One of the reasons lawyers say eye-witness testimony is notoriously unreliable ist that the human memory is flawed. Really flawed. Let’s call this foray into memory “The Rhetoric of Memory.”
“Flaws in memory can arise at different points in the process,” explained Daniel Schacter of Harvard University,” author of Mystery of Memory: Why It’s Not Perfect and The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remebersin an article on livescience.com. I’ve been an avid journal-keeper since I was in 2nd grade, with lapses in the regularity of my entries here and there. Often when I go back and read entries of either time I’ve forgotten about or thought I’d remembered vividly, I’ve been shocked at how different what I wrote about them at the time was. In fact, I can’t even count on those entries for a photographic account of the events I wrote about. Did that room really smell like bananas? Was Chip really that cute? Did I like that song that much? Did I hate the feel of wool so much then? Did I love Orange Fanta so much? As soon as something’s over, even in between its occurrence and my recording it in my journals, I wager I remember it differently.
Related: See what I’ll miss most about the late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-7)
Committing It To Memory
Then there’s my passion: words and language. I memorize lines from movies and TV shows that I love, short phrases that stick with me that people have said, conversations I had with people, and lists of, say the six parts of the oration according to classical, medieval, and Renaissance rhetoricians. Rhetoric is my passion, after all.
As an undergraduate, when I was introduced to the formal study of rhetoric, my Holy Trinity had me memorize basic, vital parts of that discipline as taught in classical, medieval, and Renaissance rhetoric through both the chunking of material and repetition of it. These are two oft-recommended ways of remembering things.
- The three modes of persuasion: ethos, logos, and pathos.
- The six parts of the oration: the exordium, the narratio, the partition, the confirmatio, the refutatio, (the optional digressio), and the peroration,
- The perfect argument, according to Quintillian: statement, reason, proof of reason, embellishment, and resume.
I’m obsessed with 1970s and 1980s movies and television. I like to watch the same ones over and over again. Just by doing so, I have entire works, both film and television episodes, memorized. And there’s my faveorite Indian Art Film by director Muzaffar Ali, Umrao Jaan. I transliterated the script and committed it to my memory by both repeated watching and re-reading of the transliteration over and over. Ask me to recite scenes from Heathers, or the whole movie start to finish, or entire episodes of The Golden Girls, Friends, or Will & Grace, and I’ll oblige you.
And: Dis/organizational frameworks as a way of arranging the world.
There’s Help On the Way!
Sometimes I need help though, as we all do. That’s where mnemonics come in. Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally (parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction) for the order of operations in mathematics, King Philip Came Over For Great Spaghetti (kingdom, phylum, class, order, species) for the order of taxonomic rank, or Superman Helps Every One (Superior, Huron, Erie, Ontario) for the Great Lakes.
The classical rhetoricians, advising their students on how to memorize speeches, told their students to imagine each part of their oration corresponded to a different part of an edifice. As they addressed their audiences, they were to imagine moving through that edifice as they moved through their presentation.
Then there’s muscle memory. When I was 12 I wanted to learn the funky chicken. So every chance I got–at home, in line, with others–I performed that dance. And now I’ll never forget it!
Also: A poem about County Guy, then and now.
A Gift–With a Price to Pay
The woman with the most remarkable memory known to science is named Jill Price. She remembers every single thing that happened to her or that she heard about happening from age 14 on. To call it photographic would be an understatement. She remembers sounds, tastes, smells, and sensations too. These endless, vivid memories play like a movie on a loop all her waking hours. On an episode of 20/20, Diane Sawyer, with a history book in her lap, asked her what would be for most of us the day that a forgettable political event happened. Jill answered without hesitation. Sawyer looked embarrassed as she corrected Jill. Jill confidently assured Sawyer that she was right. Sawyer and her team of researchers got in touch with the book’s publishers and told them that Jill thought their book might have gotten the date of that event wrong. They investigated and it turns out Jill was right. Bizzare!
I don’t know, readers. I sometimes think I’d want Jill’s memory, as torturous as it sounds. What magic–to remember your life so thoroughly and accurately. Jill says in her autobiography, The Woman Who Can’t Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living With the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science with what researchers who are studying her one-0f-a-kind brain call Hyperthymestic Disorder, that as difficult as it is to remember all the difficult times, the injuries, the break-ups, etc., she can’t imagine her life any other way. She ultimately thinks of her “disorder” as a gift.
What makes Jill’s situation even more fascinating is that on standard memory tests researchers give to subjects whose memories they’re studying, Jill’s performance is average, even below average at times. In her autobiography, she said she was an average student, because remembering historical facts, math equations, etc. proved challenging. She has to experience something or hear about it happening in real time to remember it.
I think I might consider having Hyperthymestic Disorder a gift, ultimately, too, as Jill does, had I Jill’s mis/fortune.
I’m grateful for your readership! Check back with me each week here at politicalpoetrypastiche as my linguistic, literary, and generally loquacious involvement in local politics takes on a mélange of prose and poetry genres. After all: All Politics Is HoCo-al™. Join me on Facebook here, find me on Twitter at @politicalpoetr3, and follow me on Instagram using the handle @politicalpoetrypastiche.