The recent Memory Men event at the ICA showed that the Ars Memoria is alive and well - as evidenced by the elephantine memory of participant Dominic O'Brien. But could the presence of philosopher of mind Steven Rose turn this into more than just an amusing sideshow?
In her book The Art of Memory , Frances Yates traces the history of
what she calls "the classical art of memory", an ancient mnemonic
system recorded in the writings of Cicero, Quintilian, and an
anonymous text now known as the Ad Herenium, and which Yates proposes
as its main means of transmission from ancient times to the
Renaissance.
Yates is referring to an artificial memory system, of
which she says that there "is no doubt that this method will work for
anyone who is prepared to labour seriously at these mnemonic
gymnastics." [1] It involves marking in the memory a series of places
around a building or other structure with which the would-be
"rememberer" is already familiar, then placing within this mental
maquette a series of objects at selected points along a projected
walk through the imagined site. One links each object to a particular
piece of information one wishes to later recall, and, once familiar
with the arrangement, it is a simple matter to mentally retrace one
steps and thus recall with ease complicated chains of words, numbers
or ideas.
Memory Wheels - From Giordano Bruno, De Umbris idearum, 1582
[reproduced in Yates, p. 209, see below]
Dominic O'Brien is a practitioner of this art, and in The Memory Men
not only demonstrated his admittedly impressive ability to remember
an extremely large number of things, in various versions and
sequences, but also began to train the audience to do this too. He
accurately recalled a 60-figure sequence written on a board by a
member of the audience, detailed information from a newspaper, the
names of people in the room as supplied from a list of ticket
bookings, the dates of birthdays, all the time chatting away about
how the method he was using worked and how it required no
particular abilities save perseverance and imagination. Whilst this
was, in its way, entertaining, what was disappointing about the show
was that it was precisely that - a show, a kind of spectacle, as
opposed to something more intellectually involved and engaging. As
the scientist sharing the platform with O'Brien, Steven Rose,
remarked, "this is really Dominic's evening and Dominic's show",
though why exactly this was what it was, we were never told.
Advertised as a meeting of a super successful mnemonist and a
renowned expert on the human brain, the implication was that the
evening would take the form of an extended exchange between these two
"memory men". But the basic sequence of events foregrounded the
aforementioned technical demonstrations, with only minimal diversions
into the theory of how the artificial memory system, and that
utilised by the human brain, actually worked. Rose talked of distinct
kinds of human memory - procedural, declarative, linear, photographic
- but declined to discuss their no doubt intriguing complexities and
differences in any depth. Similarly, when the personable but
otherwise "corporate" O'Brien spoke of his procedure he kept almost
exclusively to technicalities, certainly worth hearing about but
hardly the most stimulating aspect of what might well have been a much
more intelligent - as opposed to lightly distracting - event. Neither
Rose nor O'Brien even mentioned Yates' highly respected research into
the history of mnemonics, and the enigmatic "S", a character whose
life and apparently limitless natural memory is described in A R
Luria's striking study The Mind of a Mnemonist [3], was but
fleetingly referenced.
Dominic O'Brien (left) and Steven Rose (right)
The ICA has an image that suggests - tries to suggest - culture,
knowledge, education and informed debate, but in The Memory Men the
focus was upon mere entertainment, showmanship, audience
participation, and a dull but compulsory jocularity one could happily
have done without.
[1] Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, Penguin, 1969, p. 19.
[2] A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, Jonathan Cape, 1969.
