by Joshua Foer
I don’t think I’m an exceptionally bad reader. I suspect that many people, maybe even most, are like me. We read and read and read, and we forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michel de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth century: “I leaf through books, I do not study them,” he wrote. “What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.” He goes on to explain how “to compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory,” he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of what the tome was about and what he thought of it.
You might think that the advent of printing, and the ability to more easily offload memories from brains onto paper, would have immediately rendered the old memory techniques irrelevant. But that’s not what happened. At least not right away. In fact, paradoxically, at exactly the moment when a neat rendering of history would suggest that the art of memory should have been on its way to obsolescence, it underwent its greatest renaissance.
Ever since Simonides, the art of memory had been about creating architectural spaces in the imagination. But in the sixteenth century, an Italian philosopher and alchemist named Giulio Camillo—known as “Divine Camillo” to his many admirers and “the Quack” to his many detractors—had the clever idea of making concrete what had for the previous two thousand years always been an ethereal idea. It occurred to him that the system would work a whole lot better if someone transformed the metaphor of the memory palace into a real wooden building. He imagined creating a “Theater of Memory” that would serve as a universal library containing all the knowledge of mankind. It may sound like the premise of a Borges story, but it was a very real project, with very real backers, and it made Camillo into one of the most famous men in all of Europe. King Francis I of France made Camillo promise that the secrets of his theater would never be revealed to anyone but him, and invested five hundred ducats toward its completion.
Camillo’s wooden memory palace was shaped like a Roman amphitheater, but instead of the spectator sitting in the seats looking down on the stage, he stood in the center and looked up at a round, seven-tiered edifice. All around the theater were paintings of Kabbalistic and mythological figures as well as endless rows of drawers and boxes filled with cards, on which were printed everything that was known, and—it was claimed—everything that was knowable, including quotations from all the great authors, categorized according to subject. All you had to do was meditate on an emblematic image and the entirety of knowledge stored in that section of the theater would be called immediately to mind, allowing you to “be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero.” Camillo promised that “by means of the doctrine of loci and images, we can hold in the mind and master all human concepts and all the things that are in the entire world.”
That was a grand claim, and with hindsight, sure, it sounds like hocus-pocus. But Camillo was convinced that there existed a set of magical symbols that could organically represent the entire cosmos. Just as the image of the she-male represented the concept of e-mailing in that first memory palace I built to house Ed’s to-do list, Camillo believed there were images that could encapsulate vast and powerful concepts about the universe, and simply by memorizing those images, one would be able understand the hidden connections underlying everything.
A scale wooden model of Camillo’s theater was exhibited in Venice and Paris, and hundreds—perhaps thousands—of cards were drafted to fill the theater’s boxes and drawers. The artists Titian and Salviati were enlisted to paint the theater’s symbolic imagery. However, that seems to be about as far as things got. The theater was never actually completed, and all that remains of the grand scheme is a short, posthumously published manifesto, The Idea of the Theater, dictated on his deathbed over the course of a week. Written in the future tense without any images or diagrams, it is, to put it mildly, a confusing book.
Though history had largely forgotten the man who promised the ultimate technology for remembering—“divine” lost out to “quack” in almost every assessment—Camillo’s reputation was resurrected in the twentieth century thanks to the efforts of the historian Frances Yates, who helped reconstruct the theater’s blueprints in her book The Art of Memory, and the Italian literature professor Lina Bolzoni, who has helped explain how Camillo’s theater was more than just the work of a nut job, but actually the apotheosis of an entire era’s ideas about memory.
The Renaissance, with its fresh translations of ancient Greek texts, brought about a renewed fascination with Plato’s old idea that there is a transcendental ideal reality of which our own world is but a pale shadow. In Camillo’s Neoplatonic vision of the universe, images in the mind were a way of accessing that ideal realm, and the art of memory was a secret key to unlocking the occult structure of the universe. Memory was transformed from a tool of rhetoric, as it had been for the ancients, or an instrument of pious meditation, as it had been for the medieval scholastic philosophers, into a purely mystical art.
Even more than Camillo, the greatest practitioner of this dark, mystical form of mnemonics was the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno. In his book On the Shadow of Ideas, published in 1582, Bruno promised that his art “will help not only the memory but also all the powers of the soul.” Memory training, for Bruno, was the key to spiritual enlightenment.
Bruno had literally come up with a new twist on the old art of memory. Drawing inspiration from the palindromically named thirteenth-century Catalan philosopher and mystic Ramon Llull, Bruno invented a device that would allow him to turn any word into a unique image. Bruno imagined a series of concentric wheels, each of which had 150 two-letter pairs around its perimeter, corresponding to all of the combinations that could be formed by the thirty letters of the alphabet (the twenty-three letters of classical Latin, plus seven Greek and Hebrew letters that didn’t have an equivalent in the Latin alphabet) and the five vowels: AA, AE, AI, AO, AU, BA, BE, BO, etc. On the innermost wheel, the 150 two-letter combinations were each paired with a different mythological or occult figure. On the perimeter of the second wheel were 150 actions and predicaments—“sailing,” “on the carpet,” “broken”—corresponding to another set of letter pairs. The third wheel consisted of 150 adjectives, the fourth wheel had 150 objects, and the fifth wheel had 150 “circumstances,” such as “dressed in pearls” or “riding a sea monster.” By properly aligning the wheels, any word up to five syllables long could be translated into a unique, vivid image. For example, the word crocitus, Latin for “croaking of a raven,” becomes an image of the Roman diety “Pilumnus advancing rapidly on the back of a donkey with a bandage on his arm and a parrot on his head.” Bruno was convinced that his opaque and divinely loopy invention was a major step forward for the arts of memory, analogous in scale, he proclaimed, to the technological leap from carving letters in trees to the printing press.
Bruno’s scheme, tinged with magic and the occult, deeply troubled the church. His unorthodox ideas, which included such heresies as a belief in Copernican heliocentrism and a conviction that Mary wasn’t really a virgin, ultimately landed him in the unforgiving arms of the Inquisition. In 1600, he was burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome and his ashes dispersed in the Tiber River. Today, a statue of Bruno stands in the plaza where he was immolated, a beacon to freethinkers and mental athletes the world over.
Once the Enlightenment had finally put to bed the Renaissance’s obsession with occult memory theaters and Llullian wheels, the art of memory passed into a new but no less harebrained era—the age of the “get smart quick” scheme—which to this day it hasn’t yet escaped. Over a hundred treatises on mnemonics were published in the nineteenth century, with titles like “American Mnemotechny” and “How to Remember.” The
y bear a conspicuous resemblance to the memory improvement books that can be found in the self-help aisle at bookstores today. The most popular of these nineteenth-century mnemonic handbooks was written by Professor Alphonse Loisette, an American “memory doctor” who, despite his prolific remembering, “had somehow forgotten that he was born Marcus Dwight Larrowe and that he had no degree,” as one article notes. The fact that I was able to find 136 used copies of Loisette’s 1886 book Physiological Memory: The Instantaneous Art of Never Forgetting selling for as little as $1.25 on the Internet is evidence of its once immense popularity.
Loisette’s book is essentially a collection of mnemonic systems for remembering sundry trivia, like the order of American presidents, the counties of Ireland, the Morse telegraphic alphabet, the British territorial regiments, and the names and uses of the nine pairs of cranial nerves. Loisette claimed his system was wholly unrelated to classical mnemonics, for which he professed disdain, and that he had discovered, entirely by himself, the “laws of natural memory.”
Loisette charged as much as twenty-five dollars (more than five hundred dollars in today’s money) to impart this knowledge to his pupils in seminars held all across the country, including classes at just about every prestigious university on the eastern seaboard. Inductees into the “Loisette System” were made to sign a contract binding them to secrecy, with a penalty of five hundred dollars (over ten thousand dollars in today’s money) should they divulge the professor’s methods. There was, it seems, good money to be made peddling secrets of memory improvement to a credulous American audience. According to the doctor’s own numbers, he earned today’s equivalent of almost a half million dollars over a single fourteen-week stretch in the winter of 1887.
In 1887, Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, first crossed paths with Loisette and enrolled in a memory course lasting several weeks. Twain used to say that his “memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges,” and had long had an interest in memory improvement. He came out of the course a deep believer in Loisette’s system. In fact, he was so taken with Loisette that he independently published a broadside claiming that ten thousand dollars an hour would be a bargain for the invaluable tricks the doctor was imparting. He would later regret this testimonial, but not until after it found its way onto virtually every piece of printed matter Loisette produced.
In 1888, G. S. Fellows, out of “that keen sense of justice and innate love of liberty, characteristic of every true American” published a book called “Loisette” Exposed that set out to clarify that “Professor” “Loisette”—yes, both appellations bore their own set of scare quotes—was both a “humbug and a fraud.” The 224-page book revealed that his methods were either ripped off and repackaged from older sources or else obscenely oversold. Surely Loisette’s humbuggery and fraudulence ought to have been self-evident to someone as versed in the ways of the world as Mark Twain, but Twain was a profligate fad chaser, and always interested in the next big thing. (His personal investment of $300,000—$7 million today—in the Paige typesetter, an early competitor of the Linotype, was only the most ruinous of several ambitious projects he poured his money into.)
Twain himself was continually experimenting with new memory techniques to aid him on the lecture circuit. At one point early in his career, he wrote the first letter of topics he planned to drop into his speech on each of his ten fingernails, but that never really worked, since audiences began to suspect him of having some sort of vain interest in his hands. During the summer of 1883, while he was writing Huckleberry Finn, Twain procrastinated by developing a game to teach his children the English monarchs. It worked by mapping out the lengths of their reigns using pegs along a road near his home. Twain was essentially turning his backyard into a memory palace. In 1885, he patented “Mark Twain’s Memory Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates.” Twain’s notebooks are filled with pages dedicated to his spatial memory game.
Twain imagined national clubs organized around his mnemonic game, regular newspaper columns, a book, and international competitions with prizes. He became convinced that the entire corpus of historical and scientific facts that any American student needed to know could be taught through his ingenious invention. “Poets, statesmen, artists, heroes, battles, plagues, cataclysms, revolutions ... the invention of the logarithm, the microscope, the steam-engine, the telegraph—anything and everything all over the world—we dumped it all in among the English pegs,” he wrote in his 1899 essay “How to Make History Dates Stick.” Unfortunately, like the Paige typesetter, the game turned out to be a financial bust, and Twain was eventually forced to abandon it. He wrote to his friend the novelist William Dean Howells, “If you haven’t ever tried to invent an indoor historical game, don’t.”
Like so many before him, Twain had gotten swept up in the promise of vanquishing forgetfulness. He had drunk of the same wacky elixir that had intoxicated Camillo and Bruno and Peter of Ravenna, and his story should probably be read as a cautionary tale to anyone embarking on a course of memory training. Perhaps, in retrospect, the resemblances between Dr. Loisette and today’s memory gurus should have sent me running for the hills. And yet they didn’t.
Twain lived in an age when the technologies for storing and retrieving external memories—paper, books, the recently invented photograph and phonograph—were still primitive compared to what we have today. He could not have foreseen how the proliferation of digital information at the beginning of the twenty-first century would hasten the pace at which our culture has become capable of externalizing its memories. With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages. As more and more of our lives move online, more and more is being captured and preserved in ways that are dramatically changing the relationship between our internal and external memories. We are moving toward a future, it seems, in which we will have allencompassing external memories that record huge swaths of our daily activity.
I was convinced of this by a seventy-three-year-old computer scientist at Microsoft named Gordon Bell. Bell sees himself as the vanguard of a new movement that takes the externalization of memory to its logical extreme: a final escape from the biology of remembering.
“Each day that passes I forget more and remember less,” writes Bell in his book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. “What if you could overcome this fate? What if you never had to forget anything, but had complete control over what you remembered—and when?”
For the last decade, Bell has kept a digital “surrogate memory” to supplement the one in his brain. It ensures that a record is kept of anything and everything that might be forgotten. A miniature digital camera, called a SenseCam, dangles around his neck and records every sight that passes before his eyes. A digital recorder captures every sound he hears. Every phone call placed through his landline gets taped and every piece of paper Bell reads is immediately scanned into his computer. Bell, who is completely bald, often smiling, and wears rectangular glasses and a black turtleneck, calls this process of obsessive archiving “lifelogging.”
All this obsessive recording may seem strange, but thanks to the plummeting price of digital storage, the increasing ubiquity of digital sensors, and better artificial intelligence to sort through the mess of data we’re constantly collecting, it’s becoming easier and easier to capture and remember ever more information from the world around us. We may never walk around with cameras dangling from our necks, but Bell’s vision of a future in which computers remember everything that happens to us is not nearly as absurd as it might at first sound.
Bell made his name and fortune as an early computing pioneer at the Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1960s and ’70s. (He’s been called the “Frank Lloyd Wright of computers.”) He’s an engineer by nature, which means he sees problems and
tries to build solutions. With the SenseCam, he is trying to fix an elemental human problem: that we forget our lives almost as fast as we live them. But why should any memory fade when there are technological solutions that can preserve it?
In 1998, with the help of his assistant Vicki Rozyki, Bell began backfilling his lifelog by systematically scanning every document in the dozens of banker boxes he’d amassed since the 1950s. All of his old photos, engineering notebooks, and papers were digitized. Even the logos on his T-shirts couldn’t escape the scanner bed. Bell, who had always been a meticulous preservationist, figures he’s probably scanned and thrown away three quarters of all the stuff he’s ever owned. Today his lifelog takes up 170 gigabytes, and is growing at the rate of about a gigabyte each month. It includes over 100,000 e-mails, 65,000 photos, 100,000 documents, and 2,000 phone calls. It fits comfortably on a hundred-dollar hard drive.
Bell can pull off some sensational stunts with his “surrogate memory.” With his custom search engine, he can, in an instant, figure out where he was and whom he was with at any moment in time, and then, in theory, check to see what that person said. And because he’s got a photographic record of everywhere he’s ever been and everything he’s ever seen, he has no excuse for ever losing anything. His digital memory never forgets.
