by Joshua Foer
Buzan’s introduction to the art of memory, the moment that set his entire life on its present path, came, he explained, in the first minutes of his first class on the first day of his first year at the University of British Columbia. His English professor, a dour man “built like a very short wrestler with red tufts of hair on his otherwise bald head” walked into the class and proceeded, with his hands behind his back, to call out the roll of students perfectly. “Whenever someone was absent, he told off their name, their father’s name, their mother’s name, their date of birth, phone number, and address,” recalls Buzan. “And as soon as he’d done it, he looked at us with a sneer on his face. That was the beginning of my love affair with memory.”
After class, Buzan charged down the hall after his professor. “I said, ‘Professor, how did you do that?’ He turned to me and he said, ‘Son, I’m a genius.’ So I said, ‘Sir, that is obvious. But I still want to know how you did it.’ He simply said, ‘No.’ Every day we had English for the next three months, I tested him. I felt he had the Holy Grail, and he wouldn’t share it. He despised his students. He thought they were a waste of time. Then one day he said, ‘In the beginning of this miserable relationship between myself and yourselves, I demonstrated the exquisite power of human memory and none of you even noticed, so I’m now going to put on the board the code by which I managed to accomplish that extraordinary feat, and I am utterly convinced that none of you will even recognize the treasures put before you—these pearls before swine.’ He winked at me and he put up the code. It was the Major System. Suddenly, I realized I could memorize anything.”
Buzan left class that day in a trance. It occurred to him, for the first time, that he had not even the most basic idea about how the complicated machinery of his mind worked. And that seemed odd. If the simplest memory trick could dramatically increase the amount of information a person could remember, and nobody had bothered to teach him that trick until he was twenty years old, what else was there that he’d never learned?
“I went to the library and I said, ‘I want a book on how to use my brain.’ The librarian sent me to the medical section, and I came back and said, ‘I don’t want a book on how to operate on my brain. I want a book on how to operate it. Slightly different.’ She said, ‘Oh, there are no books on that.’ I thought, you get an operations manual on your car, your radio, your TV, but no operations manual on the human brain?” In search of something that might elucidate his professor’s feat of memory, Buzan found himself drawn to the library’s ancient history section, where his professor had suggested he might find some of the original ideas about improving memory. He began reading up on Greek and Roman mnemonics (in Buzan’s pronunciation, the M is not silent), and practicing the techniques in his spare time. It wasn’t long before he was using the Ad Herennium’s advice about loci and images to study for exams—even to memorize all his notes from entire courses.
After graduating from college, Buzan went on to work a collection of odd jobs in Canada, first as a farmer (“I thought I’d take that job just to have ‘shoveling shit’ at the top of my CV”), then in construction. In 1966, the same year that Frances Yates published The Art of Memory, the first major modern academic work to delve into the rich history of mnemonics, Buzan returned to London to become the editor of Intelligence , the international journal of Mensa, the high-IQ society, which he had joined in college. Around the same time, he was hired by the city to work as a substitute teacher at difficult inner-city schools in East London. “I was a special have-brain-will-travel teacher,” he says. “If a teacher got beaten up, I was the next one into that classroom.”
In most cases, Buzan had just a short amount of time with each of the classes he was subbing for, a few days at most, and hardly enough for even the most well-intentioned teacher to believe he could make any difference. In search of ways to help his troubled students, and perhaps rub off a bit of his own abundant self-confidence on them, Buzan turned to the old memory techniques he had first learned in college. “I would go into the classroom and ask the students whether they were stupid or not, because everyone had been calling them stupid, and sadly they believed they were stupid,” says Buzan. “They had been inculcated with the idea of their own incapacity. I said, ‘OK, let’s check it out,’ and I’d give them a memory test, which they’d fail. I’d say, ‘Seems you’re right about being stupid.’ Then I’d teach them a memory technique, and then I’d retest them, and they’d get twenty out of twenty. Then I’d basically say, ‘You told me you were stupid, you proved you were stupid, and then you just got a perfect score on a test.’ So I’d get them to question: What’s going on here? For some of the students who’d never gotten a perfect score on an exam, this was quite a revelation.”
Having the opportunity not only to practice the art of memory but also now to teach it allowed Buzan to start developing the old techniques in new directions, particularly when it came to note taking. Over the course of several years, he created what he believed was a completely new system for taking notes that took advantage of the ancient wisdom of the Ad Herennium.
“I was trying to get to the essence—the queen’s jelly—of what note taking was all about,” he says. “That led me to codes and symbols, images and arrows, underlining and color.” Buzan called his new system Mind Mapping, a term he later trademarked. One creates a Mind Map by drawing lines off main points to subsidiary points, which branch out further to tertiary points, and so on. Ideas are distilled into as few words as possible and whenever possible are illustrated with images. It’s a kind of outline, exploded radially across the page in a rainbow of colors, a web of associations that looks like a prickly bush, or a neuron’s branching dendrites. And because it is full of colorful images arranged in order across the page, it functions as a kind of memory palace scrawled on paper.
“In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” says Buzan. “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.” If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.
The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive. Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root inventio is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment.
This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition. “The realization that composing depended on a wellfurnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity,” writes Mary Carruthers. Brains were as organized as modern filing cabinets, with important facts, quotations, and ideas stuffed into neat mnemonic cubbyholes, where they would never go missing, and where they could be
recombined and strung together on the fly. The goal of training one’s memory was to develop the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas. “As an art, memory was most importantly associated in the Middles Ages with composition, not simply with retention,” argues Carruthers. “Those who practiced the crafts of memory used them—as all crafts are used—to make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems.”
In 1973, the BBC caught wind of Buzan’s work on Mind Mapping and mnemonics and brought him in for a meeting with the network’s head of education. The ten-program BBC series and accompanying book that came out of that meeting, both of which were titled Use Your Head, helped turn Buzan into a minor British celebrity and made him realize that there was enormous commercial potential in the memory techniques he was promoting. He began taking his ideas, many of which were borrowed directly from the ancient and medieval memory treatises, and repackaging them in a steady stream of self-help books. To date, he’s published nearly 120 titles, including Use Your Perfect Memory, Make the Most of Your Mind, Use Both Sides of Your Brain, Use Memory, Make the Most of Your Mind, Use Both Sides of Your Brain, Use Your Memory, and Master Your Memory. (At one point, I was alone with Buzan’s chauffeur long enough to ask his opinion of his boss’s work. “Same meat, different gravy” was his private assessment of Buzan’s ouevre.)
To his credit, Buzan is undeniably a marketing genius. He has established franchises of Buzan-licensed instructors all over the world who are trained to teach his memory enhancement, speed reading, and Mind Mapping courses. Today there are over three hundred Buzan-licensed instructors in more than sixty countries. And a thousand teachers around the world are officially teaching Buzan-endorsed memory systems. He estimates that over his entire career the gross sales of all Buzan products, including books, tapes, television programs, training courses, brain games, and lectures, exceeds $300 million.
The competitive memory community breaks cleanly into two camps: those who think Tony Buzan is the second coming of Jesus Christ and those who think he has gotten rich peddling overhyped, sometimes unscientific ideas about the brain. They point out, not unfairly, that while Buzan preaches a “global educational revolution,” he has had far more success in creating a global commercial empire than in actually getting his methods into classrooms.
What is especially frustrating for folks like Ed, who take the art of memory seriously and believe in Tony Buzan’s basic message that the art of memory still has a place in the modern classroom, is that the messenger can often be a bit of an embarrassment.
Buzan has a troubling habit of lapsing into pseudoscience and hyperbole when he describes how wonderfully revolutionary memory training can be, or how he has “changed the lives of millions.” He’s been known to say preposterous things, like “Very young children use 98 percent of all thinking tools. By the time they’re 12, they use about 75 percent. By the time they’re teenagers, they’re down to 50 percent, by the time they’re in university it’s less than 25 percent, and it’s less than 15 percent by the time they’re in industry.”
The fact that Buzan can go around making outrageous claims about the brain and not only be widely believed but actually celebrated is evidence of what a wild frontier the world of brain science is, and how much people want to believe that their memories are improvable. The truth is, the operating manual for the brain that Buzan went looking for in college still hasn’t been written.
But for all the pseudoscience and hyperbole that Buzan employs in promoting Mind Mapping, there actually is scientific evidence that his systems work. Researchers at the University of London recently gave a group of students a six-hundred-word passage to read, after teaching half of them how to take notes with a Mind Map. The other half were instructed to take notes normally. When they were tested a week later, the students who used Mind Maps retained about 10 percent more factual knowledge from the passage than the students who used conventional note-taking techniques. That may be a modest gain, but it’s hardly insignificant.
My own impression of Mind Mapping, having tried the technique to outline a few parts of this book, is that much of its usefulness comes from the mindfulness necessary to create the map. Unlike standard note-taking, you can’t Mind Map on autopilot. My sense is that it’s a reasonably efficient way to brainstorm and organize information, but hardly the “ultimate mind-power tool” or “revolutionary system” that Buzan makes it out to be.
Raemon Matthews doesn’t have any doubt about the effectiveness of Mind Maps or memory training. At the end of the year, each of his students creates an intricately detailed Mind Map of the entire U.S. history textbook. Most of the students’ maps take up an entire three-panel science-fair board with arrows linking every word and image, from Plymouth Rock in one corner to Monica Lewinsky in the other. “If they get an essay question about the causes of World War I on their AP test, they can just see that part of the map in the mind, and the causes are right there,” says Matthews. There might be an image of a black hand to represent the Serbian nationalist organization that Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassin belonged to, next to a machine gun wearing running shoes, which represents the arms race that swept Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, and beside that a pair of triangles to represent the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente.
Matthews takes every opportunity to turn facts into images. “My students were having a hard time getting their heads around the differences in the economic systems of Lenin and Stalin,” he told me. “I told them, ‘Look, Lenin is sitting on the toilet, and he’s constipated because of his mixed economy. Stalin busts into the stall and says, “What are you doing in here?” And Lenin goes, “Land, peace, and bread.” ’ They never forgot that image.”
A valid criticism of these sorts of mnemonics is that they are a form of decontextualized knowledge. They are superficial, the epitome of learning without understanding. This is education by PowerPoint, or worse, CliffsNotes. What can an image of Lenin and Stalin in the bathroom really tell you about communist economics? But Matthews’s point is that you’ve got to start somewhere, and you might as well start by installing in students’ minds the sorts of memories that are least likely to be forgotten.
When information goes “in one ear and out the other,” it’s often because it doesn’t have anything to stick to. This is something I was personally confronted with not long ago, when I had the opportunity to visit Shanghai for three days while reporting an article. Somehow I had managed to scoot through two decades of schooling without ever learning even the most basic facts about Chinese history. I’d never learned the difference between Ming and Qing, or even that Kublai Khan was actually a real person. I spent my time in Shanghai roving around the city like any good tourist, visiting museums, trying to get a superficial grasp of Chinese history and culture. But my experience of the place was severely impoverished. There was so much I didn’t take in, so much I was unable to appreciate, because I didn’t have the basic facts to fasten other facts to. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know, it was that I didn’t have the ability to learn.
This paradox—it takes knowledge to gain knowledge—is captured in a study in which researchers wrote up a detailed description of a half inning of baseball and gave it to a group of baseball fanatics (“experts” is the term Ericsson would use) and a group of less avid fans to read. Afterward they tested how well their subjects could recall the half inning. The baseball fanatics structured their recollections around important game-related events, like runners advancing and runs scoring. They were able to reconstruct the half inning in sharp detail. One almost got the impression they were reading off an internal scorecard. The less avid fans remembered fewer important facts about the game and were more likely to recount superficial details like the weather. Because they lacked a detailed internal representation of the game, they couldn’t process the information they were taking in. They didn’t know what was important and what was trivial. They could
n’t remember what mattered. Without a conceptual framework in which to embed what they were learning, they were effectively amnesics.
Could any less be said of those two thirds of American teens who don’t have a clue when the Civil War occurred? Or the 20 percent who don’t know who the United States fought against in World War II? Or the 44 percent who think that the subject of The Scarlet Letter was either a witch trial or a piece of correspondence? Progressive education reform has accomplished many things. It has made school a lot more pleasant, and a lot more interesting. But it’s also brought with it costs for us as individuals and as citizens. Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture.
Of course, the goal of education is not merely to cram a bunch of facts into students’ heads; it’s to lead them to understand those facts. Nobody would agree with that more than Raemon Matthews. “I want thinkers, not just people who can repeat what I tell them,” he says. But even if facts don’t by themselves lead to understanding, you can’t have understanding without facts. And crucially, the more you know, the easier it is to know more. Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.
The people whose intellects I most admire always seem to have a fitting anecdote or germane fact at the ready. They’re able to reach out across the breadth of their learning and pluck from distant patches. It goes without saying that intelligence is much, much more than mere memory (there are savants who remember much but understand little, just as surely as there are forgetful old professors who remember little but understand much), but memory and intelligence do seem to go hand in hand, like a muscular frame and an athletic disposition. There’s a feedback loop between the two. The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered. People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.