connect this to:

The helps whereof by this art memorative, they would prove to be as effectual, by these conceived fictions in the eye of the mind,12 as those we remember by the visible eye of the body, for example whereof say they, concerning the latter we read in the holy Scriptures of 12 stones, that were erected in the river Jordan in memory of the wonderful transpassage of the Israelites, Josh. 24.27.—The Memory Arts in Renaissance England by William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane, and Grant Williams

Digitized copy of the original Secret Memory Techniques

青水. 新日本古典籍総合データベース. Kyoto, 1771. https://kotenseki.nijl.ac.jp/biblio/100345690/viewer/3

Seisui. Secret Memory Techniques, Kyoto 1771. Translated by Michael Gurner. Canberra, Australia, 2022.

https://www.dalekeiger.net/tironean-shorthand/

Potential links between Tironian shorthand and mnemonics of the 1800s?

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.241504/page/n247/mode/2up

I can't tell what the publication date is on this (the original book was 1926, but this edition appears to be 1940s+) but there's a fantastic advertisement for Pelmanism in the back of this Pelican edition of Beatrice Webb's My Apprenticeship.

Addendum:<br /> A few pages before this in the advertisements is a mention that the list of Pelican books listed is only to 1938, so this was likely a 1938 publication, which also puts it into a time period in which Bruno Furst was operating.

The publication of this advertisement in a text which may have been read by students and academics is a fascinating link of these practices, though her appendix on note taking was not included in this particular volume (1 of 2 apparently).

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Christof Ludwig Poehlmann aka Christopher Louis Pelman (Anglicized) aka Ludwig Poehlmann (as known to Bruno Furst in Germany)

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Link to: - http://tw.boffosocko.com/#Christof%20Ludwig%20Poehlmann

Nice to see the taxi driver study pop up here.

Maguire EA, Valentine ER, Wilding JM, Kapur N. Routes to remembering: The brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience. 2003;6(1):90–5. pmid:12483214 https://doi.org/10.1038/nn988

I've thought this before, and sees like I've possibly read, though not captured it. Is there any solid proof of this fact?

Rat studies of mazes show this sort of spacial memory, but are there similar learned studies in lower animals? C. elegans, drosophila, slime molds, etc.?

Abysmally sad that this is presented without the context of any of the work over the last century and a half of spaced repetition.

I wonder that this point slipped past the reviewers and isn't at least discussed somewhat narratively here.

How much history is covered here?

Will mnemotechniques be covered here? Spaced repetition? Note taking methods in the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions?

The First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders read the stars by Duane Hamacher, with Elders and Knowledge Holders

https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/academic-professional/cultural-studies/The-First-Astronomers-Duane-Hamacher-with-Elders-and-Knowledge-Holders-9781760877200

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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>LynneKelly</span> in Un-Stupiding Myself - a Memory Training Journal - Memory Training Journals - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>03/14/2022 18:43:38</time>)</cite></small>

I'm all in on this now...

This likely underlies some of the thoughts I've had about dance and movement and which are touched on by indigenous cultures as documented in Lynne Kelly's work.

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/how-do-you-call-these-techniques-on-the-art-of-memory-forum/67030

It would be nice to have a comprehensive list of techniques and canonical names for them.

To more easily memory text verbatim, practice methods for reclling the information rather than simply repeating it.

Lynne Kelly describes her experiences with some elementary school students using her rapscallions, songlines, and a woodhenge to memorize their math and social studies classwork and present it to their peers.

Personally, I had assumed from Kelly's work that individual knowledge keepers may have done this. Particularly in the cases of the most advanced and protected knowledge based on the private spaces she discussed.

The question about archaeology being able to tell us is a very good one. Nothing immediately comes to mind, but it's worthwhile to look at this. Could some artifacts indicate different artists through their own craft be a way of differentiation?

With some continued clever searching today along with some help from an expert in Elizabethan English, I've found an online version of Robert Copland's (poor) translation from the French, some notes, and a few resources for assisting in reading it for those who need the help.

The text:

• The art of memory, that otherwyse is called the Phenix A boke very behouefull and profytable to all professours of scyences. Grammaryens, rethoryciens dialectyke, legystes, phylosophres [and] theologiens. Petrus, Ravennas, ca. 1448-1508 or 9., Copland, Robert, fl. 1540-1547. [Imprynted at London: In Fletestrete at the sygne of the George by Wyllyam Myddylton, [ca. 1545]]

This is a free text transcription and will be easier to read than the original black-letter Elizabethan English version.

For those without the background in Elizabethan English, here are a few tips/hints:

• Short 3 page article/crash course on Middle English
• You can learn to read Middle English

For the more obscure/non-obvious words:

• Middle English Dictionary (online) from University of Michigan
• Project Gutenberg Middle English Dictionary

Finally, keep in mind that the letter "y" can often be a printer's substitution for the English thorn character) Þ, so you'll often see the abbreviations yͤ for "the" and yͭ as an abbreviation for "that".

Copland's original English, first printing of Ravenna can be accessed electronically through a paid Proquest account at most universities. It is listed as STC 24112 if you have access to a firewall-free site that lets you look at books on Early English Books Online (EEBO). A photocopy can be obtained through EEBO reprints on Amazon. Unless you've got some reasonable experience with Elizabethan black-latter typography, expect this version to be hard to read. It isn't annotated or modernized.

@ehcolston I'm curious to hear what the Wilson/Pena text looks like. I'm guessing it's not scholarly. I think Wilson is a recent college grad and is/was a publishing intern at a company in the LA Area. I'm not sure of Pena's background. I suspect it may be a version of the transcribed text I've linked with a modest updating of the middle English which they've self-published on Amazon.

Of course, given the multiple translations here, if anyone is aware of a more solid translation of the original Latin text into English, do let us know. The careful observer will notice that the Latin version is the longest, the French quite a bit shorter, and the English (Copland) incredibly short, so there appears to be some untranslated material in there somewhere.

I haven't searched all the versions of Peter of Ravenna's name (yet) in all locations, but I recall hearing of an Italian version as well (and it's likely that there was one given its popularity).

A bit of digging around this morning has uncovered a digital copy of a French translation in the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé (Paris).:

• 1545: L'art de memoire qui est aultrement inscript le phenix livre treffort utille & profitable a tous professeurs des sciences, grammariens, rheteurs, dialetiques, legistes philosophes & theologiens

Given the date and the scant 16 pages, this is likely to be the edition which was the source of Robert Copland's English translation. As the edition doesn't appear to have an author, it's possible that this was the reason that Copland's translation didn't list one either.

The Latin -> French -> middle English -> modern English route seems an awfully muddy way to go, but without anything else, it may have to suffice for some of us for the moment.

No offense, but do you expect every professor to take a field trip with their class each lecture? Let’s be realistic here. How about the students get a workshop on it in the first week (and a book for all I care) and then learn to apply these techniques as they see fit outside the classroom.

The article is about applying these techniques at the highest levels of education, at the point where the learners have already gone through 16+ years of intensive study. I wouldn't expect college professors to go on outings. But why not center these techniques and make them more mainstream at the lowest levels of education starting in kindergarten and for the first six years of formal education? Then they can become daily habits to make learning at the higher levels far easier.

The interesting, and all-too-often ignored, feature of most colleges and universities is that they are on expansive campuses with large numbers of buildings, grounds, and surrounding neighborhoods which could specifically be used to create massive memory palaces or extended local songlines.

Or not… some people prefer rote learning for certain actives

Some may prefer rote memorization, though I don't personally know many who do, and I expect that most probably don't. This research study specifically underlines evidence that these Australian methods are easier and more "fun". The bigger issue is that the vast majority aren't presented with any options for alternate methods anywhere in their educations. I would suspect that the vast majority here in the forums are 15 years old or far beyond by the time they hear about these alternate methods.

[...] others find “song, dance, painting” a little too new age to take it seriously… not passing judgement, but everyone is entitled to their opinion.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion and you certainly have yours. I feel as if you have, however, passed judgment and simultaneously denigrated them (in my opinion) by labeling them "new age". The research article itself states:

The foremost consideration with respect to teaching of the Australian Aboriginal memory technique is the cultural safety aspect and respect for the peoples who developed this approach. In our program, the teaching of this program was administered by an experienced Australian Aboriginal Educator, who was able to integrate the method into our teaching program, while simultaneously preventing several breaches of cultural etiquette and terminology which could easily have compromised the material had it been delivered by a non-Australian Aboriginal educator (TY), however well-intentioned.

They're specifically mentioning here the lack of respect and attention (usually from Westerners, which I suspect includes you) that these methods are given outside of their home culture. I would suggest that you don't value these approaches because they weren't centered or focused on in your own cultural education. As a result you're missing out on the value they do contain, of which the research study under discussion provides direct peer reviewed evidence. Incidentally the metrical system you wish were centered is exactly the sort of technique that is already built into many indigenous systems and was very likely even embedded into ancient Greek culture, but it has long since disappeared and was nearly completely snuffed out by (religious) Western education reformers in the late 1500's.

I'd recommend looking at Dr. Lynne Kelly's texts The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments (Pegasus, 2017) and Songlines: The Power and Promise (First Knowledges) (Thames & Hudson, 2020) (with Dr. Margo Neale) for more details on some of these cultural traditions which have a more nuanced and respectful approach.

Too often here in these forums, and in life, people treat these these mnemonic techniques as "clever hacks", when, for many current and past cultures, they were a literal way of both life and survival.

Let’s face it, be it law school, med school, or b-school… students manage to graduate with or without techniques at the moment, so it’s not like we desperately need memory techniques in higher education.

This is an incredibly privileged perspective. Sure these students do manage to graduate, but you're also looking a minuscule proportion of the most highly educated people on the planet. For perspective, in 2018–2019, 21,622 applicants were accepted to allopathic (MD) medical schools out of the 52,777 who applied, for an overall acceptance rate of 41% in the United States. The accepted people represent roughly 0.0003 percent of the world's population. This number doesn't get much bigger (or rosier) when you expand the population to those in all graduate schools world wide.

I've got several hundred friends and acquaintances who did either MDs or combined MD/Ph.D. programs and very few would say their studies were easy. Why not make it easier? Why not make these methods more widespread? Why not provide them to everyone? Imagine the number who could have not only an easier time, but greater knowledge, (and more fun!)? Very few of the practicing physicians I know could still diagram the TCA-cycle described in the paper, but if you could have a more knowledgeable physician treat you, wouldn't you want that? Wouldn't you want a more educated and happier society all around?

…I’d call that stone garden a “memory palace.” Is there an outdoor element or something that memory palaces supposedly don’t have? I really don’t get how this is different. I use outdoor memory palaces all the time

The stone garden certainly is a memory palace for those who wish to use it that way. However, from the Australian Aboriginal perspective, there are additional layers of narrative, movement, (and potentially song, dance, and art, etc.) layered on top of it to enrich the experience. It's unfortunate that the paper doesn't go deeper into the subtleties or differences, but they're also making at least some attempt to show respect to the culture from which the technique stems. This is a place where Drs. Kelly and Neale's Songlines text may help provide additional depth and perspective, though even it would be limited in comparison with embedding yourself within a culture to have indigenous elders to teach you directly.

@MMScotofGlasgow, Hopefully it's not too late...

Francis Yates discusses Petrus Ramus as an educational reformer in Chapter 10 and onward in The Art of Memory. There she outlines Ramus' crusade against images (based in part on the admonition from 4 Deuteronomy about graven images) and on their prurient use (sex, violence, etc.) which were meant to make things more memorable. Ramism caught on in the late 1500's and essentially removed memory by the root from the subject of rhetoric of which it had been an integral part. Ramus felt that structure and rote memorization would suffice in its stead. As a result the method of loci decreased in prominence in schools and disappeared from the scene based on educational reform which was primarily pushed by Huguenot/Protestants. I've not read anywhere that the practice was ever banned, it just fell out of fashion due to these reforms.

I'm sure it didn't help that printed books became ever cheaper during/after this time and so the prior need to memorize for those reasons wasn't helped either.

I'm sure another confounding factor was Erasmus' Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (1512) which dramatically popularized the keeping and use of commonplace books by the learned and literate. These became a regular place in which people collected and kept their thoughts and ideas rather than memorizing them as they may have done in the past.

I've found several digital copies in Latin:

• 1491: Phoenix seu De artificiosa memoria
• 1533: Phoenix seu De artificiosa memoria
• 1533: Phoenix seu De artificiosa memoria
• 1567: Phoenix seu De artificiosa memoria
• 1508 Margarita philosophica nova (Joann Gruninger, Strasbourg) which contains a copy of the text among others

I've come across a recent text The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology edited by William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane, and Grant Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2016). (Google books should let you preview most of it, if it helps.) It contains an extended excerpt of about 5 pages of The Phoenix from the opening three chapters of Robert Copland's translation, which they consider weak. They also include a synopsis of the other 9 chapters. Copland apparently didn't acknowledge Ravenna as the original author, not did he supply the name of the French text he purports to translate.

I've got feelers out to a few classicists to see if anyone has a personal translation from the Latin that they're willing to share.

As for the size of the text, I know what you mean. I've recently acquired a 1799 edition of Richard Grey's Memoria Technica which is both smaller and denser than I had expected.

This also reminds me that I've been wanting to re-publish copies of some of the public domain classical memory texts (and/or translations) in modern typesetting/binding as a series. If anyone wants to lend a hand with creating/editing such a thing let me know.

songlines != memory palaces

Place names and songlines together reminds me of a great BBC segment "Disappearing Welsh Names" I saw recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLQ6XlG0MQ4

It highlights by analogy the value of indigenous culture, knowledge, and creativity which the survival of songlines also provides us with. (It also saddens me because it starkly reminds me of all the knowledge and languages we've lost already.)

I've been learning Welsh since the pandemic started and just a few simple words of Welsh has given me a far greater appreciation of places in the UK and what they mean. It's helped not only to expand my vocabulary, but increased my creativity in creating local songlines. It's also made it much easier to learn to say and remember the town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

<table> <thead><tr> <th>Cymraeg</th> <th>Meaning</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Aber</td> <td>Where one river flows into another body of water (example: Aberystwyth)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ban, Bannau</td> <td>Peak(s), beacon(s)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Bron</td> <td>Breast of a hill</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Bryn</td> <td>Hill</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Caer</td> <td>Fort</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Cas</td> <td>Castle</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Crug</td> <td>Hill, tump</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Cwm</td> <td>Valley</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Derw, Deri</td> <td>Oaks</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Dinas</td> <td>Hill-fort</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Dyffryn</td> <td>Valley, vale</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ffin</td> <td>Border, boundary</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Isaf</td> <td>Lower, lowest</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Llan</td> <td>Church, church land (often followed by the name of the saint to whom the church was dedicated, eg, Llangatwg - a place with a church dedicated to St Catwg)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Morfa</td> <td>Salt-marsh</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Nant</td> <td>Brook, dingle</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Pont</td> <td>Bridge</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Porth</td> <td>Gate</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Rhos</td> <td>Moor</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Tyle</td> <td>Hill-side, ascent</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Uchaf</td> <td>Upper, highest</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ystrad</td> <td>Vale</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

It also uncovers quirks of place names like Breedon on the Hill which translates from Brythonic, Saxon, and Modern English to "Hill Hill on the Hill" and crystalizes, as if in amber, the fact that Brythonic, Saxon, and English speakers all conjoined for a time on a hill in England. Similarly there's also Barnack Hills in England which translates from old Celtic (barr), Scottish Gaelic (cnoc) and English as "flat topped hill hill hills". It's almost hillarious.

Perhaps you could memorize all the constellations and potentially see if they could serve as double duty?

I've found The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H.A Rey (yes, the creator of Curious George) to be a comprehensive list with a tremendous number of pictures, charts, useful stories, mythology, etc. for memorizing all the major constellations and many of the common star names and related data. It's ostensibly aimed at a novice audience, but one might also think he was targeting the mnemonists among us as well.

Should it help in your researching image formation, the phenomenon you mentioned is called pareidolia.

@doughoff Thanks for kicking this off. I'm relieved to see someone else occupied (personally I'm worried) with this topic.

I've recently begun some work on memorizing birds in North America. Bird song is one of the more intimidating areas for me as I have absolutely zero knowledge of music beyond a pair of functioning ears.

In my early searches for a comprehensive text to work from, I did note that the book Birds of North America (Golden Field Guides series) by Chandler S. Robbins, & Bertel Bruun, and Herbert S. Zim (St. Martin's Press, 2001) was one of the few guides that dealt with birdsong and had a short section on the subject in the front and listed visual sonograms for most birds. Sadly, the book didn't include audio which I think may have been incredibly helpful in matching the sound with the visuals.

I have bookmarked a few websites that deal with it, though there are sure to be many others that match birdsong audio to a visual representation of some sort. Here are a few of those:

• http://earbirding.com/blog/archives/category/spectrograms
• https://www.audubon.org/news/start-using-spectrograms-read-bird-songs-and-calls
• http://donaldkroodsma.com/?page_id=49

Initially I imagined that through direct experience in listening and viewing these sonograms, I might come to some sort of facility with them. Next I would potentially rely on the concept of pareidolia to come up with some images to attach to them.

In any case, I thought I'd sketch out my general plan and some of the resources and words I'd come across to see if they may be of help to others. I'm looking forward to seeing what others may have come up with or used as well. Birdsong will assuredly be the last piece of the puzzle that I build into my bird repertoire.

Incidentally, after having done some significant library searching and bird guide/handbook review, I've chosen Birds of North America, Francois Vuilleumier (Dorling Kindersley, 2020, ISBN:978-0-7440-2053-3) as my "bible" for it's structuring of bird families, photographs, descriptions, and variety of data about birds and their ranges. It's about as comprehensive (for my area of the world) as anything out there, is well laid out, and sort of makes its own method of loci based on page layouts and color schemes. It is too large to take out into the field easily, but I find that working on storing the data is easier in the comfort of the house than the wilderness.

I'll also note that it has representative visual flight diagrams which may be relatively easy to categorize and therefore memorize bird flight patterns. If others have better or more detailed resources for this, I'd love to know those as well.

Such a study might be more profitably done first at the undergraduate level in a pre-med course and then followed up 1-3 years later at the graduate medicine level. In particular, there are many universities that are pre-admitting undergraduates to their graduate programs where these studies, though still possibly small, could be done with reasonable controls and better retention to cover the time differential cases. This is especially the case since many of these biological processes like the TCA cycle, etc are repeated at both levels of education.

This idea has been known historically for centuries. It's only with education "reforms" in the 1500's that things have become markedly worse in Western education.

Forget medical students and patients, this could broadly be applied to everyone everywhere! Why limit it to simply medical education?

I'll have to bump up Tyson Yunkaporta's work on my reading list, particularly the cited text:

Yunkaporta T. Sand talk: how Indigenous thinking can save the world. Melbourne, Victoria: Text Publishing Company; 2019.

What were the others using? Only the major system perhaps? Or were they the marginal under-performers?

If there were solid performers in the other 10%, what method(s) were they using?

Here's the tl;dr version of the study:

Australian Aboriginal memorization methods >> Western method of loci methods

This was not, or should not have been in question, however, it's always nice to have studied it and have data to back up the assertion.

However, I suspect that without prompting or repeated uses and examples, the percentage of students who actually do is likely abysmally poor.

This is a pretty mean feat given the complexities of what the citric acid cycle entails, even with a story of what it is and what the starting and ending reactants are, and a basic starting knowledge of the organic chemistry involved.

In my experience almost all microbiology students and medical students dislike this commonly memorized cycle.

How can something like this that so many people find worthwhile be so neglected by any school, much less a medical school?

Our educational system is really failing our students.

Damn you Peter Ramus!

This is a bit surprising, though the (N=3) numbers were so small.

It also makes me wonder if the Aboriginal method training included a spaced repetition component of any sort as traditionally it likely would, though it's highly likely that novices memorizing a random list of butterflies wouldn't have reviewed over their performance a week, a month, or other intervals later.

No instruction about the five senses, exaggeration, hyperbole, etc?

Given how much I see missing here in the Western method which I'm more versed, I wonder what I'm missing with the Australian method which I'm well aware of, but not as versed?

Were students asked or told if they'd be tested with this on long-term memory?

Personally, I'd have used a simple major system method to memorize such a list for short term memory, but would have used other techniques for long term memory.

Doing this specifically prevents the non-mnemotechniques group from adding their own visual loci in the form of annotations, drolleries, etc.

What was the instruction? How long did it last? Was it reviewed at a later interval?

Keep in mind that these numbers are likely to show even greater disparity in the broader population as the test group, based on their selection as advanced medical students, are likely to be some of the smartest and best studied students to begin with.

I'm curious if Lynne Kelly or others have looked into these areas of research with their Memory work? She's definitely posited that singing and dancing as well as creating art helps indigenous cultures in their memory work.

I'm also reading this and wondering about memory techniques and methods and how these may interact beneficially.