Down memory lane

It happened again. I strolled out of my history of science lecture into the crisp October morning. The sun smiled; I paused in the courtyard, watching McCosh disgorge its multitudes and basked in a warm, contented, post-pedagogical repletion. My professor, who crammed his lectures with names, dates, and asides on ludicrous deaths of scientists, had served up a feast of fat things, rattling at auctioneer's tempo for fifty minutes on . . . on . . . uh . . .

Damn!

I remembered being riveted. I remembered taking copious notes. I had discharged my duty as student. Yet my mind was blank. The last hour of my life had sunk into subconscious murk. I dragged the murk; some material resurfaced, bits about the intersection of science and German Romanticism. Names, fragments and images bubbled up: Naturphilosophie, Lebenskraft, Schlegel, dancing octopus and the Urpflanze — the archetypal "Ur-" or "Super-" -plant. I seized the stem of the Ur-plant, fixing upon its image, hoping to recall more. But the Ur-plant, aided by imagination run amok, proved perverse. It grew. It flowered. It exploded into fecundity like some diabolical weed, entangling and choking off my faculties, obscuring chronology and context, burying and suffocating all other recollections beneath its enormous, hairy, dinner-plate leaves before subsiding back into the swamp.

I remembered no more.

I sometimes wonder if the problem of "anti-intellectualism" on campus stems not entirely from student apathy, but from failure to make information stick to the mind. If the facts don't accompany us home, how will we discuss them in our free time? Perhaps we haven't learned to systematically store material — and storage (or interment) between the covers of a notebook doesn't count. Something about note-taking — the squeak of the racing pen, the sight of rapidly filling pages — lulls us into believing learning is in progress. But once inscribed, it's more likely the scribbles won't see light again until crunch time, when they will be hastily resurrected, memorized and forgotten the moment the exam is over.

Maybe our notion of "learning" is awry. There's much talk nowadays about the atrophy of memory in an information age. Why memorize material that is a click away? Medieval scholars, compelled by scarcity of books to commit as much as possible to memory, were perhaps wiser. They knew the key to mastering a fact or text was not merely in the reading or hearing, but in actively staking out a place in the memory — at designated coordinates — and installing it there. They described these storage places in metaphors of strong boxes, honeycomb cells, money-pouches, pigeonholes, palaces, secret chambers, nooks and caverns. Memory was no cobwebbed attic piled to the rafters with junk, but a meticulously catalogued library. Every piece of information had its proper place and mnemonic and was instantaneously accessible; the unretrievable fact was an unlearned fact. Among popular memorization strategies were the use of numerical grids to map the lines of psalms, and the visualization of concepts against architectural backgrounds (each fact nestling between, say, a Doric column). Peter of Ravenna, a fifteenth-century scholar, turned his mind into a veritable encyclopedia. He memorized thousands of texts using an alphabetical cataloguing scheme; if questioned on, say, Anti-Christ, he simply unlocked his "A" chest (subdivided into compartments for natural history, law and Scripture) and drew it out. This was not rote memorization. This was ownership.

Could we information addicts — devourers of newspapers, books, magazines, lectures, radio and television broadcasts — improve the organization of our own knowledge? Creators of encyclopedias have tried for centuries. The preface to one of the most famous specimens, the 18th century Encyclope-die of Diderot, boasts a chart of a "detailed system of human knowledge," with a niche for every kind of intellectual product. It classifies every craft and discipline from black magic (under "Science of Good and Evil Spirits") to calculus to optics to horsemanship to poetry to my personal favorite, the study of "deviations of nature," encompassing Celestial Prodigies and Monstrous Vegetables. No tidbit goes uncategorized. Once again, everything is in its place.

Perhaps this is the key to better listening and learning: retrofitting our brains for the reception and organization of input. (For history majors like myself, chronology is the ultimate expanding file). We could probably afford to take briefer notes; a key distinction in medieval memory training was that between memoria ad verbum and memoria ad res: learning something verbatim versus learning the "gist." We could even ditch the notebooks for a day and try memorizing a lecture using our own invented mnemonic devices. If you're too nervous to do it in your own class, visit a friend's. It's amazing what the mind can accomplish without a safety net.

All that note taking has helped me retain is the untimely demise of Sir Francis Bacon. I can tell you with perfect confidence that he died of a chill after stuffing a chicken with snow.

Janani Sreenivasan is a history of science major from Corvallis, Ore.