The Muses are the goddesses of inspiration who bless mortals
with the gifts of song, dance, and contemplation. There are muses of epic
poetry (Calliope), of lyric poetry (Euterpe), of love songs (Erato), of songs
to the gods (Polyhymnia), of history (Clio), of chorus and dance (Terpsichore),
of tragedy and comedy (Melpomene and Thalia), and of astronomy (Urania).
All of these arts rely on memory. Creating and performing
these works means holding lines of verse, tunes, and motions in your head,
keeping them in order, delivering them with the grace of a goddess. If we don’t
have good memories, we can’t be good artists.
For all its miracles, Google is not helping us in the memory
department. Don’t get me wrong; Google is amazing and powerful. I once employed
its virtuosic search engine to identify a particularly nasty bug in my
bathroom. I typed “big-ass bug with too many legs” in the glowing bar, and it
delivered image after image of exactly the thing: a house centipede. So I know
its phenomenal capabilities.
What I worry about is how much people are coming to rely on
it. Sometimes I feel like my students have very little impetus (beyond the fear
of failing quizzes) to remember anything; they’ll just Google it. My partner teaches chemistry. He has seen students who know the molecular weights of elements
Google the weight of a compound instead of simply adding the weights together.
This seems small, I suppose, but I think it’s probably… not
small.
When we stop calculating, we slowly lose the ability to
check Google’s responses. When we stop memorizing things, we forget how to. When
we don’t have stories and details and random facts that we find cool stored in
our heads, we have nothing from which to create new worlds and solve the
problems of this one. Memory is the mother of creativity.
It behooves us, then, to increase our memory. We need to go
to the mental gym, not just the muscle gym. Those things that help us remember
things? They’re called mnemonics, from Mnemosyne. Here are a few that always
work.
Tell a story. If
you want to remember a fact or a lesson, give it a narrative. We love stories
(as evidenced by the fact that squarely seven and a half of those muses work in
words). If you want to teach children to stay away from strangers, you tell
them “Little Red Riding Hood.” If you want to teach them multiplication tables,
it works there too. (There’s a video called Times Tales that animates numbers
with narratives and helps kids memorize even math facts with stories).
Make a list. When
we group things together that are similar, we visualize them together and see how
they connect to each other. We have a tremendous ability to remember lists, whether
we make up jingles for them or see them in our mind’s eye. Thinking of things’
similarities helps us remember them.
Visit your Mind
Palace. Long before the BBC Sherlock visualized his Mind Palace to recall
things, medieval folks imagined mental cathedrals, slotting facts or story
blocks or shopping lists in to the stained glass windows of a cathedral and
imagining themselves walking through it, seeing the items in order.
There are many more. When I have my students create journals
for my Myth as Literature class, I give them complete freedom to use whatever
tricks they can to help them remember the stories. Some make elaborate family
trees. Some draw comics of their favorite scenes. Some write Tinder biographies
of all the gods. Some theme their whole journal around what drink a god or hero
would order at Starbucks and why it’s appropriate.
We need to do more of this, not less. We need to figure out what
method works for us individually and what has a good track record on the whole,
and we need to start employing these tricks. I’m heartened by the resurgence in
Commonplace Books and Art and Bullet Journaling; there does seem to be a trend currently to
write things down that we want to remember.
Whatever we do, we need to combat the tendency to offload
all our knowledge in to data files and websites. Otherwise we risk not only
losing our ability to be creative, but also our own stories, our own lives, in
the waters of Lethe, the River of Oblivion.
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