Fantastic Memories and Where to Find them: Harry Potter and Mnemonics Pedagogy

History

Both Western culture and a tremendous number of indigenous cultures throughout history have used a variety of mnemonic techniques to teach students and help them remember a variety of knowledge. In her seminal work The Art of Memory (University of Chicago, 1966), Francis A. Yates indicates that this tradition in the West declined following the Puritan education reforms of the late 16th century led by Peter Ramus.

This decline is unfortunate as there is a lot of value and even entertainment in these methods. The difficulty of returning to some of these older forms of mnemonics or even revised and modernized methods is coming up with examples that a variety of teachers will quickly grasp and then be able to create lesson plans that will leverage the power of mnemonic techniques for their students.

The break in pedagogy is now so severe that most mentions of mnemonics I’ve seen in modern educational settings are viewed as one-off “tricks” rather than as a bedrock of teaching and learning techniques that they were in our recent past. (How our culture has managed to lose these traditions instead of the scala naturae is beyond me.)

In the Western tradition they were one of the major pillars of rhetoric. In many oral cultures they were integral to those peoples’ lifeways and means of survival to the point that colonizers over history have been known to specifically target, minimize, and even destroy the means for indigenous peoples to use them. My hope is that we might learn from our shared past and resurrect these methods.

Mnemonics Pedagogy

This is where a very powerful example of mnemonics pedagogy from the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Warner Bros., 2004) may be a great illustration.

Before we start, I realize that the idea of mnemonics pedagogy is both a neologism and a new concept for almost everyone, so let’s take a moment to define it.

Mnemonics pedagogy is the design of lessons, hopefully in a seamless manner, that combines a lesson and attendant facts with the arts of memory (in the Western tradition) or songlines and various mnemonic devices (in the tradition of indigenous cultures). It could be considered a sub-area of instructional design. In it we might hope that the art of memory serves as the bedrock upon which the lesson is built in such a way that it becomes more natural that the students both understand the lesson, but also find it easy to store in their long term memories with minimal revision.

The design should be such that the art of memory is integral and demonstrated organically. The student or learner need not have a pre-existing idea of the arts of memory, but they naturally hear or see them occurring without the need to do the additional work of creating memory palaces, songlines, or doing numerical translations into words or images. At some point, after seeing many examples, the students will have all the attendant mnemotechniques and they’ll be able to more quickly and easily do the memory portion of the work for themselves either in real time, or after-the-fact when browsing their notes.

These techniques may already be practiced by those in curriculum and course design, particularly in digital spaces, though they may be using some “gut feeling” in their practice because they’re not explicitly aware of our shared memory traditions. Hopefully with a stronger knowledge of the space, the instructional design may be more intentional and thus more useful.

For those who are still lost on the art of memory portion, stick with me, and we’ll explore some by example. I’ll also provide some references at the end which will provide some additional description of other practices and methods which may help teachers educate themselves in these techniques and begin experimenting with them in their teaching philosophies.

There’s nothing difficult about any of these techniques; I find that they can be easily taught to even beginning elementary school students. In a moment or two, you’ll have your first one mastered.

Professor Lupin stands behind Neville Longbottom for moral support as the class watches in the background as Neville is about to face his worst fear.
Don’t be afraid of the arts of memory. There are many of us standing behind you to help you out.

Learning to ban boggarts

The scene in the third installment of the Harry Potter film series which we’ll focus on is that in which Professor Remus Lupin in his Defense Against the Dark Arts class teaches his students how to fend off the shape-shifting boggart. Boggarts take the form of what a person fears most. The charm for banishing them begins by creating a strong image in the student’s mind’s eye that takes the form of that feared thing in a silly or absurd context. This followed by the incantation “Riddikulus” (ri-di-KULL-lis) will cause the boggart to take the new shape and the laughter will take the boggart’s power away from it allowing it to be banished.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I’m including a clip from the scene in question as it provides some incredibly valuable context. Most of mnemonics occurs in the practioner’s mind, so in this scene consider the boggart and its various forms as something which is happening in the student’s mind, but through the magic of filmmaking, these images can be seen by everyone in the class as well as viewers of the film.

Those with a background in the art of memory may immediately see where I’m going with this. The remainder may be clueless—if this is you, worry not. A few small hints will speed us along and provide not only a beginning foundation on creating a broader practice of the art of memory, but the example will provide a memorable example of something that we can all see physically compared to the exercise which is usually only practiced in each practitioner’s “mind’s eye”.

Hopefully the additional creative visual scaffolding that the movie example provides will give us enough support to more easily imagine what is going in the thought process we hope to create in our students’ minds. When we remove that scaffolding both teachers and students will be able to expand their learning and study practices. Sometimes it’s having the ability to imagine what is going on in the art of memory that is the most difficult part of beginning to use it.

Lupin makes a suggestion to the first student and tells him that if he “sees it, we’ll see it.” The example is solid enough for other students to easily follow its creativity. Again, the wizarding magic in combination with movie magic allows the viewer to see physically what would otherwise be happening in each mnemonic user’s mind.

Professor Lupin whispers into Neville Longbottom's ear in a darkened castle classroom as the rest of the class looks on in the background.
“If you see it, we’ll see it.”

The example Lupin provides is incredibly similar to what Rhetorica ad Herennium would suggest. The Rhetorica ad Herennium (translation: Rhetoric for Herennius), formerly attributed to Cicero, but in fact of unknown authorship, is the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, dating from the late 80s BC. It tells us in 3.22 (English translation by Harry Caplan (Loeb Classical Library 403, Harvard University Press,1954)):

Now nature herself teaches us what we should do. When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember a long time. Accordingly, things immediate to our eye or ear we commonly forget; incidents of our childhood we often remember best. Nor could this be so for any other reason than that ordinary things easily slip from the memory while the striking and novel stay longer in mind. A sunrise, the sun’s course, a sunset, are marvelous to no one because they occur daily. But solar eclipses are a source of wonder because they occur seldom, and indeed are more marvelous than lunar eclipses, because these are more frequent. Thus nature shows that she is not aroused by the common, ordinary event, but is moved by a new or striking occurrence. Let art, then, imitate nature, find what she desires, and follow as she directs. For in invention nature is never last, education never first; rather the beginnings of things arise from natural talent, and the ends are reached by discipline.

We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likenesses as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague, but doing something; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we dress some of them with crowns or purple cloaks, for example, so that the likeness may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily. The things we easily remember when they are real we likewise remember without difficulty when they are figments, if they have been carefully delineated. But this will be essential — again and again to run over rapidly in the mind all the original backgrounds in order to refresh the images.

Lupin cements the lesson to his students by having each come up with their own unique image which they associate with their fear. Having students come up with their own images will almost always be more interesting and more memorable in the long term than them using images that the teacher devises. While using teacher supplied images to start may be helpful from a demonstration perspective, the mnemonic associations will be more relevant, useful and long lasting if the student provides them.

The incantation in the lesson is a logical one as riddikulus is cognate with ridiculous, but has a quirky sounding pronunciation. This funny pronunciation will help the student to more easily remember it. I can also imagine students getting some of the sound of the word “kill” in the middle of riddikulus, and by association they may intend to “kill” the boggart with its use.

Few who have seen the film are likely to forget the worst fears of Neville Longbottom, Ron Weasley, Parvati Patil, Harry Potter, or Remus Lupin.  (Go ahead and try it. Can you remember them all? I’ll bet you can.) They will remember them because the images which each conjures to banish their boggart are so well exaggerated, strong, creepy, and funny. Who could forget Professor Snape in a tatty old woman’s dress, hunched over clutching a purse, and wearing a vulture hat? I can almost smell what I’m sure are his elderberry wine-breath, patchouli oil perfume, and his musty stockings. I still chuckle at the concept of a monster sized spider attempting to remain standing while wearing roller skates. For the benefit of coulrophobiacs I’ll stand on apophasis.

Ron Weasly, wand at the ready, stands in front of a monsterous spider wearing roller skates on every limb trying to stay standing
Teaching the art of memory is easier than a spider trying to remain standing while wearing roller skates.

While not as strong an association in the exercise, many viewers may be able to remember the order of the participants based on the transformations that occur to the boggart as each takes their turn. Perhaps a stronger grounding in a technique like a the songline or memory palace could have improved our example for this sort of retention.

These undeniably memorable images we see on screen are just the same sorts of images most good treatises of memory have suggested we try imagining in our minds’ eyes to improve our memories for millennia. These include the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and Giordano Bruno among others. I’m sure I could also cite a ceaseless variety of elders, but the vicissitudes of orality versus literacy and the brutalities of erasure and colonialism prevent providing proper credit.

Neville Longbottom amazed at what he's accomplished as Lupin teaches a class that is also astounded at Neville's performance.
The look of understanding and retention we’re all striving to create.

These writings and teachings admonish us to take objects associated with the thing we want to remember and exaggerate them, make them bigger or smaller, give them a smell, texture, sound, movement. Make them stand out. Make them funny. Make them absurd. These things make the ideas incredibly sticky. They make them hard to forget. They make them dead simple to remember.

As students in the exercise, the creative and absurd images are difficult to forget, so they’re more likely to remember the boggart-banishing spell. As viewers of the movie, the lesson works on a similar level as it makes it easy for us to associate each individual character’s fears with them.

Instructional Design

From a pedagogical perspective, the boggart lesson is incredibly well designed because it builds the mnemonic structure directly into the exercise. The students are forced to use their creative imaginations to come up with memorable mental images. For the novice, there would appear to be only one lesson here: the charm. But the clever instructional designer using mnemonic pedagogy will also see a subtle parallel lesson in mnemotechy.

This sort of lesson should be much more prevalent at the lower grades from kindergarten through fourth or fifth grade. They should also be used in upper levels for those just acquainting themselves with these sorts of techniques. Later on in fourth to seventh grades a variety of specific techniques could be taught in turns over a month or so to help students learn the broader variety of thirty or so techniques they might employ over the remainder of their academic careers or even their lives. Some of these techniques might include creating memory palaces, songlines and related journey methods, the phonetic major system, peg systems, and mnemonic devices like lukasa and neolithic stone balls among many others. We might also incorporate into these uses art, music, and dance as well. One would hope that crafty students may learn to use the Guidonian hand and find that it’s easier and more effective than cheating by writing the answers on their hand because it’s less work and the answers are etched more indelibly in their minds.

For those new to the incredibly rich history of the art of memory, keep in mind that this example is very simple and concrete. It only scratches the surface of available techniques. I would hope that folks take some time to delve into the broader practice of mnemonic techniques and experiment with ways of embedding them into their teaching.

Resources

Having read a vast swath of books, treatises, and pamphlets on these techniques written over the past two thousand years, one of the best resources I would recommend for teachers is Lynne Kelly’s Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History (Allen & Unwin, 2019). She outlines one of the largest collections of mnemotechniques in print along with examples of how they might be best used and in which settings. She’s experimented with a wide variety of these techniques and outlines how many of them might be used in practice including the idea of creating what she calls rapscallions to memorize things like multiplication tables or points of grammar in foreign languages.

Dr. Kelly’s website also has a description of some of her work with children using lukasas, rapscallions, and songlines in her article Candlebark School and Memory Systems.

Some of these techniques are also becoming the focus of some specific research as can be seen in an article earlier this year in PLoS ONE:

  • Reser D, Simmons M, Johns E, Ghaly A, Quayle M, Dordevic AL, et al. (2021) Australian Aboriginal techniques for memorization: Translation into a medical and allied health education setting. PLoS ONE 16(5): e0251710. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251710

Feedback

I’m curious to hear from teachers and researchers who are familiar with these techniques. I’d love to hear examples of how you’ve used or embedded them into your lessons. How effective do you feel they were? Did you use them with spaced repetition techniques as well?

It would be great to create a resource book of examples for others to use in their teaching for lessons at all age levels and abilities.

I’m eager to chat about this topic with others curious about its use and potentially help design lessons that integrate them. I encourage you to reach out.

I’m also happy to provide more focused reading lists and suggestions to those who want to delve deeper.

If you’re curious to delve into the specifics of mnemotechy more seriously, I’m planning on leading another cohort of my course The Art of Memory soon. Feel free to sign up to get notifications.

Read Transclusion and Transcopyright Dreams (maggieappleton.com)

In 1965 Ted Nelson imagined a system of interactive, extendable text where words would be freed from the constraints of paper documents. This hypertext would make documents linkable.

Twenty years later, Tim Berners Lee took inspiration from Nelson's vision, as well as other narratives like Vannevar Bush's Memex, to create the World Wide Web. Hypertext came to life.

I love the layout and the fantastic live UI examples on this page.

There are a few missing pieces for the primacy of some of these ideas. The broader concept of the commonplace book predated Nelson and Bush by centuries and surely informed much (if not all) of their thinking about these ideas. It’s assuredly the case that people already had the ideas either in their heads or written down and the links between them existed only in their minds or to some extent in indices as can be found in the literature—John Locke had a particularly popular index method that was widely circulated.

The other piece I find missing is a more historical and anthropological one which Western culture has wholly discounted until recently. There’s a pattern around the world of indigenous peoples in primarily oral cultures using mnemonic techniques going back at least 40,000 years. Many of these techniques were built into daily life in ways heretofore unimagined in modern Western Culture, but which are a more deeply layered version of transclusion imagined here. In some sense they transcluded almost all of their most important knowledge into their daily lives. The primary difference is that all the information was stored visually and associatively in the minds of people rather than on paper (through literacy) or via computers. The best work I’ve seen on the subject is Lynne Kelly’s Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture which has its own profound thesis and is underpinned by a great deal of archaeologic and anthropologic primary research. Given its density I recommend her short lecture Modern Memory, Ancient Methods which does a reasonable job of scratching the surface of these ideas.

Another fantastic historical precursor of these ideas can be found in ancient Jewish writings like the Mishnah which is often presented as an original, more ancient text surrounded by annotated interpretations which are surrounded by other re-interpretations on the same page. Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia have a good discussion of this in their book Annotation (MIT Press, 2019).

page of Jewish text with Mishnah in the center and surrounded by various layers of commentary in succeding blocks around it
Image of a super-annotated page of Torah from chapter 3 of Annotation (MIT Press, 2019) by R. Kalir and A. Garcia

It would create a more layered and nuanced form of hypertext – something we’re exploring in the Digital Gardening movement. We could build accumulative, conversational exchanges with people on the level of the word, sentence, and paragraph, not the entire document. Authors could fix typos, write revisions, and push version updates that propogate across the web the same way we do with software. 

The Webmention spec allows for resending notifications and thus subsequent re-parsing and updating of content. This could be a signal sent to any links to the content that it had been updated and allow any translcuded pages to update if they wished.

Annotated on February 09, 2021 at 02:38PM

In this idealised utopia we obviously want to place value on sharing and curation as well as original creation, which means giving a small fraction of the payment to the re-publisher as well.We should note monetisation of all this content is optional. Some websites would allow their content to be transcluded for free, while others might charge hefty fees for a few sentences. If all goes well, we’d expect the majority of content on the web to be either free or priced at reasonable micro-amounts. 

While this is nice in theory, there’s a long road strewn with attempts at micropayments on the web. I see new ones every six months or so. (Here’s a recent one: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqrvNoDE35lFDUv2enkaEKuo6ATBj9GmL)

This also dramatically misses the idea of how copyright and intellectual property work in many countries with regard to fair use doctrine. For short quotes and excerpts almost anyone anywhere can do this for free already. It’s definitely nice and proper to credit the original, but as a society we already have norms for how to do this.

Annotated on February 09, 2021 at 02:46PM

Transclusion would make this whole scenario quite different. Let’s imagine this again… 

Many in the IndieWeb have already prototyped this using some open web standards. It’s embodied in the idea of media fragments and fragmentions, a portmanteau of the words fragment and Webmention.

A great example can be found at https://www.kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia

This reminds me that I need to kick my own server to fix the functionality on my main site and potentially add it to a few others.

Annotated on February 09, 2021 at 02:59PM

We can easily imagine transclusions going the way of the public comments section. 

There are definitely ways around this, particularly if it is done by the site owner instead of enabled by a third party system like News Genius or Hypothes.is.

Examples of this in the wild can be found at https://indieweb.org/annotation#Annotation_Sites_Enable_Abuse.

Annotated on February 09, 2021 at 03:04PM

I just ran across and am happy to follow Anasuya Sengupta (@Anasuyashh) and
Whose Knowledge? (@WhoseKnowledge) via the New_Public Festival (#NewPublicFestival). Whose Knowledge is “a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the majority of the world) on the internet.”

As I’m reading Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly‘s (@Lynne_Kelly) Songlines: The Power and Promise, I’m curious to explore how the work of  Whose Knowledge might possibly help to empower oral cultures that are neither written down nor on the internet? Also how might this also empower their “third archive”?

Read Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking by Nana Ariel (Psyche)
Talking out loud to oneself is a technology for thinking that allows us to clarify and sharpen our approach to a problem

I ran across this article this evening and some of the ideas resonate strongly with me. The article mentions some areas of psychology research and a few papers I hadn’t seen before.

I’m also particularly interested in the idea of embodied cognition within cognitive psychology. Has anyone delved into these areas in their research or memory-related work? @LynneKelly’s research and written texts encourage singing, dancing and performing (I don’t recall specifically speaking or walking in her contexts, but I’m sure they’re all closely related), but has anyone else experimented with these additional modalities in their practice?

Most of the Western-based mnemotechniques I’m aware of are focused almost solely on internalized speech/thought. Can anyone think of any which aren’t?

I’ve seen several works in which Nassim Nicholas Taleb propounds the benefits of the flaneur lifestyle for improving thought, though his mentions are purely anecdotal as I recall. I’d appreciate any additional references to research in these areas if others are aware.


Like many of us, I talk to myself out loud, though I’m a little unusual in that I often do it in public spaces. Whenever I want to figure out an issue, develop an idea or memorise a text, I turn to this odd work routine. While it’s definitely earned me a reputation in my neighbourhood, it’s also improved my thinking and speaking skills immensely. Speaking out loud is not only a medium of communication, but a technology of thinking: it encourages the formation and processing of thoughts.

I’ve noticed speaking out loud also seems to help me in practicing and acquiring a new language.
Annotated on December 28, 2020 at 09:52PM

The idea that speaking out loud and thinking are closely related isn’t new. It emerged in Ancient Greece and Rome, in the work of such great orators as Marcus Tullius Cicero. But perhaps the most intriguing modern development of the idea appeared in the essay ‘On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts During Speech’ (1805) by the German writer Heinrich von Kleist. 

Some of this is at play with the idea of “[rubber ducking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)” as a means of debugging programs
Annotated on December 28, 2020 at 09:55PM

In both cases – speech and writing – the materiality of language undergoes a transformation (to audible sounds or written signs) which in turn produces a mental shift. 

There’s surely a link between this and the idea of thought spaces in the blogosphere or the idea of a commonplace book/digital garden/wiki.
Annotated on December 28, 2020 at 10:06PM

Mute inner speech can appear as an inner dialogue as well, but its truncated form encourages us to create a ‘secret’ abbreviated language and deploy mental shortcuts. By forcing us to articulate ourselves more fully, self-talk summons up the image of an imagined listener or interrogator more vividly. In this way, it allows us to question ourselves more critically by adopting an external perspective on our ideas, and so to consider shortcomings in our arguments – all while using our own speech. 

I’m also reading this and wondering about memory techniques and methods and how these may interact beneficially.
Annotated on December 28, 2020 at 10:07PM

It’s no coincidence that we walk when we need to think: evidence shows that movement enhances thinking and learning, and both are activated in the same centre of motor control in the brain. In the influential subfield of cognitive science concerned with ‘embodied’ cognition, one prominent claim is that actions themselves are constitutive of cognitive processes. That is, activities such as playing a musical instrument, writing, speaking or dancing don’t start in the brain and then emanate out to the body as actions; rather, they entail the mind and body working in concert as a creative, integrated whole, unfolding and influencing each other in turn. It’s therefore a significant problem that many of us are trapped in work and study environments that don’t allow us to activate these intuitive cognitive muscles, and indeed often even encourage us to avoid them. 

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.
Annotated on December 28, 2020 at 10:10PM

Replied to a thread by @KerrieDoodles (Twitter)
If people are depressed by this minimal loss since the 60’s, they’re going to explode when they read research like that of Lynne Kelly on what we’ve actually lost from indigenous cultures. Here’s a good place to start: Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture though her TED talk gives a bit of the flavor without the heavier, but worthwhile, reading–in part, because it will give us some ideas about how to turn back the clock and recover some of what we’ve lost.

Read Timeful Texts by Andy Matuschak, Michael Nielsen (numinous.productions)
How might one escape a book’s shackled sense of time, extending the authored experience over weeks and months?
It looks to me like Andy and Michael are grasping at recreating with modern technology and tools what many (most? all?) indigenous cultures around the world used to ritually learn and memorize their culture’s knowledge. Mnemonics, spaced repetition, graded initiation, orality, dance, and song were all used as a cohesive whole to do this.

The best introduction to many of these methods and their pedagogic uses is best described by Lynne Kelly‘s book Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

If they take her ideas as a basis and then layer on their own thinking, I think they’ll get much further much quicker. Based on my reading of their work thus far, they’re limiting themselves solely with western and modern cultures or at least those of a post-Peter Ramus world.

As an example, I’ve recently been passively watching the Netflix series The Who Was? Show which is geared toward children, but it does a phenomenal job of creating entertaining visuals, costumes, jokes, songs, dances, over-the-top theatricality, and small mnemonic snippets to teach children about famous people in our culture. Naturally this is geared toward neophytes, but it’s memorable, especially when watched with some spaced repetition. To follow it up properly it needs the next 10 layers of content and information to provide the additional depth to move it from children’s knowledge to adult and more sophisticated knowledge. Naturally this should be done at a level appropriate to the learner and their age and sophistication and include relevant related associative memory techniques, but it’s a start.

I’ll note that our educational system’s inability to connect (or associate) new knowledge with previous knowledge is a major drawback. 

Replied to a thread (Twitter)
Niklas Luhmann’s idea of Zettelkasten impinges on some of this, but for a deep dive on how indigenous cultures all over the world did this in a pre-industrial setting look at Dr. Lynne Kelly‘s work. Specifically: Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and When knowledge was power (2012, Latrobe University, PhD thesis). She’s got a fantastic bibliography on her website as well.

Her TED talk shows quickly how she did something similar, but with birds and bird identification. Her work has examples of how many other cultures did this as well.

Replied to Stones only by Kate Bowles (Music for Deckchairs)
The purpose of Stonehenge is lost to us. There will always be debate about its meaning. Stonehenge Visitor Centre, Wiltshire I grew up in England, although I wasn’t born here. Here. I’m…
I ran across this 5 year old article courtesy of a few recent tweets:

What surprises me is that it’s about education and pedagogy that starts off with a vignette in which Kate Bowles talks about the unknown purpose of Stonehenge.

But I’ve been doing some serious reading on the humanities relating to memory, history, and indigenous cultures over the last few years. It dawns on me:

I know what those stones are for!

A serious answer provided by Australian science and memory researcher Dr. Lynne Kelly indicates that Stonehenge and similar monolithic sites built by indigenous cultures across the world are–in fact–pedagogic tools!!

We’ve largely lost a lot of the roots of our ancient mnemonic devices through gradual mis- and dis-use as well as significant pedagogic changes by Petrus Ramus, an influential French dialectician, humanist, logician, and educational reformer. Scholar Frances Yates indicated in The Art of Memory that his influential changes in the mid-1500’s disassociated memory methods including the method of loci, which dated back to ancient Greece, from the practice of rhetoric as a field of study. As a result we’ve lost a fantastic tradition that made teaching and the problem of memory far worse.

Fortunately Lynne Kelly gives a fairly comprehensive overview of indigenous cultures across human history and their use of these methods along with evidence in her book Memory Code which is based on her Ph.D. thesis. Even better, she didn’t stop there and she wrote a follow up book that explores the use of these methods and places them into a modern pedagogy setting and provides some prescriptive uses.

I might suggest that instead of looking forward to technology as the basis of solutions in education, that instead we look back—not just to our past or even our pre-industrial past, but back to our pre-agrarian past.

Let’s look back to the tremendous wealth of indigenous tribes the world over that modern society has eschewed as “superstitious” and “simple”. In reality, they had incredibly sophisticated oral stories and systems that they stored in even more sophisticated memory techniques. Let’s relearn and reuse those techniques to make ourselves better teachers and improve our student’s ability to learn and retain the material with which they’re working.

Once we’ve learned to better tap our own memories, we’ll realize how horribly wrong we’ve been for not just decades but centuries.

This has been hard earned knowledge for me, but now that I’ve got it, I feel compelled to share it. I’m happy to chat with people about these ideas to accelerate their growth, but I’d recommend getting them from the source and reading Dr. Kelly’s work directly. (Particularly her work with indigenous peoples of Australia, who helped to unlock a large piece of the puzzle for her.) Then let’s work together to rebuild the ancient edifices that our ancestors tried so desperately to hand down, but we’ve managed to completely forget.

The historical and archaeological record:
The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments by Dr. Lynne Kelly

A variety of methods and teaching examples:
Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History by Dr. Lynne Kelly

Annotated on April 26, 2020 at 08:34PM

Read - Reading: Memory Craft: Improve your memory using the most powerful methods from around the world by Lynne KellyLynne Kelly (Allen & Unwin)
📖 On page 198 of 320 of Memory Craft

I love some of the things she’s documenting here though I’ll have to dig into her references. She’s much better versed in memory practice than Yates, in part because she actually makes a practice of using the techniques. There are pieces I wish she went into greater depth on.

Syndicated to Goodreads on March 15, 2020 at 11:52AM

Read - Reading: Memory Craft: Improve your memory using the most powerful methods from around the world by Lynne KellyLynne Kelly (Allen & Unwin)
📖 On page 130 of 320 of Memory Craft

I’m loving all these examples of memory devices she’s discovered and describing in this section. Not much of this is covered in much (any?) of the other common literature on memory.

Dr. Lynne Kelly’s research on history, indigenous people, and memory, and a dovetail with Big History

David Christian, Fred Spier, Bill Gates, Big History Institute, and other Big History researchers and thinkers, if you’re not already aware of her, allow me to introduce you to researcher Dr. Lynne Kelly. Her work dramatically expands our understanding of pre-literate societies’ learning, memory, and particularly collective learning. Further, it makes for a strong and fascinating story that could not only be integrated into Big History; it provides links between modern and pre-modern humans and ties deeply into ideas of origin stories, mythology, and early religion; and it provides actual methods for improving student’s memories and particularly that for history.

I think her work has some profound impact on the arc of Big History, particularly with respect to Threshold 6, well into Threshold 7, and continuing into the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. In true big history fashion, her thesis also touches heavily on a broad array of topics including anthropology, archaeology, psychology, neuroscience, history, and education.

A broad, reasonable introduction to her work can be had in CalTech physicist Sean Carroll’s  recent podcast interview.

Another short introduction is her TEDx Melbourne talk:

A solid popular science encapsulation of her work can be found in her book The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments (Pegasus Books, 2017).

A more thorough academic treatment of her work can naturally be found in:

With some work, I think her research could become a better foundational basis for a stronger bridge from threshold 6 into threshold 7 with dramatic impact on how we view origin stories, mythology, religion. It also has some spectacular implications for improving pedagogy and memory within our educational systems and how we view and use collective memory and even innovation in the modern world.

Watched Modern memory, ancient methods by Lynne Kelly from TEDxMelbourne | YouTube

Today, we explore whether memory still has a practical place in the world of big data and computing.

As a science writer, Lynne has written 18 books including The Memory Code. Her research showed that without writing, people used the most extraordinary suite of memory techniques to memorise massive amounts of practical information. This explains the purpose of monuments like Stonehenge, the Nazca Lines and the statues of Easter Island. Her next book, Unlocking The Memory Code explains the most effective memory methods from around the world and throughout time. Lynne shows how these can be invaluable in modern world. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

I had watched this earlier this fall, but thought I’d take another peek for the compactness of the presentation.
Listened to Sources and Methods #34: Lynne Kelly by Alex Strick van LinschotenAlex Strick van Linschoten from Sources & Methods

Interview with Lynne Kelly primarily covering an overview of her memory-related works and focusing primarily on her academic work including her Ph.D. thesis and subsequent archaological-based texts. This appears to have been done prior to The Memory Code and so doesn’t cover those portions of some the more applied areas like her work in rapscallions or the bestiary.

Originally bookmarked on December 14, 2019 at 08:42AM