A REALLY important point. I am finding it hard to explain what happens in my head. That is why I yelled the REALLY. I am implementing my mnemonics more along the lines of the indigenous cultures I am studying than the less complex methods of the Greeks and modern memory champions. Indigenous cultures use a complex of integrated methods which is so far from linear that it is impossible to describe in writing. Or in linear speech. The difficulties I am having explaining to you reflects what one of my Aboriginal colleagues told me when we were talking about how this works for his people. I understand his frustration! Thank you!
In the history block, I would only have one date per person. I only want the general idea. So if it is a ruler, I’m only going to put in the date of the start of their reign. The end will be indicated by the start of the next. I won’t put in births and deaths.
If I want more complexity, then it may be that I use another device in association, or a longer story or a song. As I walk the history block, I would not reel off everything stored or I would end up walking at a crawl and my mind gets overwhelmed. I select. I now understand things said by indigenous people about recalling. We ask them questions our way: what do you know about kangaroos? They then extract from all sorts of sources to answer. The answer will often include performance. Australian Aboriginal people work more by space, so they will tell you all the knowledge associated with one location in Country. They extract the information they need at any given time. It would not be everything they need on a given animal, say.
So if I happen to be really interested in Jane Austen, then my knowledge of her will be in the History walk, but also associated with other systems I have going, including sets of cards representing characters, like the mythological characters which form the stories of indigenous cultures. I then would add layer upon layer to my Jane Austen character. She might also be in England in the country walk. So I have linked her the set of steps which is the UK. I don’t extract all of the Brits every time I go past the steps, but if I want to know where Jane Austen lived, I get the steps from the Jane Austen character mnemonics and then that gives me England. I have no idea if this makes any sense at all. It has all become so complicated because all my different systems interlink.
I need to do it this way to try and understand the way indigenous cultures work and thus the application to archaeology.
It sounds complex, but I don’t have any system about what I memorise on any day. I have lots of little bits of paper with all the different things I want to commit to memory and do whatever suits my daily activities. If something comes up on the news about a country I know little about which gets my attention then I already have the hook for that country so I’ll add the news item and then possibly look it up and add more about the country to that location. My general knowledge used to be appallingly bad, but I am adding so much as part of ordinary life because of all the mnemonic technologies I now have in play.
I will lose things which don’t get repeated. That is very much the way oral tradition works - important information is repeated, that which loses relevance is lost, new information is added, interpretations are adjusted to the current social needs.
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I would never have suspected English was not your first language. Everything you are saying makes very good sense. I think that I am seeing trends and parallelisms, but not as much as I would like. My background is not history, or even Arts, but engineering and mathematics / science teaching, IT and so on. I moved into the humanities for my PhD as a science writer. So I haven’t been thinking about these ideas for long enough yet. What you are saying is really intriguing and will take a lot more thinking before I can give a meaningful reply.
I’m impressed! Like me, you don’t seem to be going for speed or competitiveness but permanent memory of stuff you will use.
What you describe resonates with what I think I am doing, but I am also new to mnemonics - well, about 6 years of research into indigenous methods, but I have only been implementing it for about two years. I am also still experimenting. I am using decks of cards as characters, much as you have loci for your 148. I am struggling with 52! I am using a tarot deck for archaeological sites, which then cross references to the prehistory and history walks, but it is all done only partly, some barely started, so I am only glimpsing what might be possible. I’d love to spend more time on it!
I need to read what you have written a good few more times and adjust my methods from that too!
Lukasa is a wooden board with carving or beads on it used by the Luba people in Central Africa.
The churinga serves the same purpose in some Australian cultures:
The churinga should not be photographed for cultural reasons, but is an incised wooden or stone object, usually larger than a lukasa but still easily portable and hand held. I think of them as miniature memory spaces, miniature memory palaces. In both cases they are held and the user points to a location on then, singing or reciting the information associated with the location.
I use a lukasa-like memory board with 100 or so beads on it which encodes the 405 birds found in my state, Victoria. The beads represent the 82 families, and their scientific names, I then use songs or stories to recall the birds in each family. If there are more than four, then I also use a set of physical loci to remember the birds in the family. There are 36 honeyeaters, for example, so I have encoded them into the set of loci around the house which also holds countries and 20th century history. It is just all woven in together, but still works fine. I know my lukasa so well that I can reel off all the birds without it physically in my hand, just by imagining it.
I am now adding more data about each of the birds to the stories linked to each bead. Interestingly, as I get to know the bird species I am getting a funny kind of morphing happening in my mind between the bird and the human characters in the stories. It is amazingly like so many indigenous stories and just happened naturally.
The book will be published by Cambridge University Press as “Knowledge and power in prehistoric societies: orality, memory and the transmission of culture” in Fall (US) 2015. We have just gone into the production phase.
Thank you for giving me so much to think about and for forcing me to try and explain what I am doing. It helps my writing!
Lynne