On the left, a drawing of hippocampal cells by Ramon y Cajal, one of the founding fathers of neuroscience; on the right, the cellular city - a detail from Nolli's plan of Rome. The hippocampus plays a key role in fixing our memories by creating “cognitive” maps, which underlie our sense of direction and sense of place; these internal maps are then used to organize and retrieve memories of life experiences.
Memorable Places
The world is full of memorable places, both natural and man-made. Nature has given us the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, Yosemite National Park, Monument Valley; memorable cultural monuments include Imhotep's Pyramid of Cheops, Pericles' Athenian Acropolis, Louis Le Vau's Palace of Versailles, Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Joseph Strauss' Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, and Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, among many others. These are all sublime landmarks that suggest that triggering an overwhelming sense of awe is what makes a place memorable.
There is, however, a different kind of memorable place. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in talking about our childhood homes in "The Poetics of Space", describes the manner in which this shape our lives. The home, he says, is a kind of container for our daydreams and memories. Most of us have grown up in somewhat modest homes, suggesting that not all memorable places need to shout out "look at me"; instead, they make their way into our consciousness and memory in a more understated and more resonant way, intertwined with our lived experience. Intimacy, rather than awe, is the quality that is evoked here.
Somewhere in between these two memorable extremes, between the awe-inspiring monuments of humankind and nature that make us feel small, and the private refuges that we inhabit and that make us feel big, lie the everyday spaces and places of the urban and suburban public realms: places that seem more than ever threatened by irrelevance. Can these places live on in our memories in the same way?
In order to answer this question, I will take as my guideposts discoveries both ancient and modern, and will look to science as well as literature. In this first part of this three-part essay (The Art of Memory) we look back to antiquity, when orators discovered a unique place-based technique that enabled them to commit hours-long speeches to memory by building «memory palaces », hinting at the subtle relationships between place, memory.
The second part (The Science of Memory) will fast-forward to the present day and to the evolving field of neuroscience and the fascinating links between place and memory, confirming many of the intuitions and techniques laid out in the memory treatises of antiquity. We will touch on two memory experiments (the doorway effect and the Baker/baker paradox) that demonstrate how physical spaces help shape and frame memories by providing spatial and narrative contexts that allow memories to endure; we will also look at the hippocampus, an amazing context-creating device wrapped around our brain stem that organizes our thoughts and memories into spatial maps, so that we can find our way through the physical space that surrounds us and the imaginary space of our memories. Part two concludes with the provocative distinction made by noted behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman between our experiencing selves and our remembering selves - the first being inward looking, and the second being at the root of social connections to our fellow human beings as we share our memories with each other through storytelling.
The third part (Making Memorable Places) will apply insights from parts 1 and 2 to the design of public places: we’ll look at some of the features of buildings and places that allow us to better frame our experiences and turn them into enduring memories.
Ultimately, the exploration of the relationship between place and memory may help us gain insights into the somewhat elusive concept of « sense of place », and the related activity of placemaking. These are terms that are much bandied about today in architecture and urban design, yet few seem to be able to define them with any degree of precision. Memories associated with specific places are certainly one way that place can become personally meaningful and communicative, and as far as the public realm is concerned, this is perhaps more important for the places we frequent on a weekly basis (such as the humble grocery store or a commercial street) than it is for once-in-a-blue-moon "experience" destinations (Disneyland, MOMA, the Golden Gate bridge etc.).
Memory Loss
If we don't record it, will we remember it?
Is humanity undergoing an epidemic of memory loss? The isolation and repetitiveness of life during the months of lockdown in 2020- different zoom meetings blurring into one, all taking place in the virtual two-dimensional world of computer screens; work life and home life blending into one seamless undifferentiated expanse of time - all have had a strange, dulling effect on our minds: in one survey in England, 80% felt that their memories were worse than before the pandemic. Too much time spent in the same chair, in the same room, staring at the same computer screen.
Our ever-increasing reliance on smartphones and wayfinding devices seems to be further stunting our memories. Are we losing our ability to remember what we are supposed to do next because we expect our phones to do it for us? Before smartphones, our heads would have held a cache of phone numbers and appointments, mapped out in our memories; now I struggle to remember my children's phone numbers, available at the push of a button. And given that every moment is potentially Instagramable, do we even have to pay attention to what we are doing, seeing or eating, when we can just record it on our devices?
According to New York Times journalist Joshua Foer (the 2016 USA memory champion) "once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them and transmit them verbally. Before the written word had been invented, there was no alphabet to transcribe them in, no paper to set them down upon. Anything that had to be preserved had to be preserved in memory: any story that would be retold, any idea that would be transmitted, any piece of information that would be conveyed, first had to be remembered. Memory was at the root of all culture, and cultural transmission meant oral transmission". The ancient Greeks considered Mnemosyne, memory, to be the mother of all the arts: memory was principal medium of transmitting information from one generation to the next, as it passed from mouth to ear. Foer adds:" The great oral works transmitted a shared cultural heritage, held in common not on bookshelves, but in minds".
Increasing cultural complexity, brought about by the birth and growth of cities about 5 millennia ago, eventually led to the development of writing - clay tablets were civilization’s first recording devices, the ancestors of smart phones (and ironically about the same size as an i-phone, designed to fit comfortably in one’s palm). Over time, we’ve gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids—a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. Our collective memory loss started many centuries ago as technology stepped in to help us remember the stories we wanted to tell. After clay tablets came papyrus, then paper, then the printing press, then the slide projector, the teleprompter, the smart phone and Instagram. As we all outsource parts of our memories to various external devices, are we becoming a society of amnesiacs?
Taking a Walk down
Memory Lane: the Ancient Art of Memory
A walk down memory lane: on the left is an illustrated representation of the mental processes involved in remembering the order of a randomly shuffled deck of 52 cards, using the method of loci. On the right, an illustration from a 16th century memory treatise by Johannes Romberch, suggesting the use of everyday places such as a library or barbershop as being suitable for "storing" memories.
Homer’s Odyssey is one of the earliest narratives in the Western literary canon, an ancient story passed on through oral storytelling before being committed to verse by Homer. The Odyssey as we've received it consists of over 130,000 words, an equivalent storytelling time of about ten hours. A number of features enable it to be committed to memory - the rhythm of the verse, the rhyming structure - but perhaps the most importantly "memory-friendly" feature of the story is the place-based nature of the narrative. As a story it is structured as an eventful journey going from one place to the next: remember the place and you’ll recall the event ( « topos », a Greek word for place, is where we get the word "topic« ); it turns out that when we visualize facts as a story that moves from place to place, we are able to store and recall a prodigious amount of information. This was the foundation of an extraordinarily influential mnemonic technique call the « method of loci » (« loci » being a Latin word for places, from where we get « location »).
The invention of the method of loci is attributed to the ancient Greek poet Simonides. Invited to perform a recitation at a banquet, he had to step outside for a few minutes during which the banqueting hall collapsed, crushing everyone beyond recognition. Simonides was asked to help identify the bodies, and he was able to do so by picturing where everyone had been seated: visualizing the place helped reconstruct the memory of who had been sitting where. Even though he had made no conscious effort to memorize the seating arrangement, it had nevertheless left a durable impression upon his memory.
Simonides’ discovery was eventually developed by Roman orators such as Cicero and Quintilian into a technique for remembering speeches: ancient orators were expected to deliver long and rousing speeches, without the use of cue cards and long before the invention of the teleprompter. The method of loci was their way of committing these speeches to memory, and the techniques associated with this method were enshrined in numerous treatises on rhetoric (rhetoric was the art of giving persuasive speeches, which back then did not have today's negative connotations). According to Cicero, persons desiring to train memory "must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it." The mental images should be striking; the localities could be the rooms of a house, or the public spaces of a city - together they form a "memory palace"- an imagined edifice in our mind acting as a receptacle for our thoughts and ideas. Walk through the memory palace and you will retrieve the topics you are planning to discuss.
Cicero describes the kinds of places that make for good memory loci: "One must employ a large number of places which must be well-lighted, clearly set out in order, at moderate intervals apart“- a sequence of distinct spaces differentiated from each other, evoking a walk through an intimate series of public and private spaces of varying scales. By way of explanation of the workings of the Art of memory, Cicero suggests that “when we return to a place after a considerable absence, we not merely recognize the place itself, but remember things that we did there, and recall the persons whom we met and even the unuttered thoughts which passed through our minds when we were there before.” This fact has been corroborated by modern scientific research: when you are trying to learn or remember something for a test, memory works best when the context during testing matches the context during learning, a phenomenon that psychologists call the encoding specificity principle: specific places are associated with specific thoughts and ideas, and they assist with memory retrieval of those thoughts and ideas. A room may be forever linked to what you learned or experienced inside it - whether or not you made a conscious connection at the time. In addition, this phenomenon is not just limited to indoor spaces: the above illustration on the right is from a 16th Century memory treatise by Johannes Romberch, in which he suggests that outdoor places, such as places one might encounter along a city street, can form memory loci which are just as effective as a sequence of indoor spaces. His woodcut features a butcher's shop, a barbershop and a bookstore - all unique places that are suitable for "parking" the topics of a speech. Retrace your steps through the city, and your speech will be correspondingly recalled.
The
mnemonic techniques of ancient orators have, ironically perhaps, mostly been
forgotten today - with the exception of participants in memory competitions,
who use them to perform impressive feats of memory. Every Spring,
New York City hosts the USA memory
championships. « Moonwalking with Einstein » is an
entertaining memoir written by Foer that describes the year of intense memory
training that led him to be crowned the 2016 USA memory champion. Tasks performed
during the competition included memorizing two decks of cards in less than 5
minutes and committing to memory a list of 300 random words in less than 15
minutes. The diagram reproduced at the start of this section is a
visual description of Foer’s “memory walk” through the two card decks - cards
are grouped in threes, associated with a striking image (examples suggested by
Foer include visualizing a pack of nudists on bicycles, the cookie
monster riding a talking horse, or Einstein doing the moonwalk) and placed in
an imagined (but very detailed) physical space - his memory palace. Foer is
turning the deck of cards into a story featuring a series of striking or
surreal events in distinct locales - in effect creating his own version of
Homer’s Odyssey. He retrieves the sequence by walking through his memory
palace - a very literal walk down memory lane. It's a memorable mix
derived from the juxtaposition of the outrageous (the striking memory
images) and the familiar (the intimate spatial settings of the memory palace).
The loci are the background, the structure that allows the narrative to unfold.
Foer suggests that as bad as we are at
remembering names, phone numbers, word for word instructions, we have really
exceptional visual and spatial memories. On a mundane level we all use
familiar places as a mnemonic device that can organize and prompt our memories:
that’s where I went on my first date; that's where my parents celebrated a
wedding anniversary - in fact the narrative of our own lives is very much
place-based. Psychologists hypothesize that we
lock in memories by integrating many stimuli, including spatial stimuli, that
together will help us remember something particularly important. They call this
process episodic memory formation: the locking of ideas and objects to a
specific place or setting. Or, to quote Quintilian, highlighting the
importance of context in creating enduring memories: "...memory
includes backgrounds and images. By backgrounds I mean such scenes as are
naturally or artificially set off on a small scale, complete and conspicuous,
so that we can grasp and embrace them easily by the natural memory — for
example, a house, an intercolumnar space, a recess, an arch, or the like. An
image is, as it were, a figure, mark, or portrait of the object we wish to
remember; for example, if we wish to recall a horse, a lion, or an eagle, we
must place its image in a definite background". In other words,
to remember an image or concept or event you need be able to visualize the
background - the contained needs a container.
Place as a Repository
of Memories - Personal and Cultural
A physical memory palace: Joyce's Dublin, evoked in great detail in "Ulysses", a book written whilst Joyce was in exile in Zurich, Trieste and Paris.
Author James Joyce, in his autobiographical "portrait of the artist as a young man", set in Dublin at the beginning of the 20th Century, provides a vivid example of the workings of the art of memory as he describes how the settings of his daily walks in Dublin would evoke his favorite authors: "as he walked down the avenue and felt the grey morning light falling about him through the dripping trees and smelt the strange wild smell of the wet leaves and bark, his soul was loosed of her miseries... His morning walk across the city had begun, and he foreknew that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humor of Guido Cavalcanti and smile; that as he went by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty; and that passing a grimy marine dealer’s shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson…”
This is a striking echo of Romberch's woodcut illustration from his memory treatise, written 450 years before Joyce.The streets, storefronts and trades of Dublin (a city that would become the backdrop to his magnum opus Ulysses) act as containers for literary and cultural memories, remembered and evoked as the young James Joyce walks past them- the City of Dublin acting a physical memory palace. The evoked associations are part of the process of investing a place with meaning and personal relevance - a process that transforms a neutral « space » into a meaningful « place ».
The role of place as a mnemonic device adds an interesting nuance to Joshua Foer's statement that before the written word had been invented, anything that had to be preserved had to be preserved in memory: in fact, landscapes and buildings performed that very function before the advent of writing. Many early human societies developed rich oral traditions in which embedded their knowledge of the land into stories involving creation, spirituality, and the life histories of their gods and totemic animals. Then came the first permanent structures, which were likely houses of the dead - and tombs are, by definition, memorials to the deceased. As humankind eventually settled into cities, buildings and public spaces continued to embody traditions, frame rituals, memorialize ancestors and provide a common ground of experience, memory, and cultural understanding. In ancient Athens the agora gathered around itself both commercial and institutional buildings to become both a visible symbol of the republic and a memorable image of it. Lighting up the dark ages, the Gothic cathedral is often cited as the epitome of this aspect of building, with the old and new testaments carved and illustrated in its portals and stained glass windows - historical events, religious laws and cultural symbols were all, up until the fifteenth century, embedded in architecture - an important and powerful vehicle of cultural transmission at a time when the majority of the population was illiterate. Apostles and saints not only had a place in a biblical narrative – they also had a very real physical place in the walls or windows of the cathedral, which acted as a "real" memory palace in the cities of Christendom. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a building like the medieval gothic cathedral is worth about 750,000 (approximately the number of words in the King James bible). For a priest it was a conscious memory palace, a tool to be used while sermonizing, whether within the cathedral or without (the art of memory was still very much practiced during the Middle Ages); for the layperson it represented a spatial organization for a huge number of impressionable and memorable images.
The crucial cultural role played by buildings began to be challenged in the middle of the 15th Century with the invention of the printing press. French author Victor Hugo, in a famous passage in his book "Notre Dame de Paris" entitled "this will kill that" (meaning the book will kill the building), describes how the cultural content once embodied by the cathedral had mostly migrated to books once these became readily available. Instead of being embodied by buildings and the rituals that took place there, culture and knowledge could now live a disembodied life on the printed page. Would physical places lose their cultural relevance, now that printed books had become readily available?
Contemporary scientific research on memory suggests otherwise.
Next - Part 2: The science of memory
