Reviving the Ancient Art of Memory: An Orator's Secret Weapon

Stepping into a bustling courthouse, judges and juries in session, you will invariably see counsel glued to a lectern. Notepads full of notes. Eye contact? Minimal. Whether he speaks to a witness or a juror, his notes are the apple of his eye. They are the external hard drive to his memory.

Yet we all know how powerful it is to speak directly to our audience, hold eye-contact as is appropriate, and then move on to the next listener for a like interval. It’s the eye that is the portal to the soul, or so they say.

What’s more, in examining a witness, the advocate who regularly consults his notes misses the subtle moments when a witness twitches, looks down to one side rather than the other. Or when the witness shifts in his seat ever so slightly, betraying uneasiness. And for the advocate, an opportunity to strike and hone in on a vulnerable point. Missed.

A good memory is nowadays equated with intelligence. And intelligence is natured, rather than nurtured and improved by cultivation.

That’s new-think. Because in former times, memory was considered an art form, i.e., something to be studied and trained. Something that can augment and surpass nature. Before computers, a trained memory wasn’t just helpful – it was essential for persuasion, refutation, and extempore brilliance.

I doubt that any law school curriculum features a course on memory.

To the ancient Greeks and Romans, and their advocates especially, training the memory daily was a matter of course. In introducing his chapter on Memory, Quintilian states:

‘But pleaders need not only to be able to retain a number of facts in their minds, but also to be quick to take them in; it is not enough to learn what you have written by dint of repeated reading; it is just as necessary to follow the order both of matter and words when you have merely thought out what you are going to say, while you must also remember what has been said by your opponents, and must not be content merely with refuting their arguments in the order in which they were advanced, but must be in a position to deal with each in its appropriate place.  Nay, even extempore eloquence, in my opinion, depends on no mental activity so much as memory. For while we are saying one thing, we must be considering something else that we are going to say: consequently, since the mind is always looking ahead, it is continually in search of something which is more remote: on the other hand, whatever it discovers, it deposits by some mysterious process in the safe-keeping of memory, which acts as a transmitting agent and hands on to the delivery what it has received from the imagination.’ (‘The Orator’s Education,” Book 11.3)

Why you should not neglect your memory, but train it daily, you all see for yourselves.

And I won’t tell you that it won’t be exhausting, because it will be. Your meat-computer burns a lot of calories. Just like all things rewarding.

The following technique I have learned chiefly from three sources:

1)     Quintilian’s ‘The Orator’s Education,’

2)    Cicero’s ‘De Oratore,’ and

3)    The anonymously written ‘Rhetorica Ad Herennium.’

This is the Method of Loci, also known as the Memory Palace, or the Treasure House of Eloquence.

You need two things: a) locations, and b) images.

A location is a setting that you are familiar with and can instantly recall and walk through in your mind. Perhaps your bedroom, office, garden, or a familiar walk, a park, a monument, a pretty building with pillars. It’s up to you.

Secondly, you need images or pictures that you create in your imagination, and that correlate to the material you are trying to retain. Those images you then place inside your location at various points which you then walk past, in a chronological order.

In the end, you will walk through your location in your mind, and the stored images will jog your memory.

Let’s say you want to commit to memory Robert Frost’s short poem, Nothing Gold Can Stay:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

In your location, say a spacious room, not too cluttered, perhaps the sanctuary in your church, or a conference room, you place at your first point the image of a man standing on a small patch of green grass with flowers. He has just picked up a gold bar, but it seems to be slipping out of his hands. By this image, you jog your memory to the first two lines of the poem, and if you visualize the image in your location while reading it, it will imprint very quickly, and sustainably.

Next station: a tiny hourglass with a bright yellow flower trapped inside, petals already wilting as sand rushes down, because: "Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour."

I will let you figure out how to memorize the rest.

Just a quick tip. Choose locations that are rather spacious and orderly, than cluttered and cramped. There also needs to be a clear direction of travel. Lastly, your images should be striking, and can also be absurd, because these will be easier to retain.

Practice this a few weeks in a row, and you will realize the power of this technique. Be easy on yourself. Do a poem this week. A longer one the next week. Dedicate 10 minutes in the morning, 10 before bedtime.

Try building your first Memory Palace. Now.

Yours,

Tom