For a while now, I’ve been thinking about memory.
I recently read Mind Hacks, an excellent book in the O’Reilly Hacks series: written by a cognitive neuroscientist and a computer programmer, it’s a collection of all sorts of cool mind/brain experiments you can try yourself. The authors also maintain an excellent blog on similar matters. Recently there was an interesting post about a hacker who described how he’d managed to improve his coding skillz by listening to the same song over and over again while working on a particular piece of software: this improved his associative memory as hearing the song kept bringing back things connected with the coding project.
I’ve noticed the same thing while working on a piece of fiction: I either have to do it in total silence or keep playing the same damn song over and over again (not really feasible with novel-length projects, but works for short stories). As pointed out in the above blog entry, using a particular smell would probably work even better, but I’m not sure how to implement this in practice. It did get me wondering if this kind of priming phenomenon might be responsible for the fact that a lot of authors either smoke or drink incredible amounts of tea/coffee: besides the proven intelligence-enhancing effects of caffeine, the smells involved might well function as an associative memory aide. In fact, writing almost made me a smoker at one point. While working on a still-unfinished novel, I got into the habit of having one cigarette before I started working. It did have positive effects on my writing, but when I noticed myself actually going out of my way to buy cigarettes, I stopped. I’d rather be a healthy mediocre writer than a brilliant writer with lung cancer, thank you very much.
An another really cool memory enhancement method Isabelle introduced me to is the memory castle technique. This is an ancient method of associating memories with (real or imagined) physical locations, and utilized by many memory world champions to great effect. The excellent MentatWiki has several pages devoted to the memory castle technique and its variants: apparently it was originally developed by Roman senators who had to memorize incredibly long speeches. Giordano Bruno and other Renaissance men allegedly had memory castles utilizing occult symbols and the like that could hold thousands of items.
The basic idea behind memory castles is to learn to visualize a journey - say, a short walk in your flat or along some other route you know well. Then you associate the items you wish to remember with each of the locations along the way – if possible, imagine physically placing some sort of evocative representation of the item into a box or a nook. It sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly effective: stuff that I put there sometimes jumps out days later, unbidden. For a more detailed description of memory castles, you could do worse than go back to the source: Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. I’m pretty sure the basic concept goes further back than that, though – there’s a strong oral storytelling tradition in Finland, for example, and the bards of old had to remember thousands and thousands of lines of poetry (of course, rhymes have well-known memory-enhancing effects of their own).
I’ve also found that visualizing a fantasy workspace is a good concentration exercise and helps to focuse the mind – for a while (due to way too much websurfing, I have to admit) I suffered from an attention deficit or information addiction of sorts, and it’s taken conscious effort to be able to concentrate properly again. Taking up analog tools again has also helped quite a lot.
Besides these low-tech hacks, I’ve been experimenting with Remembrance Agent, a very impressive piece of software with an Emacs frontend which continuously scans the text you type and suggests related files from a database it’s previously indexed. It hasn’t yet revolutionarized the way I work, but in the future, it might: to get a maximum benefit I think you need a huge database of information snippets and ideas of no more than about 500 words in length. Steven Berlin Johnson has recently written about the way he uses DevonThink, a cool Mac database application, and I agree with his assesment that 500 words hits some sort of information content sweet spot – enough to contain one in-depth idea. So lately I’ve been using my personal wiki as a sort of scrapbook, actually cutting and pasting stuff from my daily web consumption. It’ll be interesting to see what happens once I’ve got a couple of thousand entries there: maybe it’ll help me outdo Charlie in writing information-dense, overclocked SF.
Some people actually run Remembrance Agent on their wearables: I’d be curious to know what the long-term effects are.
Anyway, it seems likely that the way we use our memory will continue to change as finding information becomes easier and easier, and ideas like lifecaches move closer to reality. Still, I do wonder what mind hacks have been lost over the centuries. Giants like Gauss, Newton and da Vinci surely had a few tricks up their sleeves that us lesser, latter-day mortals could benefit from…