John Sutton, December 1999

Not far into the new millennium, many of us may be taking so-called 'smart drugs' to improve our memory. There's a long history to the idea of artificially enhancing our capacity to remember. The scientist and architect Robert Hooke, who was the experimenter for the early Royal Society of London, took silver filings and mercury to improve the conduction of ideas along the coils of memory in his brain. But a range of less painful methods, which you can still find in pop psychology books, derive from the ancient and medieval arts of memory.

Shakespeare has the Ghost tell Hamlet a horrid, dire story about the wickedness of Hamlet's mother Gertrude and his uncle Claudius. On departing, the Ghost bids Hamlet 'remember me'! Hamlet's response evokes these old memory traditions:

Hamlet: .... Remember thee?
    Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
    In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
    Yea, from the table of my memory
    I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
    All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
    That youth and observation copied there,
    And thy commandment all alone shall live
    Within the book and volume of my brain,
    Unmix'd with baser matter. ...

From Roman times, orators, monks, and scholars trained themselves in bizarre and fantastic techniques known as 'local memory' or 'place memory’. For instance, you would construct in your imagination a large palace. This palace has long corridors with rooms off each side. This construction gives you a permanent set of memory rooms, and memory locations, once you've internalized this building in your mind. Then, when you need to commit something to memory - a speech, say, or a list - you can mentally place in each room, on either side of the corridor, a fixed number of items to recall. In order to remember everything, when you're giving your speech, you then walk in imagination down the corridors, entering each room in order, and simply reading off whatever you have previously stored there. For your next speech, you'd then just store new points or new thoughts in each existing room.

The art of memory sounds crazy at first: what's the point of learning this memory palace or whatever as well as having to learn your speech? But the system is infinitely flexible. Once you've successfully built these locations in to your own memory architecture, you can use them for any purpose whatever. The art of memory in effect allows you to construct, or to turn your mind into, a truly random access memory system.

In other variants of the memory techniques, medieval monks used grids, plans, or theatres instead of memory palaces: but the principle was the same. Items in memory are rigidly ordered, inscribed in a kind of inner writing (in 'the book and volume of your brain') to be inspected only at will. As you walk down the corridors of your own memory palace, you are in control of your own memories, in control of your personal past. You are an executive, a self, quite separate from the contents of your mind.

What was the need for these strange arts of memory? Natural, unaided memory, thought the Renaissance scholars, is prone to confusion. The 17th-century English pirate and philosopher Kenelm Digby described the terrible and frustrating difficulty we often find in extracting a memory from the brain without such artificial training. As Digby put it, when the mind seeks an idea,
    it shaketh again the liquid medium they all floate in, and rouseth every idea lurking in
    remotest corners of the brain; and continueth this inquisition and motion, till it be
    grown weary with tossing about the multitude of little inhabitants in its numerous
    empire, and so giveth over the search, unwillingly and displeasedly.

This is why natural memory had to be supplemented or replaced. In the memory palaces, every idea can be kept pure and isolated. With each in its own special place, or at its own specific address, no memories could ever get mixed up or interfere with each other. This became a matter of ethics, not just a practical tool. The true memory artist would never be haunted by reminiscences, or troubled by the intrusion of unwanted thoughts into the calm of deliberate, tranquil recollection. The ideal was as optimistic, and perhaps as doomed, as Hamlet's claim that the Ghost's command would remain 'all alone' in his brain.

The arts of memory thus required the adepts to impose a strange kind of cognitive discipline. The palace of memory was an internal prosthesis, an artificial aid imported into the mind. By freezing the contents of memory, and locking them into their separate rooms, the medieval scholars laboriously tried to civilize and tame their own minds, turning the chaotic dynamics of natural memory into more rigid, static systems, where, they hoped, thoughts about the good and the true could be branded, 'unmix'd with baser matter'.

Next piece: Descartes.

Last updated 28 May 2000.