No substitute for hard work

This is one of a series of posts on memorization of text; in particular in relation to trying out a new technique. 

Getting the first part of Ephesians chapter 3 under my belt took longer than I expected. When I came to join it to the rest of the chapter - which I’d learned some years ago - it was initially a bit messy getting back into it. However, after a couple of run-throughs, and checking the original text to see how my memory of it compared, it came back to mind without much difficulty.

This is pretty normal when I haven’t thought about a particular text for some time. I’ve now moved on to complete the rest of chapter 4. Again I’d learned the first half some years ago, and never completed the rest.

I’m using the newish method I’ve described in previous blogs. First, I do a read-through of the passage several times. Then I write out the initial letters, and aim to remember what I’ve just read through using only those letters. This comes reasonably easily, but I have to be aware that this is just being stored in the short term memory; it’s not yet at the point where it will stay if I leave it alone for a day.

Next day I’ll reinforce what I’ve learned, still keeping the initial letters as a check. What I find about using this as part of the system, is that it ensures that the words I remember are accurate, and that I don’t forget small words - or substitute other small words for them - or swap phrases around. That’s always been an issue in the past that’s taken some overcoming.  So the initial letters aspect is an improvement on what I’ve done previously.

But on its own, it’s not enough. The hard work of actually learning the material still has to be done, and this will take work over several days until it’s starting to hold. And then of course, I’ll need to keep coming back to – while lying in bed for instance, or at another part of the day.

In other words, there’s no easy method for long-term memorization.

I mentioned substitution above. What always intrigues me is the way the brain readily substitutes other words for the original ones. It’s often only when you check against the written text that you realise this is the case.

The brain has a remarkable capacity for doing this. I first noticed it, I think, with songs. When a word would go missing at the vital moment the brain would comfortably substitute a word that fitted neatly - often with the right number of syllables - and made good sense. The new word would be similar in meaning to the original.

This is a quite extraordinary feat on the part of the already extraordinary brain. Knowing that it’s not going to find the correct word in time, it brings up a synonym. Without missing a beat. How amazing is that?

Trying a new memory technique

In my last post I talked about a nonfiction book idea that I'm now pursuing instead of the children's fantasy I'd been writing. It's going to be focused around how we memorize text, such as poetry, chapters of the Bible, playscripts and more. In this post, and future ones, I'll be exploring some of the ideas that will go into the book. 

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

sword, and a King and Auntie Joyce holding hands.

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.

Death of a story

Some sad news...for me, if not for the few readers who actually read my kids' books. I'm abandoning book four in the Grimhilderness series. Something's just not happening, in spite of all my efforts, and I can't even blame procrastination anymore.

My 'sounding board' person stated about my idea of bringing back characters from the previous three books: 'I think it's fraught with pitfalls.' Not a bad sentence in itself, and maybe worth using somewhere.

Though that pronounced sentence sounds like a death knell in itself, the life had already gone out of this book. I'm putting it in the famous bottom drawer until one of my grandchildren discovers it and says, 'I wonder why granddad didn't pursue this extraordinarily good idea.'

Except they won't find in the bottom drawer, because there is no bottom drawer on the computer. Might have to invent a folder named that. Maybe I should just call it Atlantis, instead of 'Bottom Drawer.'

Meanwhile, on a more positive front, I've decided to pursue a nonfiction idea I've toyed with for some time. I've written about this subject on and off since I first started writing articles, and it's been a topic that's intrigued me for decades.

I'm not going to spill the beans about the idea in this blog post, but keep an eye out in future ones, where I'll start to discuss different facets of what I want to work on, and explore the ideas in short bursts.

An Afterthought

Procrastination
Ruins
Ordinary
Creatives'
Remarkable
Actions
So
That
In
Normal,
Average
Times
Inaction
Obliterates
Novels.

Still remembering after all these years

Courtesy DoctorsHangout.com

I've been talking a bit about memorising again in this blog, and have started to work my way back through the pieces - Scripture extracts and poems - that I've learnt over the years. After working over the last year on the huge Psalm 119 with its 176 verses (around about 360 lines; some verses have three lines as opposed to two) and its repetitions that vary marginally but can be confusing to keep in the right place, everything else seems a piece of cake.

It's been intriguing to come back to the pieces I'd memorised in the past - which I've revised more than a couple of times over the years - and find that they're mostly intact. I've now caught up with nine of them, and only one has proved hard to get back into. The others have mostly picked themselves up again during a half an hour's walk with the dog. Which has surprised me. I thought I might be starting almost from scratch, but in fact, the memory has kept hold of these lines over the years, parked them somewhere in the archives, went off and found them now that I need them again, and after a bit of dusting off and polishing, has brought them back into the main store.

As I say, only one has proved hard to get to grips with. Some of the lines were intact, but others took some real relearning. This was another Psalm, as it happens. Number 37, which, like Psalm 119, has quite a bit of repetition built into it. Furthermore, it doesn't flow logically from one thing to another. It's as if the writer decided he has a theme and he has to hammer it home, revolving around and around it until he's satisfied that he's covered all his bases. The fact that to the reader it seems like he's gone into a bit of overkill is another matter.

Another Psalm (139) came back much more easily, and there was a reason for this. Like 37, it has a focus and comes at it from all sorts of angles. But I'd first learned this psalm by adding a tune (of sorts) to it, and between the remembering of the tune and the revising of the words, it came back to me within the proverbial half-hour dog-walk.

All this is encouraging because I'm due to hit the big 70 next year (all things being equal, and God willing) and I'm heading into that time of life when things can go wrong with the body and the mind - if they haven't already. I could still get dementia/Alzheimer's (two blood relations, an aunt and an uncle, have had it) so I'm not assuming that doing all this memory work will necessarily stave off trouble with the brain. No one really knows, although we keep on saying that keeping the brain active and creative is supposed to help.

But apart from whatever might happen in the future, what this ability to remember stuff is saying is that the brain never stops enjoying working. The idea that our brains kind of go into old age mode after a while is a nonsense; it seems that they're much more likely to keep functioning even when the body is having problems if we encourage them. (By the way, I note that a recent movie is using the other piece of nonsense about us only ever using ten percent of our brains as its tagline. That bit of twaddle was discredited decades ago.)

Mattresses

One of my projects, when I finish all the others, is to write a book on memorisation, and techniques for memorising things, such as poems, Scripture, play scripts, speeches. I haven't yet seen a book that really gets to grips with most of these, though it may be out there hiding from me.

I was reminded of this (memory technique!) by seeing the phrase memory foam topper. I had to go and check it out. Turns out it merely means material that, when you put your hand behind it, retains the shape of your hand. Or, more correctly, when you're trying to get to sleep, it takes on the contours of your body. It sort of sounds useful, though I'm not entirely convinced. In the same advertising there's something called convoluted toppers, which turn out to look like a large extended egg carton that you sleep on. You can use the peaks up or down, depending on your preference. I don't see me sleeping on this stuff personally, although no doubt there are people who swear by it. I'd probably have nightmares about being an egg whose shell was breaking.

We've got a good solid mattress on our bed that we've now had for a number of years; it has give in it, but not enough to give way, so you're always feeling firmly supported. The bed at our daughter's house in Christchurch (where we were babysitting for the last few days) is similar: you have none of that awful sinking feeling when you get into it. The mattress we had for a number of years (before the current one) used to throw us together in the middle of the bed. This has its points but isn't ideal long-term.

I'm not sure that mattresses that take on the shape of your body are actually better for you than ones that give you firm support. Each to his/her own, I guess.

The Sunshine Boys

I've been offered a part in the Repertory Society's coming production of The Sunshine Boys, a play by Neil Simon.  I'd heard this was in the offing three or four weeks ago, and got a copy of the play to read.  It's very funny, sometimes in a kind of aggressive way, and the three main characters are great to play.  I'm doing Al, who doesn't appear till the second scene. He's the bête noire of the main character, who's being played by Bert Nisbet.  Bert's character is onstage for a great deal of the play - even when he's not onstage, he has lines that he has to fit in from offstage.  I'm relieved that I have several sections of the play when I get a break - and time to cram up on my next lot of lines, no doubt! 

Apropos of this, I've been memorising Psalm 119 over the last few weeks - it's a slow process, because there isn't a kind of narrative flow to the psalm.  The sometimes seemingly random statements - which use the same words over and over in different ways - don't easily connect to one another in the brain, so you have to have all sorts of links to keep track of things.  The part in the play is a piece of cake to learn by contrast with Psalm 119, so in a way I've been doing some mental exercises in preparation.  However, it's also the longest part I've ever learnt, I think, and will be kind of tough to deal with.

I was in a play last week on the life of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first missionary to leave New Zealand from the Baptist Mission Society.  I had only around twenty-five lines in the play all up, and for once I was word-perfect.  My aim is to be word-perfect in this play too, because I feel that if you don't get the words right, not only does it do a disservice to the author, but it also makes it harder to remember whether you've got the line quite in its proper shape.  The brain delights in muddling those who don't learn things exactly (it can muddle those who do know things exactly).  It may seem picky to want to learn the thing perfectly, but I know from experience that if I don't I'll have trouble at some point in the performances.

The great 119th

Over the years I've made several attempts to memorise that Psalm of Psalms, Number 119.  All have seemed doomed to failure, for various reasons. Firstly, it's the longest, but that shouldn't necessarily be an issue - I've been able to memorise poems and scripture that in sum are much longer, and in some cases more complex.  It's repetitive and uses the same words and ideas over and over in various ways.  It doesn't easily stick because the links between the statements (each verse being an independent statement) are few, and on only some occasions are there connections that help the memory process.

At present I'm working my way through the notes that Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher, provided in his book, The Treasury of David.  He also included, alongside his own notes, the commentaries of other divines, preachers and teachers - and the occasional explorer.  These notes are often illuminating, and it's surprising how much variance these writers can get out of what appears to be a psalm that winds around the same points like a labyrinth. 

Anyway I decided, while working slowly through these notes (often only a verse's worth a day) that I'd have another go at memorising the psalm.  My attempts in the past have involved number system approaches and other tricks of keeping stuff in the head, but this time I'm just working one step at a time, one verse (roughly) a day, using various mnemonics and other memory tricks, and I'm hoping that I'll have the intestinal fortitude to complete the task. 

I have some predecessors in the job.   Spurgeon notes:  Our best improvement of this sacred composition will come through getting our minds into intense sympathy with its subject. In order to this, we might do well to commit it to memory. Philip Henry's daughter wrote in her diary, "I have of late taken some pains to learn by heart Psalms 119:1-176, and have made some progress therein." She was a sensible, godly woman. Having done this, we should consider the fulness, certainty, clearness, and sweetness of the word of God, since by such reflections we are likely to be stirred up to a warm affection for it.

William Alexander, in "The Witness of the Psalms", written in 1877 notes that 'In the midst of a London season; in the stir and turmoil of a political crisis, 1819, William Wilberforce writes in his Diary— "Walked from Hyde Park Corner repeating the 119th Psalm in great comfort"'. 

 

Ruskin

Ruskin, who was a man often at odds with the religious views of his day, wrote: It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother taught me, that which cost me most to learn, and which was to my child's mind most repulsive— the 119th Psalm— has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the law of God. 

 

I've now got the first eight verses under my belt, and have to keep tightening my belt to keep them there.  They have a great habit of straying.  Nevertheless, I persevere.  Some 168 days (or more) down the track I may have the whole thing by heart...

Same meat, different gravy

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer has one of those eye-catching titles that publishers love (Driving with Plato, for instance) but which actually have little to do with the book's contents.   In fact it wasn't the title that caught my eye, but the subtitle: the art and science of remembering everything.  I've read a number of books on memorisation, and, since I'd been given a gift voucher for Marbecks by the cast of Grimhilda! I thought buying and reading another book on the subject (for free, as it were) wouldn't go amiss.

I'm glad I did, though initially I thought the book might just cover the same ground as many others.  At one point, Foer discusses an interview he had with Tony Buzan, the guru of memory work, and a person Foer doesn't seem to have too much time for.  He quotes something Buzan's chauffeur said about the writer's 120 or so books: Same meat, different gravy.  (I wonder if the chauffeur still has a job?)  Same meat, different gravy is pretty much how I've felt about Buzan's books too.  Not only does he uplift from writers of the past about memory work, but he repeats his own theories, and promotes his system of Mind Mapping to a great extent.  Foer notes, in relation to Mind Mapping: my own impression of Mind Mapping, having tried the technique to outline a few parts of this book, is that much of its usefulness comes from the mindfulness necessary to create the map. Unlike standard note- taking, you can't Mind Map on autopilot.  My sense is that it's a reasonably efficient way to brainstorm and organise information, but hardly the " ultimate mind- power tool" or "revolutionary system" that Buzan makes it out to be.  (page 206).  That's pretty much my own feeling about Mind Mapping, though Foer does give examples of its very positive use in at least one particular environment. 


Anyway, the book is only partly about Buzan (he's unavoidable if you're writing about memorisation), and apart from him Foer charts a great deal of territory that was unfamiliar to me.  He does write about doing memory work, and some of the techniques are familiar, but the rest of the book is full of intriguing real-life characters.  Foer began his interest in memorisation when he covered the US Memory Championship.  He became somewhat obsessed with the subject, and amazingly, a year later he was able to enter the Championship himself - and win!

Foer's mentor was an eccentric 25-year-old Englishman called Ed Cooke, a grandmaster in the International Memory Championships.  Foer was trained in the techniques of memorising as required for the US Championships, as well as being given a good deal of advice about the whole process of what it takes to train your memory to remember.   Foer was able to go to Cooke's home in the UK more than once - each occasion is a highlight in the book.

The book swings between narrative and discussion of the processes of memorisation - and the necessity of it, something that Foer and the others regard highly compared to those in charge of education in general.   Memorisation of material (especially stretches of important text) leads to greater understanding of your world and the culture you come from.  It's not surprising that the lack of training children to memorise has resulted in youngsters leaving school with a minimal understanding of who they are in the wider scheme of things.

There's an interesting section on savants, in particular Kim Peek (the original Rainman, who at the time the book was written had been memorising the telephone books in his local public library for ten years, and who had an extraordinary range of facts at this fingertips) and Britisher, Daniel Tammet, who I've written about previously on this blog.  Tammet comes in for a deal of criticism in the book: it seems that Foer thought he may not have been as 'autistic' as he claims.  Certainly Tammet is unusual not just in his ability to memorise and retain material, but in his social skills, which are superior to those most autistic people have.  He's worked hard to make them so, however, as he notes in both his books, and as Foer mentions here.

Tammet's abilities in the numerical area are queried: this is the particular area Foer is concerned about, and wonders whether Tammet hasn't just learned and practiced the techniques most memorists use.  He mentions in passing Tammet's ability to learn languages (Icelandic in a week) but doesn't elaborate on how Tammet is supposed to have used 'ordinary' techniques to learn these, which is a pity.  I think Tammet, in spite of Foer's criticisms, has extraordinary brain capabilities (caused by an epileptic fit as a child, it's thought) and is probably much more likely to have an 'opening' in his brain that allows him to achieve what he does.  It's usually the case that savants - or what might be called their opposites, people who have lost their ability to retain new memories (and these appear in the book too) - have had some major brain trauma as a child or adult.  This brain damage reconfigures the brain in some way, so that the normal balance is upset.  Sometimes this results in an extraordinary use of the brain; sometimes it debilitates it to a huge extent.

I must say I thoroughly enjoyed this book - admittedly it's a topic close to my heart.  I did feel a bit let-down, however, to find that in spite of there being a chapter entitled How to memorise a poem Foer didn't come up with anything terribly helpful in terms of learning how to memorise text.  This is something, in fact, that most writers on memory techniques avoid, preferring lists of things or remembering names instead.  But text, such as poetry, and Scripture, is what I find memorisation is most useful for, and the orators of the past learned huge chunks of text as a matter of course. This omission is curious, because at one point he mentions how his mentor, Ed, "had long ago learned the bulk of Paradise Lost by heart (at the rate of two hundred lines per hour, he told me), and had been slowly slogging his way through Shakespeare."  How Ed did this isn't really discussed, except in a brief page or two in this same chapter.  

All this talk of mental building (as opposed to metal building) has got me going on memorising stuff again.  I learned a poem yesterday (improving my approach to the memorising by incorporating some of what Foer writes about), and will get back to doing this regularly.  The more you memorise, of course, the better your retention gets, and even in the last two or three years I've found I've improved my retention rate for poems by the slightly different approaches I've been taking to learning them.  I'd love a more foolproof method, but in the meantime will have to go with what I've got.

Years ago, my wife and I worked through a series of cassette tapes on improving your memory by Kevin Trudeau.  He used pretty much the same techniques as Foer writes about here, and Buzan discusses in his 120 books.   We had a great time with these tapes, and certainly achieved what we were supposed to achieve, but lost our skills as soon as we stopped using them daily.  You have to keep at it.  Like any other skill, as soon as you start leaving it alone, the skill level drops.  Foer talks about the OK Plateau in relation to this.  This is when you think you're good enough at a skill and don't push yourself to improve further.  Most of us have skills of some sort at this level.

Good memorisation requires daily practice, and not only daily, but practice that pushes you further and further (it's like playing the piano and challenging yourself to keep on doing stuff that seems beyond you).  For years I've learnt poetry and Scripture while walking to work - or, now that I've retired, while walking the dog.  I've put this aside over the last few weeks because it felt as though my brain was tired with all the work we were doing on Grimhilda!  The result is I have to get up and go again.  Is it worth it?  I think so.  Foer gives plenty of reasons throughout the book as to why it's worth it (and competing in memory championships is the least of them).  One of the best, I've found, is that actually memorising a poem or chunks of Scripture means you get to grips with what they're saying, far more than you ever would if you just read these off the page.  If for no other reason, that's why I'll keep practicing.