I am interested in hearing about favorite memory quotes/inspiration memory phrases… Some of my favorite two are:
“Memory is an indescribable good; for this reason, human skill cannot find the necessary words of praise to extol it; for he who remembers well, by either natural or artificial means, gleams like the sun and, like light in the darkness, provides brightness.” - The Medieval Craft of Memory - Boncampagno da Signa (circa 1170-1240)
“Once a day…call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge.” - Isaac Watts “improvement of the mind”
I am always surprised when I meet people who say its “creativity” or “how to use knowledge” rather then memory which is important… How can you have the former without the latter? And if memory is then required for creativity or how to use knowledge then wouldn’t it be a skill desired to be proficient in?
I have said this elsewhere on the forum (though not in these exact words), but it bears repeating …
I have heard it said that knowledge is the lowest form of intelligence, and memorizing is the lowest form of learning. I think they are better thought of as the foundation upon which intelligence and learning are built.
And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses. There is stored up, whatsoever besides we think, either by enlarging or diminishing, or any other way varying those things which the sense hath come to; and whatever else hath been committed and laid up, which forgetfulness hath not yet swallowed up and buried. When I enter there, I require what I will to be brought forth, and something instantly comes; others must be longer sought after, which are fetched, as it were, out of some inner receptacle; others rush out in troops, and while one thing is desired and required, they start forth, as who should say, “Is it perchance I?” These I drive away with the hand of my heart…
It is true that memory sits as the foundation of usage of knowledge. However, it is also the case that good memory is not always required.
This would highly depend on what profession/occupation people are in, reason being that some subjects, such as let’s say history, require you to learn massive amounts of information. Here, having memory may very well be more important than being able to use the knowledge you gain from history, especially if you are just studying it for fun or for some form or record keeping.
There’re also fields, where you pretty much have a very few fixed rules, like axioms in math, from which everything else is built through the usage of these little memory pieces.
I do think that both memory and the ability to use it/apply it in varying situations is of high importance, but specific tasks in your day may require one more than the other. However it is true that in now’s era it feels that people neglect memory too much. I mean…having good memory + knowing how to use knowledge vs only one of the two sounds like a better deal to me!
Lay up in the treasury of your mind all that you can, like a man aiming at filling a vessel.
—St. Thomas in Sixteen Precepts
We do not live by memory, we use our memory to live.
—Antonin Sertillanges. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife.
“It rewires your head and keeps you in company with gods.”
—Mary Karr on memorization as Eucharist
“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.”
—Walter Brueggeman, theologian
“It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I am free because I remember.”
—Abhinavagupta, tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic
But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another ; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding ;and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”
—Plato in Phaedrus Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical Library 36. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. pp 563-564 Plato, Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus | Loeb Classical Library.
“My father stopped hitting me for my grades,” Mr. Lorayne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. “He hit me for other things.”
I am always surprised when I meet people who say its “creativity” or “how to use knowledge” rather then memory which is important… How can you have the former without the latter? And if memory is then required for creativity or how to use knowledge then wouldn’t it be a skill desired to be proficient in?
From a neurobiological perspective, I would argue this is right.
However, language is rife with imprecisions.
If we conceive of memory as the synaptic, neuronal, and molecular changes that encodes learning in the brain, then creativity is unambiguously proportional to memory.
If we conceive of “memory” as equivalent to how people view “memorization” as memorizing 1:1 text definitions then it is not. I’d say the problem is mainly that people use language in sloppy ways, and that there is no convergence on what “memory” means.
I’ll share this quote from Moonwalking with Einstein
What would it mean to have all that otherwise-lost knowledge at my fingertips? I couldn’t help but think that it would make me more persuasive, more confident, and, in some fundamental sense, smarter. Certainly I’d be a better journalist, friend, and boyfriend. But more than that, I imagined that having a memory like Ben Pridmore’s would make me an altogether more attentive, perhaps even wiser, person. To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
As someone who memorizes terms and concepts related to metaphysics… I can only conclude that I am not an actor! If ontological understanding is every coming, I haven’t seen the script by which to act, let alone understand…
Which leads me to some fave quotes from A Question of Memory (Berglas).
One is that memory is not a unitary mechanism, but a behavior.
The other is that each must interpret the tradition of on one’s own, emphasis on interpretation being itself a behavior grounded in doing.
