When you think of ancient memory devices you might think of a memory palace. This is a memory device used by memory champions to recall, quickly, a set of shuffled cards in sequence. It was a technique used by Roman orators who would imaginatively assign a piece of their speech into a physical building they knew well, such as their home. When they recited the speech, they would imaginatively move through their home retrieving the part of the speech assigned there as they performed. The part of the speech, or whatever you need to remember, can be represented as a person, animal, goddess, or any animated being, interacting with the space in an amusing or surprising manner. The more vivid the image, the easier it is to recall. Information combined with emotion moves to long-term memory. We remember stories more easily than dry facts.
Our natural memory stores information randomly which makes it difficult to retrieve. Allocating information to a filing system makes it easy to retrieve. That is the principle of using memory palaces: it trains our memories.
There are many more ancient memory devices that we can use and encourage our students to use. We can call these mnemonic technologies. These were taught in ancient times, in the medieval period and the Renaissance. We can consider resurrecting their use to help students today.
Orality
Imagine you live in an ancient oral culture. Try not to think about oral cultures as lacking literacy but as fully functioning rich cultures; they didn’t know they lack literacy.
How does your tribe communicate important information? How is the knowledge of the tribe, knowledge about how to live, how to hunt for food, how and when to trade with other tribes, how to resolve problems, how to perform rituals to honour life events, genealogies, taxonomies of plants and animals, pharmacopoeia and timekeeping, how to navigate across deserts or oceans, how is the information communicated? How is it passed down from one generation to the next?
This knowledge may be embedded in memory devices which might be physical, like rock paintings, statues, totems, decorative art on masks or bowls, it could be told through dance and song, or might be related orally through language and stories. They created storage devices for information with layers of information, indexed and retrievable, taught in layers upon layers in a structured manner to each new generation. Knowledge was secret and protected, restricted to the initiated.
Let’s think about the range of ancient memory devices and then consider how we can use them to help our students learn.
We might categorise these mnemonic technologies as different types of encoding or inscribing information: through language, through performing arts, on small objects, and in our environment. A leader in this field is Lynne Kelly, Australia’s Senior Memory Champion, who has documented her 40 memory experiments and writes that Indigenous knowledge was embedded in a concrete reality.
Encoding in Language
All the sayings or slogans or quotes that you remember are memorable by design. In an oral culture, this could mean the difference between life and death. For example:
- Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning.
- Look before you leap.
- A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
- Forewarned is forearmed.
- A light purse makes for a heavy heart.
- Fail to plan, plan to fail.
You will notice some literary techniques used here: short sentences of monosyllabic words, alliteration, repetition, parallel constructions, use of opposites, epithets, rhythm and rhyme.
All the literary terms you learned in primary school are memory devices. Ancient oral memory devices became our literary devices, according to Walter J. Ong, who wrote Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of the Word in 1982.
Mnemonics are memory devices. The word mnemonics is based on the ancient Greek word for
memory. The Greek goddess of memory was Mnemosyne, daughter of Gaea (Earth) and Uranus (Sky), mother of Zeus and the Muses. These are personifications or anthropomorphosis or symbols of
physical realities and concepts. A mnemonic for spelling ‘mnemonic’ is “Memory Needs Every Method
Of Nurturing Its Capacity”. The memory devices, including acronyms, are types of mnemonics.
We naturally remember events and situations that we respond to with strong emotions or that are
surprising or have meaning for us. We remember stories because distinctive characters doing surprising things create a vivid mental image and have an emotional impact. Scholars now theorise
that the ancient mythology of Homer, which was epic oral poetry, could be stories based on memory
devices, wherein distinctive and lively characters interact with each other. For ancient mythological
stories, we remember the stories but not what they meant for ancient people. Eventually, we tell the
stories (mythologies) rather than knowing the material things to be remembered. Future generations
may believe it was important for us that “every good boy deserves fruit”, rather than what it is a memory
device for, that is, musical notation. The clarity around what is literal and what is figurative has
disappeared for us but would have been clear for people initiated in the knowledge. Epic poets like
Homer, who was thought to be blind, memorised up to 15,000 lines which were recited over several
days of performance. This is evidence of a trained memory.
Encoding in the performing arts
The use of song, dance, rhythmic music, chanting, or anything performed and repeated in rituals and
ceremonies, were ancient memory devices. Examples in teaching include singing the alphabet song
whist pointing to letters with corresponding pictures and chanting the multiplication tables. We could
expand on these from primary school uses to be more creative.
By asking students to create memory
devices we are asking them to shift modality to express their understanding of course content.
They
need to synthesise their knowledge. It is a good method of assessing understanding and creates
memorable learning experiences which are shared amongst class members. The more active and
embedded in the body the stronger the memory. Remember, Mnemosyne was mother to the nine
muses who inspire the creative and performing arts. It is hard to imagine a more concise and elegant
expression that memory belongs with the arts than this relationship of lineage.
Encoding in small objects
Knowledge may be embedded in memory devices which might be physical, like statues, totems, or
decorative art on garments, masks, Winter Counts (pictographs to mark the year), lukasa (memory boards), Khipu or Quipu (knotted strings), bowls or strings of beads. These might be felt by touch or
they might be visual prompts. For example, Aboriginal dot paintings are maps, even though we may
not have recognised them as such. In oral cultures, art is the presentation or materialisation of
culture.
Encoding in our environment
The same principle applies to larger expanded natural or built environments as touchstones for
memory.
Stonehenge could be a memory device around which rituals were performed. These rocks could have
been erected to replicate the homeplace of a tribe who moved to another region and brought the
implements on which they had inscribed their knowledge. It would be like moving a library. Lynne
Kelly lists the ten indicators of a memory site here.
Australian Aboriginal people embedded memory in landscape accompanied by songs. Songlines are
pathways in which knowledge is shared, memorised and recalled by walking and singing, with stops
for rituals and rock paintings, thereby embedding knowledge in landscape. Knowledge is filed in
country, between earth and sky.
Helping our students learn and connect online
In the physical classroom, we might use drama activities such as frozen pictures, soundscapes, or
games based on sports; the more active the better. Australian Memory Champion, Anastasia Woolmer, shows how she uses her dance training to scaffold her memory.
The
goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, was mother of the muses. Creativity supports memory.
In our teaching, we may have assessment tasks that are multimodal and weight-bearing. However,
we can also provide opportunities for students by setting up creative plenaries, either at the end of a
lecture or tutorial or as weekly, non-compulsory, contributions to a discussion board.
Examples might
include:
- Express a concept visually – post an image connecting it to your learning and use the image as an analogy.
- Create and post a video about something you have learned in the unit so far.
- Make a meme to express something you have learned in the unit so far.
- Share a mnemonic –
a device, such as a formula or rhyme, used as an aid in remembering. - Draw in stories from current affairs –
relate something about this unit to real-world current events. - Image analogy –
teacher uploads images of random objects and students explain how the objects relate to their learning. - Share your learning as a graphic organiser
- Share a mnemonic based on an object – see Unjaded Jade who used this ancient technique
without knowing how old it is. - Choose an object on campus – it may be a gargoyle, a garden, a cafe or a classroom, to encode
with learning from this unit – share with your classmates. - Abecedarian revision –
Starting with A, write a statement about content from the unit. The next
post starts with B, and so on. - How are you organising your notes for revision? See Unjaded Jade’s flashcards that combine
images (pictographs) with text. - Present a reflection on your learning in a nominated form
- Create games like bingo cards or Top Trumps about the unit content.
- What if? What if you did not know this information? Present this as a particular form.
Students using a discussion board in weekly non-compulsory activities learn together and form
a sense of belonging to a cohort of learners. They get to know each other as they synthesise their new
learning into their own interests. They can collect notes to revise before exams. These are neither
weighted activities nor tutorials.
This also ties to principles from Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
– providing i) multiple means of engagement, ii) multiple
means of representation, and iii) multiple means of action and expression to maximise your students’
ability to learn and express their learning. It maps to the higher-order outcomes in Bloom’s revised
taxonomy. For more ideas see Phil Beadle’s books Dancing About Architecture
and The Ultimate Plenary Book.
In using creative plenaries, ancient memory devices, we can also tie these types of activities
to our Indigenous Strategy.
As we understand more about how ancient peoples thought and learnt
and remembered, and how they encoded memory devices in place, we can begin to understand how
destroying or dividing sacred sites is like destroying the encyclopedias, libraries and universities of
ancient peoples. Ancient knowledge may be partially spiritual but is also situated in concrete reality.
This is true for Australia’s Indigenous peoples and provides a way to value their knowledge which is
filed in Country and recognise this intelligence.
Students of the University of Sydney report they lack a sense of belonging at the University. In student
surveys, the lowest-scoring category is Learner Engagement. The average positive rating for Learner
Engagement in 2020 in the Higher Education Student Experience Survey was 44%.
By asking students
to encode their learning into objects on campus, we can engineer a sense of belonging and even help our students file their knowledge on campus.
