Mnemonics

“ How to construct an easy channel for any event or series
of events or facts which one wishes to remember, along which the mind
will ever afterward travel, is the secret of mnemonics.
Loisette, in common with all the mnemonic teachers, uses the old device
of representing numbers by letters--and as this is the first and easiest
step in the art, this seems to be the most logical place to introduce
the accepted equivalents of the Arabic numerals:
0 is always represented by s, z or c soft. ”

“ Topical aids to memory are of the greatest service to many persons, and teachers of mnemonics make large use of them, as by advising a speaker to mentally associate the corners, etc., of a room with the chief divisions of the speech he is about to deliver. Those who feel the advantage of these aids most strongly are the most likely to cultivate the use of numerical forms. ”

“ There have been invented more than one hundred different systems of mnemonics, all professing to be invaluable, and some claiming to be infallible. It appears to be a fatal objection to these memory-systems that they substitute a wholly artificial association of ideas for a natural one. The habit of looking for accidental or arbitrary relations of names and things is cultivated, and the power of logical, spontaneous thought is injured by neglecting essential for unessential relations. ”

“ This applies with even greater force to the large group of symbolic mnemonics whose purpose is more restricted, whether it be as help to the singer in his verses, to the medicine-man in his incantation, to the hunter in his quest, or, as among ourselves, to the tramp on his rounds. The subjoined copy of a cadger's map (Fig. 16) , given in Hotten's Slang Dictionary (1869) , is an addition to the number of survivals which are found in so-called civilised communities, and has fit place among the examples of pictorial mnemonics in matters of 1, love ”

“ FEINAIGLE, GREGOR von (1765?–1819) , mnemonist, born at Baden about 1765, visited Paris in 1806, and delivered public lectures on local and symbolical memory, which he described as a ‘new system of mnemonics and methodics.’ He was accompanied by a young man who acted as interpreter. Count Metternich, the Austrian ambassador, and his secretaries followed the whole course of lectures, and spoke in highly laudatory terms of the system, which, though novel in its applications, was founded on the topical memory of the ancients, as described by Cicero and Quinctilian. ”

“ He has then the problem of arranging abstractions in a series, and, if he is naturally an ear-minded child, will arrange them as a mere series of associated sounds. If, however, he is eye-minded, he may consciously or unconsciously hit upon the device of a visual spatial image, and thus enable himself to comprehend and remember the numbers as he does other things by a mental picture. A number form thus becomes a little system of topical mnemonics. ”

“ The most complete account of his system is given in two works by his pupil Martin Sommer, published at Venice in 1619. In 1618 John Willis (d. 1628?) published Mnemonica; sive ars reminiscendi (Eng. version by Leonard Sowersby, 1661; extracts in Feinaigle’s New Art of Memory, 3rd ed., 1813) , containing a clear statement of the principles of topical or local mnemonics. Giordano Bruno, in connexion with his exposition of the ars generalis of Lull, included a memoria technica in his treatise De umbris idearum. Other writers of this period are the Florentine Publicius (1482) ”

“ There was no attempt to connect the nonsense syllables by the invention of special associations of the mnemotechnik type; learning was carried on solely by the influence of the mere repetitions upon the natural memory. As I do not possess the least practical knowledge of the mnemotechnical devices, the fulfillment of this condition offered no difficulty to me.
7. Finally and chiefly, care was taken that the objective conditions of life during the period of the tests were so controlled as to eliminate too great changes or irregularities. ”

“ What we know is that memory, and mnemic phenomena generally, can be disturbed or destroyed by changes in the brain. This certainly proves that the brain plays an essential part in the causation of memory, but does not prove that a certain state of the brain is, by itself, a sufficient condition for the existence of memory. Yet it is this last that has to be proved. The theory of the engram, or any similar theory, has to maintain that, given a body and brain in a suitable state, a man will have a certain memory, without the need of any further conditions. ”

“ Since the mnemonic technique adds to these one more conception, through whose means the things with which we have to deal are to be fixed in order to be able freely to express them in us, it trebles the functions of remembering, and forgets that the mediation of these and their relation—wholly arbitrary and highly artificial—must also be remembered. The true help of memory consists in not helping it at all, but in simply taking up the object into the ideal regions of the mind by the force of the infinite self-determination which mind possesses. ”

“ We find sometimes that, IN MNEMIC CAUSATION, an image or word, as stimulus, has the same effect (or very nearly the same effect) as would belong to some object, say, a certain dog. In that case we say that the image or word means that object. In other cases the mnemic effects are not all those of one object, but only those shared by objects of a certain kind, e.g. by all dogs. In this case the meaning of the image or word is general: it means the whole kind. Generality and particularity are a matter of degree. If two particulars differ sufficiently little, their mnemic effects will be the same ”

“ Just a few words concerning mnemotechnique, mnemonic, and anamnestic. The discovery of some means of helping the memory has long been a human purpose. From Simonides of Chios, to the Sophist Hippias of Elis, experiments have been made in artificial development of the memory, and some have been remarkably successful. Since the middle ages a large group of people have done this. ”

“ The nouns which we learn after all others, and therefore forget soonest, are the names of persons, so that elderly people very commonly complain how (?) they can not recall persons’ names.”
Founded on some of the theories of memory, this is good reasoning; but it pushes back the mystery only a step. Why should this mechanism manifest a peculiar selective power over the different parts of speech? Why should the verb-cells be stronger than the noun-cells? Or if there be no actual verb-cells and noun-cells, why should the verb-impressions be deeper than the noun-impressions? ”

“ When interest and attention animate us, it seems as if we did not need to be at all troubled about remembering anything. All the so-called mnemonic helps only serve to make more difficult the act of memory. This act is in itself a double function, consisting of, first, the fixing of the sign, and second, The Logical Epoch.47 the fixing of the conception subsumed under it. ”

“ The mnemonic organ was developed in my head only eight years and four months after my birth; it is then that my soul began to be susceptible of receiving impressions. How is it possible for an immaterial substance, which can neither touch nor be touched to receive impressions? It is a mystery which man cannot unravel. ”

“ When the chloroform absorbed by the mucous membrane of the lungs has passed into the blood, active memory, which presupposes attention and will, has disappeared; still, the intelligence is not yet dead. Ideas are still conceived, old recollections persist, and sometimes even the memory of past events is strangely quickened. The patient will speak in a language he thought he had forgotten, and recall old stories that seemed to have passed into oblivion. ”

“ Now, memory is a property not only of the nerve-cell, but also of the nerve-fibre, which is only a modification of the cell. The fibre has a recollection of the stimulus which it conveyed, in the same way as the cell has of that which it has transformed into presentation and motion. A stimulus will be more easily conducted by a fibre which has already conveyed it, than by one which propagates it for the first time from one cell to another. ”

“ On the basis of our present knowledge neither the one nor the other of these possibilities can be declared self-evident
To facilitate an insight into the actual conditions I have instituted a few preliminary experiments in the following way. Six aeries of 16 syllables each were impressed upon the memory by a 16- or 64-fold attentive repetition. After 24 hours an equal number of derived series of the same length, which had been obtained from those already learned by skipping one intermediate syllable, were learned by heart to the first repetition. ”

“ I have already dwelt upon the importance of mnemic phenomena for psychology, and shall not enlarge upon them now, beyond observing that they are what transforms a biography (in our technical sense) into a life. It is they that give the continuity of a "person" or a "mind." But there is no reason to suppose that mnemic phenomena are associated with biographies except in the case of animals and plants.
Our two-fold classification of particulars gives rise to the dualism of body and biography in regard to everything in the universe, and not only in regard to living things. ”

“ The memory of sounds and words forms the basis of our speech—"the memory of words is only the memory of certain articulations"—and those parts of the brain which regulate articulation are also the memory-centers for speech or the result of articulation. Thus, when the speech-center is disorganized, not merely the power of articulation disappears, but also the memory of words. ”

“ Sounds are no further preserved by these mnemonic signs, than is incident, more or less, to all pure figurative or representative pictures. The simple figure of a quadruped, a man, or a bird, recalls the name of a quadruped, a man or a bird. * * We may thus recall something of the living language from the oblivion of the past, by the pictorial method. Mnemonic symbols are thus at the threshold of the hieroglyphic.
BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. IV
OJIBWA MEDA SONG.
One of the best examples of this mnemonic device is one of the Ojibwas, found in Schoolcraft, op. ”

“ It would seem to fit better with what we can immediately observe if we were to say that an image is occasioned, through association, by a sensation or another image, in other words that it has a mnemic cause--which does not prevent it from also having a physical cause. And I think it will be found that the causation of an image always proceeds according to mnemic laws, i.e. that it is governed by habit and past experience. If you listen to a man playing the pianola without looking at him, you will have images of his hands on the keys as if he were playing the piano ”

“ In a letter, addressed to his friend Brother Michael, about the year 1025, Guido speaks of the value, as an aid to memory, of the first six hemistichs of the Hymn for the festival of S. John the Baptist, 'Ut queant laxis.' 'If, therefore,' he says, 'you would commit any sound, or Neuma, to memory, to the end that, wheresoever you may wish, in whatsoever Melody, whether known to you or unknown, it may quickly present itself, so that you may at once enuntiate it, without any doubt, you must note that sound, or Neuma, in the beginning of some well-known Tune. ”

“ In a similar way, most of the supposed isolated "faculties" of higher intellection appear, upon clearer analysis, as complex aggregations of primary sensations, and hence necessarily dependent upon numerous and scattered centres. Some "faculties," as memory and volition, may be said in a sense to be primordial endowments of every nerve cell—even of every body cell. Indeed, an ultimate analysis relegates all intellection, in its primordial adumbrations, to every particle of living matter. ”

“ Another class of phenomena, now to be considered, seems to afford even more direct and cogent evidence of the dependence of Memory, in its simplest exercise, upon a registering process, that consists in some Nutritive modification of the Brain-tissue. In what we call "learning by heart"—which should be rather called learning by Sense, instead of by Mind—we try to imprint on our Memory a certain sequence of words, numbers, musical notes, or the like ”

“ Such balance, either simple or complex, is found in almost every second line of the inscription. It is sometimes varied in rhythm, as the examples cited show; sometimes it is massed so as to fill a whole passage.
In primitive speech, the rhetorical effect of balance is Mnemonic value. scarcely more important than its mnemonic effect—the clue it affords the memory of speaker as well as of hearer. To a speaker a sonorous phrase, well-coined, is more valuable than a single word expressive of the same idea. The phrase has greater weight and momentum ”

“ As a matter of fact there are almost as many different kinds of inward books as there are outward books, but as the two chief ways of expression are voice and gesture, so the records of oral speech and gesture language, received by eye, ear, or touch, and inwardly recorded, are the chief kinds of memory books. ”

“ Mnemonic object libraries Mnemonic writing, as it is generally treated in the textbooks, includes all sorts of simple memory aids, and is generally, and probably rightly, regarded by writers of palaeography as preceding picture writing, although there is an element of abstractness even in the tally or knotted cord or pebble as compared with the actual imitation or representation of the picture, and in the evolution of human thinking, other things being equal, the abstract necessarily follows the concrete in time and in the order of evolution. ”