wax tablets (cerae) or papyrus, and the arrangement of the images on them
is like writing; subsequent delivery is like reading aloud. The backgrounds
must be arranged in a series, a certain order, so that one cannot become
confused in the order. One can thus proceed forwards from start to finish,
or backwards, or start in the middle (one might recall here the artificial
memory system described in Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia, which
also allows one to scan, sort, and move about mentally in a similar way).
The formation of the backgrounds in the mind should be done with
special care and precision, ‘‘so that they may cling lastingly in our memory,
for the images, like letters, are effaced when we make use of them, but the
backgrounds, like wax tablets, should abide’’ (III, 18, 31). One should
practice daily seeing one’s backgrounds and placing images on them. It is
also useful, in order to keep track of where one is, to place a mark on every
fifth or tenth one – a golden hand, or the face of a friend named Decimus.
In memorizing backgrounds, one should avoid crowded places, because
too many people milling about confuse and soften their outlines.
Background loci should be well lighted but not glaring; they must not be
too much alike but differ enough in form to be clearly distinguishable one
from the next; they should be of moderate size and extent, ‘‘for when
excessively large they render the images vague, and when too small often
seem incapable of receiving an arrangement of images’’ (III, 19, 32). (Notice
that grouped images are placed in a scene within a single locus, serving like a
stage; the analogy between memory art and theatre is ancient and persis-
tent.)123 If we are not pleased with the real backgrounds available to us, we
may create some in our imagination and ‘‘obtain a most serviceable
distribution of appropriate backgrounds’’ (III, 19, 32).
These backgrounds should be viewed from about thirty feet away, ‘‘for,
like the external eye, so the inner eye of thought is less powerful when you
have moved the object of sight too near or too far away’’ (III, 19, 32). Both
the ‘‘auctor ad Herennium’’ and Cicero use the word intervallum in
articulating this rule, meaning ‘‘the distance between two points.’’ I under-
stand this word differently in the context of mnemotechnical advice from
the way it is translated by Harry Caplan, the Loeb editor. He refers it to the
distance between the background places themselves. Now, while one is
advised to make these distinctive from one another in order to avoid over-
lapping and confusion, the Ad Herennium’s author explains the need for
the rule quoted above in terms of the viewer’s ability to see an object clearly.
This concern also accords with an aspect of mnemonic advice from the
Middle Ages.124 So I understand intervallum to refer to the distance of the
Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory
91
viewer from the background, optimally (according to Tullius) thirty feet; it
is thus a principle of perspective, the viewer’s stance in relation to the
background.
The images to be placed in these backgrounds are then described in
detail. The principles governing their creation are consistent with ancient
observations that recollection is achieved through association, and that
images, especially visual ones, are more easily and permanently retained
than abstract ideas. So we associate the materials of memory through a
system of consciously selected visual–verbal puns or pictures, whatever will
serve to fix the association of image with idea. One can use such a system to
remember things (memoria rerum) or to remember ‘‘words’’ (memoria
verborum). Remembering ‘‘things’’ means remembering subject matters,
the main words in quotations, the chief theses of an argument, the gist of
a story, or the like. Remembering ‘‘words’’ means exact word-for-word
memorization, and should be reserved for an extract from the poets (III,
19, 34) – the Ad Herennium recommends the practice for children, and for
adults only as an exercise to sharpen memory for matters (III, 24). In each
kind of memorizing, punning images are used to make orderly association,
but he admits that word-for-word memorization in this fashion is cum-
bersome and burdens the mind; exact memorizing is better served by
repeating a passage two or three times to set it in the memory by rote
before one begins to attach images to it (III, 21, 34).
Much the same advice is found in Cicero’s De oratore but more briefly
because the subject ‘‘is well known and familiar’’ (II, 87, 358).125 Visual
images are the keenest of all and best retained by the memory; auditory
or other perceptions are retained when attached to visual ones (II, 87, 357).
Images are retained more easily than abstract thoughts, but they ‘‘require
an abode,’’ for ‘‘the embodied cannot be known without a place’’
(‘‘corpus intelligi sine loco non potest’’). 126 One needs a large number of
loci, distinctly visible, and at moderate distances (modicis intervallis), and
images that are ‘‘lively, sharp, and conspicuous, with the potential to
present themselves quickly and to strike the mind.’’ Practice will form
the necessary habits for mastery of these skills, and Cicero mentions several
methods of forming suitable images, involving homophony, puns, rebuses,
and the like. All this mental image-forming, he says, should be practiced
‘‘according to the systematic approach of a consummate painter, who keeps
the different localities distinct from each other by employing a variety of
shapes [modo formarum varietate locos distinguentis]’’ (II, 87, 358), a phrase
which Rackham, the Loeb translator, observes ‘‘denotes what we call
‘perspective.’’’127 One should remark here Cicero’s important, though
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commonplace, comparison between the forming of images and painting;
one should also remark that he acknowledges the importance of the view-
er’s perspective.
Quintilian has sometimes been regarded as skeptical of the whole idea of
artificial memory, but, as Frances Yates observed, this reputation is not
founded.128 He extolls memory highly – ‘‘all learning depends on memory’’
(‘‘omnis disciplina memoria constat’’: Inst. orat., XI, ii, 1) – and believes,
like all the authors of antiquity, that a natural memory can and should be
cultivated by practiced techniques. It is memory which ‘‘makes available to
us the reserve of examples, laws, rulings, sayings, and facts which the orator
must possess in abundance and have always at his finger-tips’’; it is the
treasury of eloquence, ‘‘thesaurus hic eloquentiae’’(XI, ii, 1).
Quintilian’s skepticism is directed towards the image-making schemes to
accomplish ‘ memory for words,’ such as that described in Ad Herennium.
How, he says, can such a cumbersome method enable one to grasp a long
series of connected words, such as the five books of the second process against
Verres
(Cicero’s Verrine Orations)? One cannot even represent every sort of
word by an image (for instance, conjunctions). Quintilian admits that one
might devise a method of shorthand symbols (notae) as Metrodorus is said to
have devised, but he himself counsels learning a long work by dividing it into
short sections, which one then memorizes one at a time, so that by frequent
and continuous practice one learns the words in each brief section, and then
unites the fragments in order (XI, ii, 28). He suggests embedding cues (notae)
to stimulate the memory, especially in passages hard to recall – these cues
could take the form of associated images or some other method (perhaps
numerical or other notae). He also suggests learning a passage by heart from
the same wax tablet upon which it was originally written down, thus effecting
a transfer from the external tablet to the tablet of memory, and counsels
reading passages aloud once or twice over so the mind is ‘ kept on the alert by
the voice’’ (XI, ii, 32–34). For memory work, the voice should not rise above a
murmur, however. It also helps if another reads aloud to us so that we can
test what we have memorized, identify hard passages, and mark them. By
such means, he says, he has trained his own natural memory, which is not at
all exceptional. And he ends with his famously skeptical assessment of
reported feats of prodigious memory, such as those of Theodectes, supposed
to be able to remember any number of verses after a single hearing: ‘‘We
ought to believe [such a thing], however, simply because believing it gives us
hope’ (XI, ii, 51).
It is noteworthy that Quintilian’s reservations are directed more at
schemes which promise accurate ‘‘memory for words’’ than at ‘‘memory
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93
for things.’’ This attitude is compatible with the basically ethical value
given to memory training. Memory for words, like any merely iterative
reproduction of items in a series, can deteriorate rather quickly into mere
trickery, and is associated by Quintilian with sophistical rhetoric (a prej-
udice which extends at least into the thirteenth century, as we will see in
Chapter 4). Even the Ad Herennium commends memory for words pri-
marily as good exercise for memory for things. Memoria ad res compels the
recollector to actively shape up material for an occasion, whether as
composer or viewer or reader, and thus is ethically more valuable, consis-
tent with the moral emphasis given to rhetoric by Cicero, Quintilian
himself, Augustine, and the traditions of monastic prayer. Especially in
composition, memory for things is preferred to rote iteration, even when
the speaker has accurate command of the original words. This is, of course,
exactly the reverse of modern prejudice.
Quintilian’s reservations concerning elaborate schemes of loci and imag-
ines have reinforced our own modern puzzlement in the face of such an
apparently cumbersome and odd procedure. Even Frances Yates, who
studied these schemes so thoughtfully, confessed herself puzzled by their
seemingly cluttered nature, especially that for memoria verborum. What
purpose could they serve, except demonstrating ‘ vanity and ostentation in a
man who, where memory was concerned, took more pride in his art rather
than in his natural powers,’’ as Quintilian says of Metrodorus (XI, ii, 22).
Quintilian’s criticism of the Greeks (and one should note that all the
people whose extravagant claims he criticizes are non-Romans, though
similar claims, as we know from Pliny, were current concerning the
prodigious memories of Julius Caesar) is likely to have been in part a
Ciceronian pose, that of the practical, sparely educated Roman. This is
the persona adopted in De oratore by both Crassus and Antonius, the
heroes of the dialogue, both men highly learned in Greek but affecting to
despise ‘‘Greeklings.’’ ‘‘Crassus,’’ Cicero says, ‘‘did not so much wish to be
thought to have learned nothing, as to have the reputation of looking down
upon learning, . . . while Antonius held that his speeches would be the
more acceptable to a nation like ours, if it were thought that he had never
engaged in study at all’’ (De orat., II, 5). Quintilian, we recall, was modeling
himself upon Cicero’s example, against excesses of artifice and style that he
detected in Seneca and Tacitus. Though this literary context may help to
explain Quintilian’s skeptical pose regarding the Greeks, it does not help to
ease our modern skepticism concerning how the system of backgrounds
and images could work for many people, as it evidently did, being ‘‘well
known and familiar’’ to Cicero’s audience.
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A remarkable demonstration of how it might work has come recently
in psychological literature. The distinguished Soviet neuropsychologist,
A. R. Luria, published a lengthy case-study (The Mind of a Mnemonist) of a
Russian journalist of prodigious memory, who became a professional
‘‘mnemonist’’ or performing memory-artist. Luria studied him over a
thirty-year period, from the 1920s through the 1950s, testing him frequently
and asking him in detail about the systems he had worked out for retention
and recall. The system used by Shereshevski, the subject (whom Luria refers
to as ‘‘S.’’ in his study), was almost exactly that of the ancient architectural
mnemonic, based upon ‘‘places’’ and ‘‘images,’’ although he was entirely
self-taught in memory arts. Luria himself seems unaware of the ancient
system; at least he does not mention it. Moreover, Luria refers to an
account of a Japanese mnemonist, who had also worked out a system of
‘‘placing’’ images very similar to that of S.129 The study of S. gives valuable
insight into the praxis of the ancient system.
Luria observes first that everything S. recalled was in the form of words
(including numbers, nonsense syllables, and seen or described objects) and
that he responded to hearing words by at once converting them into vivid
and remarkably stable visual images. He did this on a word-by-word basis,
so that to recall a long series of words he needed to find a way of
distributing his mental images in an orderly row or sequence. He seems
most often to have used a street which he visualized in precise detail in his
memory, often a street in the town he grew up in but also streets in
Moscow, where he then lived – Gorky Street served him often. As Luria
describes the process: ‘‘Frequently he would take a mental walk along that
street . . . beginning at Mayakovsky Square, and slowly make his way down,
‘distributing’ his images at houses, gates, and store windows. At times,
without realizing how it had happened, he would suddenly find himself
back in his home town . . . where he would wind up his trip in the house he
had lived in as a child’’ (p. 32). This technique enabled S. to reproduce at
will a series from start to finish, or in reverse order, or from any point. He
could also tell at once, given one word in a series, which word
occurred on
either side of it, its ‘‘neighbors,’’ so to speak (we recall Aristotle’s similar
description of this recollective phenomenon in De memoria).
His recollection of these visual images was so stable that when asked to
recall passages or series he had memorized even years earlier he could do so
promptly and accurately. Luria and his associates concluded quickly that
S.’s memory was essentially limitless and gave up trying to measure its
capacity. The key to this capacity was the stability of his images and places.
As Luria concludes, ‘‘the astonishing clarity and tenacity of his images, the
Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory
95
fact that he could retain them for years and call them up when occasion
demanded it, made it possible for him to recall an unlimited number of
words and to retain these indefinitely.’’130
Nonetheless, S. did occasionally make errors. Luria determined, how-
ever, that these were not errors caused by loss but errors of perception. In
revisiting his places, S. sometimes failed to notice or saw badly an image
which he had placed in a poor location. As S. described these errors to
Luria:
I put the image of the pencil near a fence . . . the one down the street, you know.
But what happened was that the image fused with that of the fence and I walked
right on past without noticing it. The same thing happened with the word egg.
I had put it against a white wall and it blended in with the background . . .
Sometimes I put a word in a dark place and have trouble seeing it as I go by. (36)
His solution to the problem was as follows:
What I do now is to make my images larger. Take the word egg I told you about
before. It was so easy to lose sight of it; now I make it a larger image, and when
I lean it up against the wall of a building, I see to it that the place is lit by having a
street lamp nearby . . . I don’t put things in dark passageways any more . . . Much
better if there’s some light around, it’s easier to spot then. (41)
Crowds and noise confused him (37) because they interfered with his
ability to perceive his images and places, and stray noise confused his
concentration. S. described his problem: ‘‘You see, every sound troubles
me . . . it’s transformed into a line and becomes confusing. Once I had the
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