Real-life applications of obscure research obsessions
I was listening to This American Life this weekend, and the first story was about a guy who went to extraordinary lengths to get onto Jeopardy!. So I’m half-listening, and the guy starts talking about how he memorized facts, like the titles of E. M. Forster’s novels: to remember A Room with a View, he imagined someone’s living room and its view, and then to remember Howards End, he thought of a friend named Howard and then visualized Howard’s buttocks, at enormous size, visible through the windows of the room. Then he added Where Angels Fear to Tread by reasoning that of course the angels would want to avoid Howard’s, er, end. (At which point Ira Glass notes: "Let’s not even talk about how he worked in A Passage to India.")
And I do a little dance of nerdy joy, because
memorization-by-imagery is one of the things I wrote my dissertation about.* When I was working on the Magnum Opus, people always asked me "but why would anyone create such an elaborate system to memorize things? It doesn’t seem like it would work!" I wondered the same thing myself. But this guy sounds like he’s just figured out on his own that the method works — without reading anything about the classical practice of constructing memory places, or the way various ancient and medieval authors suggested picturing places and people you know, or really absurd imagery, to make the content
stick in your memory better.
So: they were right, after all! Maybe I’ll send Ira Glass an e-mail about it.
You
can listen to the whole thing here (it’s the one called "Quiz Show"). The other stories —
especially the one about the MIT Mystery Hunt (which I really want to
do someday) — are all well worth listening to.
* If you’re curious, Frances Yates wrote a classic introduction to the subject
(The Art of Memory, University of Chicago Press, 1966); Mary Carruthers’ The
Book of Memory (Cambridge UP, 1990) is another, more recent take on it.
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