot about how people used to read. So, too, does the fact that the ancient Greek word most commonly used to signify “to read” was
ánagignósko
, which means to “know again,” or “to recollect.” Reading as an act of remembering: From our modern vantage point, could there be a more unfamiliar relationship between reader and text?

Today, when we live amid a deluge of printed words—would you believe that ten billion volumes were printed last year?—it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to read in the age before Gutenberg, when a book was a rare and costly handwritten object that could take a scribe months of labor to produce. Even as late as the fifteenth century, there might be just several dozen copies of any given text in existence, and those copies were quite probably chained to a desk or lectern in some university library, which, if it contained a hundred other books, would have been considered particularly well stocked. If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you’d never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn’t just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea. For one thing, modern bookshelves with their rows of outwardfacing spines hadn’t even been invented yet. That didn’t happen until sometime around the sixteenth century. For another thing, books still tended to be heavy, hardly portable objects. It was only in the thirteenth century that bookmaking technology advanced to the point that the Bible could be compiled in a single volume rather than a collection of independent books, and yet it still weighed more than ten pounds. And even if you did happen to have a text you needed close at hand, the chances of finding what you were looking for without reading the whole thing start to finish were slim. Indexes were not yet common, nor were page numbers or tables of contents.

But these gaps were gradually filled. And as the book itself changed, so too did the crucial role of memory in reading. By about the year 400, the parchment codex, with its leaves of pages bound at the spine like a modern hardcover, had all but completely replaced scrolls as the preferred way to read. No longer did a reader have to unfurl a long document to find a passage. A reader could just turn to the appropriate page.