Remembering: Method or Mystery?

This is a follow-up to Rachel’s previous article called “Remembering:Building a Memory Palace.”

“William, William, Henry, Stephen, Henry, Richard, John, oi!” I chuckled as the enthusiastic tune emanated from the shower down the hall. While preparing our memory work for the school year, I stumbled upon Horrible Histories “Monarch’s Song.” It begins with a dancing William the Conqueror joined by a cast of lively singing monarchs including Henry VIII (“I had six wives, two were beheaded”), Charles II (“I liked to party!), and Queen Victoria (“I ruled for 64 years, you know”). Almost instantly we memorized one thousand years of British sovereigns in a way we will not forget.

My observation over the past dozen years as a classical educator in school, homeschool, and co-op settings is that memorization often does not work as advertised. For every child or two who successfully memorizes jingles, timelines, poems, etc., there is another who can’t. In my community, I have seen that those who can’t are much more likely to leave classical education (or, more commonly, avoid it altogether). Thus, schools and co-ops self-select for those who will be more successful, masking the problem. Perhaps my little corner of the world is an anomaly, but I doubt it.

Once I began homeschooling, I limited our memory work to content containing ideas. Nonetheless, we still struggle. “Why?” reverberated in my mind for years until it shifted to a more helpful question: How can we memorize in a way that honors our humanity?

Memorization occurs through repetition. Through repetition content is stored in the left hemisphere, the brain’s center for language and short-term memory. After enough repetition, the memory crosses to the right hemisphere, the center for long-term memory. However, the right hemisphere is not only the center for long-term storage but also the imaging center of the brain. Herein lies the effectiveness of the memory palace and the Monarch’s song: these instances of memorization knit image and language. How then might this principle apply in other areas, I wondered?

One of my children particularly struggles to memorize. He is highly intelligent and has an astounding memory; he can effortlessly narrate a book he heard years ago, even remembering some sentences word for word. Nonetheless, sometimes lessons don’t seem to stick. Grammar is a prime example. I love diagramming, but for many, it remains in the realm of linguistic abstraction. For the past year, he has struggled to remember and differentiate between two sentence patterns. Firstly, those with a linking verb and predicate noun (which I call “renaming”), and, secondly, those with an action verb and a direct object (which I call “receiving”). When we review “renaming” and “receiving”, he can then do the diagramming properly and by the next day has forgotten.

This time, I considered how I could marry image and sense to language. Together, we stood. Then we leaned forward in the same direction of the slanted line for predicate nouns, cupped our hands to our mouths, and shouted, “Renames!” Next, we straightened up, imitating the vertical line before the direct object. We moved our hands like we were catching a football and shouted, “Receives!” We repeated the actions several times before moving on with the lesson. From this sensory experience, he was able to grasp these abstract grammatical concepts. He has since remembered and was quickly able to transfer the same concept to Latin declensions.

I tried a similar experiment with another struggle: Latin vocabulary. We chose only five from the new vocabulary list; for each of these, we linked the Latin word to a word picture that made sense to him. For example, pugno, “I fight.” We imagined having our ankle bit by a pug and having to fight it off. Each of these words joined to sensory images has been retained in his memory ever since.

These anecdotes are merely an application of what the great tradition has always known: knowledge begins in the senses. Poetic knowledge serves as a foundation for all learning. This is a sensory-emotional knowledge that operates through images. When my son and I added movement, sound, and pictures, we were imaging linguistic concepts. Similarly, the “Monarch’s Song” images the chronology of the English throne with period costumes, nicknames, and silly details about the monarchs. A memory palace images a text to be memorized by tying it to sensory details and a tangible location.

Modern research indicates that using songs and hand movements in memorization builds neural pathways more quickly. But countless times I have seen a history timeline with “fun” hand motions or a grammar song not be retained in memory. Using motions and songs is to apply a system or a method which is, by necessity, to operate in an analytical mode. It does “work” (or seems to work) for a subset of students because we are accustomed to operating in the analytical mode. Imaging, alternatively, is poetic. It is imitating and, through imitating, becoming one with the thing known. The difference is subtle yet profound. One is a method, the other, a mystery. This way of knowing and being in the world is the self-same way that cultivated the very things that we now try to memorize. Plugging truth, goodness, and beauty into a Cartesian system results in a brittle thing; recovering the poetic mode will not give you a product, but it will give you a mystery.