I’ve been memorizing poetry and Scripture for several
decades now, and am always interested in hearing about alternative methods of memorizing.
Recently I came across an idea for the first time which was
touted as being a great way of learning text really quickly. The idea isn’t
new; in fact I’ve just found in a Facebook discussion on memorization that
an acting friend told me he'd been using it for years.
This is how it goes:
You read through a particular speech a few times, getting to
know something of the words, but not memorizing it.. Then you sit
and write down the initial letters of each word, along with any punctuation. With poetry,
it’s good to stick to the layout of the poem as well.
These initial letters become a kind of code. It's surprising how
quickly you can read through these letters and remember the text you’re
learning.
That’s good, and seemingly some people with better memories
than me can be word perfect the next day when they have to deliver a speech,
using this method alone.
Or so it appears.
I tried it for the first time on Psalm 63, which happened
to be the next item I wanted to learn.
I broke the text down into four sections and only worked on one section
each day, over four days. The first day it all seemed very easy, and I could recite back the words with relative ease. But before the
day was out, I’d pretty much forgotten what I’d learned. Away from the code, I had
smatterings of it, but there were gaps and I wasn’t sure exactly what some words
were or how they fitted together.
A little discouraged, I came back to the first section the
next morning, and, using the initial letters I’d written out again, found I could
quickly remember the lines. So I carried on with the second section.
Next morning, the first section – without using the initial
letters – was kind of there, but not really learned. The second was mostly missing. And so it went on, until I’d
worked through all four sections.
By the time I'd got through all four sections I found I had to start working on the lines in my
usual way: checking for similar letters in a phrase, for words that rhymed with
each other (wings, sings and clings all turned up within two lines),
for connections to other pieces I’d learned (my Auntie Joyce is a usual
reminder of rejoice and has been used
when learning another Psalm), for words that remind me of something else, and
so on. All long-established techniques.
The thing was still not really sticking…
Lying in bed on the sixth day (or thereabouts) I decided to
use the technique known variously as the
Memory Palace or the Mind Palace or the Place of Loci. All of them basically
mean using real places that you know well in real life and letting them be the
link to getting you from A to B in the piece.
I chose the road outside our house, leading to my neighbour’s
fence (where my generous neighbours, in imagination, were standing), upstairs
in my house where I was lying in a bed, and then to my other neighbour’s place,
where relationships between us aren’t so good.
These were starting points, but I needed to add in other
things: the motor scooter shed in our drive, a hand mower being lifted over the
fence, eating a marrow without cutting it, someone wielding a
 |
| A substantial marrow |
Now the thing started to be more fluent. And now, a few days later, it’s
at the point where I’m much more likely to remember it than I was using
the initial letter code on its own.
So the point is, I think, that if you want to learn
something and retain it, you have to use a variety of means to keep it alive in
your head.
I’ll talk about something called retrieval in my next post. This is another essential
element to retaining things that have been learned.
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