1/18/2024 0 Comments Method of loci mind palace![]() He was (much later) burnt at the stake for heresy. He continued to popularize his memory techniques, which were apparently prodigious, and even demonstrated his memory skills to Pope Pius V. His book, De Umbis Idearum ( "The Shadow of Ideas") was published in around 1581, and integrated mnemonics, psychology, and hermetic magic. Thomas, the arts of memory and of placing verse on images is the very essence of remembering: “Man cannot understand without images the image is a similitude of a corporeal thing, but understanding is of universals which are to be abstracted from particulars.” In the later 16th century, Giordano Bruno, a Dominican order monk, introduced the memory arts to the masses, and it subsequently became something of a fad. The idea then seemed to languish for centuries until Thomas Aquinas picked up on it in his writings Summa Theologica, which stated that the development of memory-enhancing techniques was part of the virtue of Prudence (and thus well within the realm of appropriate Christian practice). In 55 BC, the Roman philosopher Cicero also used the Method of Loci to remember long speeches, and wrote about it in De Oratore. The Method of Loci was used by the ancient Greeks, as written about in Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia ( On Memory and Reminiscence). The Method of Loci is a very ancient device, and was in use with cultures that had an oral tradition in story-telling or oratory speechifying, and which celebrated current events and history with long saga-type poems with hundreds of stanzas. Anyway, this got me thinking about memory, how we use it, how it can influence our lives, and how there are techniques for spatializing thoughts for easier recall - Memory Palaces, for instance. We associate memories, experiences, emotions, on a very base, almost unconscious, level to our sense of smell. (BTW, I certainly could never fault anyone for not having read the book – at 1.5 million words, it is one of the longest novels ever written!) In the book, when the protagonist smells and has a taste of a madeleine dipped in tea many years later as an adult, it evokes an involuntary hidden (repressed?) memory from his childhood. ![]() I was referring to the madeleine, a type of French cake or cookie made famous by Marcel Proust in his book À la recherche du temps perdu ( Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time). I off-handedly mentioned that old books must be her version of the “Madeleine moment,” a reference with which she was unfamiliar. ![]() She seemed to think that her actions required explanation (they did not!), and then we spoke about how scent is the most primitive of our senses and the most directly linked - hard-wired, really - to memory. student who is working in my lab returned an old book to me, and was smelling the pages of it before she let it go. I started thinking about memory the other day on campus when a Geography Ph.D.
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