The Art of Memory• Tony Judt, famous historian, paralyzed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, invents, composes,

and remembers without writing. He describes it in a way that is exactly like classical rhetoricians – he has a room, he composes bits, and puts them in drawers in a desk in the room, etc. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Trials-of-Tony-Judt/63449/

• By last February, Judt could no longer move his hands. "I thought it would be catastrophic," he recalls matter-of-factly. How would he write? He discovered that a lifetime of lecturing—often without notes and in complete sentences and full paragraphs —had trained him to think out loud. He can now, "with a bit of mental preparation," dictate "an essay or an intellectually thoughtful e-mail." Unable to jot down ideas on a yellow pad, Judt has taught himself elaborate memorization schemes of the sort described by the Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence in his 1984 book, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. Like Ricci, a 16th-century Jesuit missionary to China, Judt imagines structures in his head where he can store his thoughts and ideas. The basic principle: Picture entering a large house; turn left and there is a room with shelves and tables; leave a memory on each surface until the rooms fills. Now head down the hall into another room. To retrieve your memories, to reconstruct a lecture or recall the content and structure of an article, you re-enter the building and follow the same path, which should trigger the ideas you left behind.

The “psychodynamics” of kindergarten learning

• In kindergarten, abstract geometrical concepts are personified (Ricky Rectangle, Suzy Circle, Tommy Triangle, etc.) and students are given rhymes to help remember how to draw these shapes. (definitions = hard to remember)

• When learning how to draw numbers, (which may seem easy to us, but which is a very complex cognitive task – try memorizing how to draw 30 kanji characters) students learn by doing, but also by reciting rhymes that help “store” the knowledge in memory.

• Alisha, aged 4, learning how to draw numbers:

• Advertisers are very good at making audiences remember, at imprinting messages on the ear. Consider the JINGLE, which uses rhyme, rhythm, and prosody to get us to remember.

• Can you think of some jingles? (‘takes a lickin’ but keeps on tickin’) Some studies of memory suggest that in the past kids memorized poems and songs, now they are more likely to remember jingles, ads and logos.

How to encourage forgetting?• “It's commonly understood by psychologists - and ad

makers - that if a person is presented with a list of things, he/she is more likely to remember items at the beginning and at the end of the list than items just past the middle. For example, if you are asked to hear, then recall, a list of 10 foods, chances are best that you'll forget the sixth, seventh and eighth foods. So, while drug-makers abide by the law and present important side effect information, it's no surprise that they nearly all follow the same format: putting benefit information in the first half of the commercial, side effect information just past the middle, then benefit information again at the end. Sometimes the ads employ crafty timing or visual distraction to deemphasize the risks. Sometimes they do so simply by using complex language.” [or skilful reframing, as with “habit forming”] http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1806946,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

Style as strategy: making your words memorable (or forgettable)

• Politicians like to use figures of speech that will help audiences remember them - that “imprint” themselves on the ear.

• In the current election cycle, the trope du jour was antimetabole (an-tee-meh-TA-boe-lee), a rhetorical device in which words are repeated in transposed order (political speechwriters call it “the reversible raincoat.”)

Examples of antimetabole

• "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent!" Dr. Seuss, Horton Hatches an Egg.

• “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.” JFK’s

• "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." Carl Sagan

• "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done."-- George W. Bush, 9-20-01.

• "Who sheds the blood of a man, by a man shall his blood be shed" (Genesis 9:6)

Recent speeches: top trope = antimetabole, top theme = change

• "In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change."

• "We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us."

• "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."

• "He has brought change to Washington, but Washington hasn't changed him” (describing his running mate, Biden)

• "In the end the true test is not the speeches a president delivers, it's whether the president delivers on the speeches."

• "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom."