Moonwalking With Einstein Part 4

I was finding it a little hard to get excited about Claudia Schiffer and her tub of cottage cheese, however. My nose and ears were stinging from the icy wind. "Um, Ed, should we maybe take this lesson inside somewhere?" I asked. "There must be a Starbucks around here."

"No, no. This cold air is good for the brain," he said. "Now pay attention. We've just walked inside the door of your house. I want you to turn to the left in your mind's eye. What's the next room you enter into?" he asked.

"The living room. There's a piano in it."

"Perfect. Our third item is peat-smoked salmon. So let's imagine that underneath the strings of this piano there's a lot of smoking peat. And lying on top of the piano strings, there is a Hebridean salmon. Ooooh ... can you smell that?" He whiffed at the cold air.

Again, I wasn't certain what peat-smoked salmon was, but it sounded like lox, so that's what I visualized. "Smells great," I said, my eyes still closed.

(If you don't have a piano in your own home, just put the peat-smoked salmon somewhere to the left of your front door.) The next item on the list was six bottles of white wine, which we decided to place on the stained white couch next to the piano.

"Now, anthropomorphizing the bottles of wine is quite a good idea," Ed suggested. "Animate images tend to be more memorable than inanimate images." That advice, too, came from the Ad Herennium Ad Herennium. The author instructs his readers to create images of "exceptional beauty or singular ugliness," to put them into motion, and to ornament them in ways that render them more distinct. One could "disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint," or else proceed by "a.s.signing certain comic effects to our images."

"Perhaps you should imagine the wines discussing their relative merits among themselves," Ed suggested.

"So, like, Mr. Merlot is saying-"

"Merlot is not not a white wine, Josh," he interrupted, with a bemused t.i.tter. "Rather, let's imagine that the chardonnay is plaintively insulting the soil quality of the sauvignon blanc, while the gewurztraminer is giggling away nearby at the expense of the rieslings ... That sort of thing." a white wine, Josh," he interrupted, with a bemused t.i.tter. "Rather, let's imagine that the chardonnay is plaintively insulting the soil quality of the sauvignon blanc, while the gewurztraminer is giggling away nearby at the expense of the rieslings ... That sort of thing."

I thought that was a funny image, and one sure to stick in my mind. But why? What makes six snooty, anthropomorphized wine bottles more memorable than the words "six bottles of wine"? Well, for one thing, visualizing such an outlandish image demanded more mental indulgence than simply reading four words. In the process of expending all that mental effort, I was forming more durable connections among the neurons that would encode that memory. But even more important, the memorableness of those talking wine bottles is a function of their novelty. While I have seen many wine bottles in my day, I have never seen one that talks before. Were I to simply try to remember the words "six bottles of wine," that memory would soon blend in with all my other memories of wine bottles.

Consider: How many of the lunches that you ate over the last week can you recall? Do you remember what you ate today? I hope so. Yesterday? I bet it takes a moment's effort. And what about the day before yesterday? What about a week ago? It's not so much that your memory of last week's lunch has disappeared; if provided with the right cue, like where you ate it, or whom you ate it with, you would likely recall what had been on your plate. Rather, it's difficult to remember last week's lunch because your brain has filed it away with all the other lunches you've ever eaten as just another lunch just another lunch. When we try to recall something from a category that includes as many instances as "lunch" or "wine," many memories compete for our attention. The memory of last Wednesday's lunch isn't necessarily gone; it's that you lack the right hook to pull it out of a sea of lunchtime memories. But a wine that talks: That's unique. It's a memory without rivals.

"Next along on our list we have three pairs of socks," Ed continued. "Maybe there's a lamp you can hang them on nearby?"

"Yeah, there's a lamp right next to the couch," I said.

(If you're still following along, you should be putting those six bottles of wine and three pairs of socks somewhere in the first room of your house.) "Splendid. Now, I know of precisely two ways to make socks attention-grabbing. One is to have them be appallingly old and smelly. The other is to make them those incredible socks made of cotton in nice colors that you can never really find. Let's make these socks the latter. So I'd like you to just see them dangling there on the lamp. And since it's often good to have a bit of supernatural c.r.a.p going on, too, perhaps you can imagine that there is an elegant ghost inside the socks that is stretching and pulling them. Really try to see it. Imagine the feeling of those soft cotton socks coolly brus.h.i.+ng against your forehead."

I followed Ed like this around my childhood home, dropping images along the way as I sauntered from room to room in my imagination. In the dining room, I visualized three hula-hooping women on top of the table. Stepping into the kitchen, I saw a man wearing a snorkel diving into the sink, and a dry-ice machine blowing smoke across the counter. (Are you keeping up?) (Are you keeping up?) From there, I moved into the den. The next item on the list was "e-mail Sophia." From there, I moved into the den. The next item on the list was "e-mail Sophia."

I unclenched my eyes to ask Ed for help, and watched him licking the edge of a rolling paper for a fresh cigarette. "What should 'e-mail Sophia' look like?" I asked.

"Ooh, that's a tough one," he said, putting down his cigarette. "You see, e-mail isn't very memorable in itself. The more abstract the word, the less memorable it is. We need to make e-mail concrete somehow." Ed paused and thought on it for a moment. "What I'd like to propose is that you imagine a she-male sending the e-mail. Can you do that? And you'll need to a.s.sociate that she-male with Sophia. What's the first image that enters your mind when I say the word 'Sophia' ? "

"It's the capital of Bulgaria," I said.

"That's very educated of you, Josh. Bravo. But, alas, not very memorable. Instead let's make it Sophia Loren. And let's have her sitting on the lap of the she-male as she/he types away at the computer. Have you visualized it? Are you sufficiently engaged by this image? Splendid."

The pace of image-making now picked up. I left the den and visualized a comely woman in a skin-toned cat suit purring in the hallway. I placed Paul Newman in a nearby alcove, and an elk at the top of the stairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt. I walked down the stairs and into the garage, where I left behind an image of Ed sitting in a director's chair barking orders through a giant megaphone. Then I imagined myself pressing the clicker that raises the garage door and walking out into the backyard, where a harnessed climber was using ropes to ascend a sizable oak tree. And the final image, a barometer, was installed alongside the backyard fence. "To remind you that it's a BAR-ometer, you should see a thermometerlike column sitting in a bed of pork scratchings and other bar snacks," Ed helpfully suggested. Having completed my circuit of the house, I opened my eyes.

"Well done," Ed said, with slow and deliberate applause. "Now, I think you're going to find that the process of recalling these memories is incredibly intuitive. See, normally memories are stored more or less at random in semantic networks, or webs of a.s.sociation. But you have now stored a large number of memories in a very controlled context. Because of the way spatial cognition works, all you have to do is retrace your steps through your memory palace, and hopefully at each point the images you laid down will pop back into your mind as you pa.s.s by them. All you'll have to do is translate those images back into the things you were trying to learn in the first place."

I closed my eyes again and saw myself back at the foot of my parents' driveway. The enormous jar of pickled garlic was just where I'd left it. I walked up the path to the front door. There was Claudia Schiffer, seductively scrubbing herself with a sponge in a tub of cottage cheese. I opened the door and turned to the left, and inhaled a noseful of the fish that was still laid out across the strings of the piano, curing in peat smoke. I felt its flavor on my tongue. I could hear the highpitched chatter of those haughty wine bottles on the couch, and feel the three pairs of luxurious cotton socks on the lamp brus.h.i.+ng softly against my forehead. I couldn't believe it was really working. I called out the first five items of the to-do list for Ed to confirm. "Pickled garlic! Cottage cheese! Peat-smoked salmon! Six bottles of wine! Three pairs of socks!"

"Exceptional!" Ed shouted into the cold wind. "Exceptional! The makings of KL7 material here!"

Well, I knew my performance couldn't have been that that exceptional, given the much more impressive feats I'd witnessed the day before. Still, I was feeling pretty good about my accomplishment. I continued walking through the house, picking up the bread crumbs of exotic images I'd deposited earlier. "Three hula hoops on the dining room table! Snorkel in the sink! Dry ice machine on the counter!" To my surprise and delight, all fifteen images were exactly where I'd left them. But would those memories really stick, I wondered? A week from now, would I still remember Ed's to-do list? exceptional, given the much more impressive feats I'd witnessed the day before. Still, I was feeling pretty good about my accomplishment. I continued walking through the house, picking up the bread crumbs of exotic images I'd deposited earlier. "Three hula hoops on the dining room table! Snorkel in the sink! Dry ice machine on the counter!" To my surprise and delight, all fifteen images were exactly where I'd left them. But would those memories really stick, I wondered? A week from now, would I still remember Ed's to-do list?

"Barring an episode of binge drinking or a wallop to the side of your head, you're going to find that those images will hold in your mind far longer than you might expect," Ed promised me. "And if you revisit the journey through your memory palace later this evening, and again tomorrow afternoon, and perhaps again a week from now, this list will leave a truly lasting impression. And having now done this with fifteen words, we could easily do it with fifteen hundred, provided you had an appropriately large memory palace to store them in. And then having mastered random words, we can move onto the truly fun stuff, like playing cards and Heidegger's Being and Time Being and Time."

SIX.

HOW TO MEMORIZE A POEM.

My first a.s.signment was to begin collecting architecture. Before I could embark on any serious degree of memory training, I first needed a stockpile of memory palaces at my disposal. I went for walks around the neighborhood. I visited friends' houses, the local playground, Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art. And I traveled back in time: to my high school, to my elementary school, to the house on Reno Road where my family lived until I was four years old. I focused on wallpaper and the arrangement of furniture. I tried to feel the flooring under my feet. I reminded myself of emotionally resonant incidents that occurred in each room. And then I carved each building up into loci that would serve as cubbyholes for my memories. The goal, as Ed explained it, was to know these buildings so thoroughly-to have such a rich and textured set of a.s.sociations with every corner of every room-that when it came time to learn some new body of information, I could speed through my palaces, scattering images as quickly as I could sketch them in my imagination. The better I knew the buildings, and the more each felt like home, the stickier my images would be, and the easier it would be to reconstruct them later. Ed figured I'd need about a dozen memory palaces just to begin my training. He has several hundred, a metropolis of mental storehouses.

At this point, out of full disclosure, I ought to say a word or two about my living arrangements at the time that I began my dalliance with memory training. I was a recent college grad trying to make it as a journalist, sponging off my parents in the home in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., where I'd grown up. I was sleeping in my childhood bedroom with a pair of Baltimore Orioles pennants above the window and a book of Shel Silverstein's poems on the shelf, and working in a makes.h.i.+ft office in the bas.e.m.e.nt, at a desk I'd set up between my father's Nordic Track and a stack of boxes filled with old family photos.

My office was awash in Post-it notes, and long lists of items I needed to catch up on: calls to be returned, article ideas to be investigated, personal and professional ch.o.r.es to be completed. Fortified with confidence from my successes in Central Park, I tore down a handful of the most urgent items, converted them into images, and diligently filed them away in a memory palace I had constructed out of my grandmother's suburban ranch home. "Get car inspected" became an image of Inspector Gadget circling the old Buick in her driveway. "Find book on African kings" was an occasion to imagine Shaka Zulu hurling a spear at her front door. "Book Phoenix ticket" led me to transform her living room into a landscape of desert and canyons, and to picture a phoenix rising from the ashes of her antique credenza. This was all well and good, and even kind of fun, but it was also exhausting. I noticed, upon memorizing ten or so of my Post-it notes, that I felt physically tired, like my mind's eye was getting bloodshot. This was harder work than it seemed, and much less efficient than I'd imagined. And there were still a few items on the wall I had no clue what to do with. How was I supposed to turn telephone numbers into images? What was I supposed to do with e-mail addresses? I fell back into my office chair with a handful of Post-its clinging to my palm and looked up at my wall, whose off-white paint now showed through in a few additional patches, and wondered what, really, was the point of all this. In truth, those notes had been working just fine stuck to my wall. Surely the art of memory had more valuable applications.

I stood up and pulled a copy of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry off my bookshelf. It was an 1,800-page brick of a book that I had purchased once upon a time at a used bookstore and had opened not more than twice since. If the ancient art of memory was good for anything, I figured, surely it was learning poetry by heart. Simonides, I knew, was not a hero of the ancient world for having discovered a clever way to remember his to-do lists. His discovery was meant to serve a humanizing agenda. And what could be more humanizing than committing poetry to memory? off my bookshelf. It was an 1,800-page brick of a book that I had purchased once upon a time at a used bookstore and had opened not more than twice since. If the ancient art of memory was good for anything, I figured, surely it was learning poetry by heart. Simonides, I knew, was not a hero of the ancient world for having discovered a clever way to remember his to-do lists. His discovery was meant to serve a humanizing agenda. And what could be more humanizing than committing poetry to memory?

Ed, I had already discovered, was always memorizing something. He had long ago learned the bulk of Paradise Lost Paradise Lost by heart (at the rate of two hundred lines per hour, he told me), and had been slowly slogging his way through Shakespeare. "My philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about ten years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed," he said. "Given that an hour of memorization yields about ten solid minutes of spoken poetry, and those ten minutes have enough content to keep you busy for a full day, I figure you can squeeze at least a day's fun out of each hour of memorization-if you should ever happen to find yourself in solitary confinement." by heart (at the rate of two hundred lines per hour, he told me), and had been slowly slogging his way through Shakespeare. "My philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about ten years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed," he said. "Given that an hour of memorization yields about ten solid minutes of spoken poetry, and those ten minutes have enough content to keep you busy for a full day, I figure you can squeeze at least a day's fun out of each hour of memorization-if you should ever happen to find yourself in solitary confinement."

This worldview owes a lot to the collection of ancient and medieval texts on memory that Ed had relentlessly tried to foist upon me. For those early writers, a trained memory wasn't just about gaining easy access to information; it was about strengthening one's personal ethics and becoming a more complete person. A trained memory was the key to cultivating "judgment, citizens.h.i.+p, and piety." What one memorized helped shape one's character. Just as the secret to becoming a chess grand master was to learn old games, the secret to becoming a grand master of life was to learn old texts. In a tight spot, where could one look for guidance about how to act, if not the depths of memory? Mere reading is not necessarily learning-a fact that I am personally confronted with every time I try to remember the contents of a book I've just put down. To really really learn a text, one had to memorize it. As the early-eighteenth-century Dutch poet Jan Luyken put it, "One book, printed in the Heart's own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks." learn a text, one had to memorize it. As the early-eighteenth-century Dutch poet Jan Luyken put it, "One book, printed in the Heart's own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks."

The ancient and medieval way of reading was totally different from how we read today. One didn't just memorize texts; one ruminated on them-chewed them up and regurgitated them like cud-and in the process, became intimate with them in a way that made them one's own. As Petrarch said in a letter to a friend, "I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow." Augustine was said to be so steeped in the Psalms that they, as much as Latin itself, comprised the principle language in which he wrote.

This was an attractive fantasy: I imagined that if I could only learn to memorize like Simonides, I would be able to commit reams of poetry to heart. I could make a clean sweep through the best verse and really really absorb it. I imagined becoming one of those admirable (if sometimes insufferable) individuals who always seem to have an apposite quotation to drop into conversation. I imagined becoming a walking repository of verse. absorb it. I imagined becoming one of those admirable (if sometimes insufferable) individuals who always seem to have an apposite quotation to drop into conversation. I imagined becoming a walking repository of verse.

I decided to make memorizing a part of my daily routine. Like flossing. Except I was actually going to do it. Each morning, after waking up and having my coffee, but before reading the newspaper or showering or even putting on proper clothes, I sat down behind my desk and tried to spend ten to fifteen minutes working through a poem.

The problem was that I wasn't any good at it. When I sat down and tried to fill a memory palace with Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," a twenty-eight-line poem composed almost entirely of nonsense words, I couldn't figure out how to transform the "brillig" and "slithy toves" into images, and ended up just memorizing the poem by rote, which was exactly what I wasn't supposed to be doing. Next I tried T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a poem I'd always adored, and which I already knew in bits and pieces. "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo." How could I forget that? Or rather, how was I supposed to remember it? Was I meant to put an image of women, coming and going, speaking of Michelangelo in my uncle's bathroom? And what was that supposed to look like? Or was I supposed to form an image of women, an image of coming, an image of going, and an image of Michelangelo? I was confused. And this was taking forever. These memory techniques, which had seemed so promising while I'd huddled numb-fingered with Ed on a boulder in Central Park, weren't working out nearly so well now that I was alone in my parents' bas.e.m.e.nt. I felt like I had tried on a slick pair of sneakers at the store, and now that I'd worn them home, I had blisters. Clearly I was missing something.

I turned to my newly acquired copy of the Rhetorica ad Herennium Rhetorica ad Herennium and opened to the section that discusses the memorization of words. I was hoping it might offer some hints as to why I was failing so badly, but all the two-thousand-year-old book could provide was consolation. Memorizing poetry and prose is extraordinarily difficult, the author willingly concedes. But that's exactly the point. He explains that learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard. "I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things," he writes. and opened to the section that discusses the memorization of words. I was hoping it might offer some hints as to why I was failing so badly, but all the two-thousand-year-old book could provide was consolation. Memorizing poetry and prose is extraordinarily difficult, the author willingly concedes. But that's exactly the point. He explains that learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard. "I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things," he writes.

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Having begun to futz around with memory techniques, I didn't yet have any sense of the true scope of the enterprise I was embarking upon. I still thought of my project as a harmlessly casual experiment. All I wanted to know was whether I really could improve my memory, and, if so, by how much. I certainly hadn't taken Tony Buzan's challenge to try to compete in the U.S. Memory Champions.h.i.+p seriously. After all, there were more than three dozen American mental athletes who trained each year for the event, which takes place every March in New York City. There was no reason to think a journalist who occasionally forgets his own Social Security number could compete against America's top memory geeks. But, as I would soon learn, Americans on the international memory circuit are like Jamaicans on the international bobsledding circuit-easily the most laid-back folks at any compet.i.tion, and possibly even the most stylish, but on the international stage, we are behind the curve in terms of both technique and training. around with memory techniques, I didn't yet have any sense of the true scope of the enterprise I was embarking upon. I still thought of my project as a harmlessly casual experiment. All I wanted to know was whether I really could improve my memory, and, if so, by how much. I certainly hadn't taken Tony Buzan's challenge to try to compete in the U.S. Memory Champions.h.i.+p seriously. After all, there were more than three dozen American mental athletes who trained each year for the event, which takes place every March in New York City. There was no reason to think a journalist who occasionally forgets his own Social Security number could compete against America's top memory geeks. But, as I would soon learn, Americans on the international memory circuit are like Jamaicans on the international bobsledding circuit-easily the most laid-back folks at any compet.i.tion, and possibly even the most stylish, but on the international stage, we are behind the curve in terms of both technique and training.

Even though the best American mnemonists can memorize hundreds of random digits in an hour, U.S. records still pale in comparison to those of the Europeans. Generally, n.o.body in North America takes memory sport seriously enough to stop drinking three months before the world champions.h.i.+p, like the eight-time world memory champ Dominic O'Brien used to do, and from the looks of it, few compet.i.tors engage in the rigorous physical training regimen that Buzan recommends. (One of his first, unsolicited pieces of advice to me was to get in shape.) n.o.body downs daily gla.s.ses of cod liver oil or takes omega-3 supplements. Only one American, the four-time national champion Scott Hagwood, has ever been inducted into the KL7.

Even though America has run its national memory champions.h.i.+p for as long as any country in the world, the best American memorizer has only finished in the top five of the world champions.h.i.+p once, in 1999. Perhaps it says something about our national character that America has produced none of the world's best compet.i.tive memorizers-that we're not as detail-obsessed as the Germans, as punctilious as the Brits, or as driven as the Malaysians. Or maybe, as one European soberly suggested to me, Americans have impoverished memories because we are preoccupied with the future, while folks on the other side of the Atlantic are more concerned with the past. Whatever the reason, it became clear that if I wanted to learn more about the art of memory-if I wanted to study with the best in the world-I was going to have to go to Europe.

Having spent several weeks struggling with mixed success to furnish my memory palaces with poetry, I thought it time to enlist some help in order to take my efforts to the next level. The granddaddy of events on the yearlong international memory circuit, the World Memory Champions.h.i.+p, was going to be held in Oxford, England, at the end of the summer. I decided I needed to go, and convinced Discover Discover magazine to send me to write an article about the compet.i.tion. I called up Ed to ask if I could crash at his place. Oxford was his home turf-where he'd grown up, gone to college, and now lived at home with his parents on their country estate located on the town's outskirts, in a seventeenth-century stone house called the Mill Farm. magazine to send me to write an article about the compet.i.tion. I called up Ed to ask if I could crash at his place. Oxford was his home turf-where he'd grown up, gone to college, and now lived at home with his parents on their country estate located on the town's outskirts, in a seventeenth-century stone house called the Mill Farm.

When I arrived at the Mill Farm (or simply "the Milf," as Ed sometimes referred to it) on a sunny summer afternoon a few days before the World Memory Champions.h.i.+p, Ed greeted me and carried my bags up to his bedroom, the same one he grew up in, with clothes scattered about the floor and nine decades of cricket almanacs on his bookshelves. Then he took me into the house's oldest wing, a fourhundred-year-old converted stone barn linked to the kitchen. There was a piano in the corner and colorful fabrics draped from the ceiling, the remnants of a party held years ago that were never taken down. At one end of the room was a long wooden table with eight decks of playing cards arranged at the head.

"This is where I practice," Ed said, and pointed to a balcony that jutted into the upper part of the barn. "Images of binary digits come pouring down those stairs over there, right across the room. This is exactly where you'd expect a memory champ to exercise, isn't it?"

Before dinner, an old childhood friend of Ed's named Timmy stopped by to say h.e.l.lo. Ed and I came downstairs to find him at the table chatting with Ed's mother and father, Teen and Rod, while his youngest sister, Phoebe, chopped vegetables from the garden at the kitchen island. Timmy now ran an online application development company. He had driven over in a BMW, wore a crisp polo s.h.i.+rt, and had a warm tan.

Teen introduced me and explained, with a wry laugh, that Ed was my memory coach. Timmy seemed not to believe that Ed was still toying with all this memory stuff. Hadn't it been quite some time since he'd taken that crazy trip to Kuala Lumpur?

"Edward, are you at all nervous that your new student will surpa.s.s you?" asked Teen, mostly it seemed for the sake of ribbing her son.

"I don't think anyone needs to be too concerned about that," I said.

"Well, I think it'd strike a tremendous blow for education," said Ed proudly.

"Do you think you could give Ed a nine-to-five job?" Rod asked Timmy.

Ed laughed. "Yes, you know, maybe I could give memory training courses to your employees."

"You could do programming," offered Teen.

"I don't know how to program."

"Your father could teach you."

Rod made a small fortune in the 1990s designing computer software, and retired at an early age to a life of leisure and eccentric pursuits. He is a practicing apiarist and gardener and would like to take the Mill Farm off the electrical grid by exercising his ancient water rights and installing a hydroelectric generator in the creek that runs by the house. Teen teaches developmentally disabled kids at a local school and is an avid reader and tennis player. She is mostly tolerant of Ed's eccentricities, but also cautiously hopeful that Ed might someday direct his considerable talents in a more focused, and perhaps even socially useful, direction.

"What about the law, Edward?" she asked.

"I consider the law to be a zero-sum game, and therefore a pointless use of a life," said Ed. "Being good at being a lawyer means merely, on average, maximizing injustice." Ed leaned over to me. "I used to be quite a promising young man when I was eighteen."

This prompted Phoebe to chime in: "More like thirteen."

While Ed was in the bathroom, I asked Rod if he would be disappointed if his son ended up becoming the next Tony Buzan, a fantastically wealthy self-help guru. Rod pondered the question for a few seconds and stroked his chin. "I think I'd prefer if he became a barrister."

The next morning, at the examination hall at Oxford University, which was hosting the world's finest mnemonists, Ed was sprawled out across a leather sofa, wearing a bright yellow cap and a T-s.h.i.+rt with the words "Ed Kicks a.s.s-220" emblazoned in bold letters across his chest, above a menacing ironed-on photograph of himself, a cartoon of a karate kick, and a photograph of thonged female hindquarters. (In addition to communicating an intimidating bit of trash talk to his opponents, he explained, those three words, "Ed Kicks a.s.s," are a mnemonic that helps him remember the number 220.) He was smoking a cigarette (he doesn't take the physical training part of the sport too seriously), and warmly greeting each of the compet.i.tors as they strolled through the door. He informed me that since we'd last seen each other, he'd taken an indefinite leave of absence from his PhD program in Paris to pursue "other projects." He also told me that his and Lukas's big plans for the Oxford Mind Academy had been temporarily derailed when, not long after the U.S. champions.h.i.+p, Lukas badly seared his lungs in a fire-breathing stunt gone wrong.

Memory champions.h.i.+ps can be pathologically compet.i.tive events, and Ed described his vanity T-s.h.i.+rt as part of a "campaign of pretend intimidation" with the aim of "generally upping the quality of banter between compet.i.tors-especially with the Germans." To that end, he had showed up at the champions.h.i.+p bearing copies of a cheeky onepage stats sheet that he was handing out to the press and fellow compet.i.tors. It described his character (in the third person)-"Irreverent, flamboyant, ready for anything (especially yesterday)"-and his training regime-"Early Rise, Yoga, Skipping, Superfoods (including blueberries and cod liver oil), Four-hours training, two gla.s.ses of wine per day (from the pota.s.sium rich soil of the Languedoc-Roussillon in Southern France), 30 minutes reflection period at sunset each evening, keeping a journal online." It noted that his "unique abilities" include lucid dreaming and tantric s.e.x. It also described Tony Buzan as "a champion ball-room dancer and a mentor for me throughout p.u.b.erty," and his thoughts on the future of compet.i.tive memory: "Hoping it will be an Olympic sport before 2020," when he is "planning to retire to a life of synaesthesia and senility." His plans for after the champions.h.i.+p: "Revolutionizing Western Education."

Sitting on the couch next to him was the legendary world memory champion Ben Pridmore, a man who until that moment I had known only through Google and myth. (I had heard he could memorize playing cards as fast as he could turn them over.) Ben wore a worn-out "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" Dr. Seuss T-s.h.i.+rt with a badly stretched collar, and a f.a.n.n.y pack. He was also sporting an enormous wide-brimmed black Australian steer-hide undertaker's hat that he professed to have worn every day for the last six years. "It's my gimmick," he said softly. "It's part of my soul." At his feet there sat a pink and black backpack with the words "Pump It Up" graffitied on the back. He informed us that there were twenty-two decks of playing cards inside, which he intended to memorize the next day in a single hour.

With his bald head, dark beard, face-swallowing gla.s.ses, and wide, searching eyes, Ben seemed almost like a figure out of an R. Crumb cartoon. He even had the same shrugged shoulders and loopy strut. The soles of his tattered leather shoes slapped under his feet like flip-flops. He spoke with a gentle, slightly nasal Yorks.h.i.+re accent, which turned "my" into "me." "I hate me voice," he said when explaining why he'd been so cagey about returning my phone calls during the previous weeks. One of the first pieces of information about himself that he shared with me was that he believed he was England's youngest college dropout. "I was admitted to Kingston on Thames University when I was seventeen, but I dropped out after six months. Now I'm twenty-eight, which is a bit depressing. I'm starting to feel like the old man of memory sports. You know, I was one of the hot newcomers once."

Bad luck does seem to stalk Ben. He'd had no intentions of being at the World Memory Champions.h.i.+p. Instead, he had devoted the last six months to memorizing the first 50,000 digits of the mathematical constant pi, which he planned to recite at the Mind Sports Olympiad, a weeklong festival of board games to be held a week after the World Memory Champions.h.i.+p. It would have been a new world record. But an obscure j.a.panese mnemonist named Akira Haraguchi had emerged from nowhere to memorize 83,431 digits just a month earlier. It took him sixteen hours and twenty-eight minutes to recite them. Ben read about the accomplishment on the Internet and was forced to reevaluate his plans. Instead of trying to learn another 33,432 digits, he gave up and rededicated himself to defending his t.i.tle as world memory champion. He had spent virtually every free moment of the last six weeks cleaning out memory palaces that had been devoted to pi, undoing months of hard work so that he could reuse the palaces in the memory champions.h.i.+ps.

Most of the mental athletes on the memory circuit came to the sport the same way I did: They once saw someone perform an outrageous memory stunt, thought it was cool, learned the trick behind it, and then went home and tried it themselves. But Ben missed one critical step. He'd seen someone memorizing playing cards and thought it was cool, and went home and tried it himself. But n.o.body ever told him how it was done. Without using any techniques at all, he just stared at the cards over and over again until they'd become imprinted on his brain. And the amazing thing is, he kept doing this in his spare time for several months, under the a.s.sumption that eventually he'd surely get good at it. He finally got his time down to fifteen minutes using pure rote memorization, a feat in many ways more impressive than his world record time of thirty-two seconds using techniques. It wasn't until he showed up at his first World Memory Champions.h.i.+p in 2000 that he found out about the memory palace. After the first day of events wrapped up (he finished near last place), he went to a bookstore, bought one of Tony Buzan's books, decided this was something he had a talent for, and forgot about all of his other extracurricular interests, including his lifelong quest to watch every one of the 1,001 theatrically released Warner Bros. cartoons made between 1930 and 1968.

Ben had been working on a book called "How to Be Clever," which teaches readers how to calculate the day of the week for any date in history, how to memorize a deck of cards, and how to scam an IQ test. "The book is about making people think you're brainy without actually increasing your intelligence," he told me. "The problem is I haven't written very much because I always have more important things to do, like watch cartoons. If I tried to write a serious book on how to improve your life, I'd be rubbish at it, because I haven't got the faintest idea how to improve my life."

The favorite to take Ben's t.i.tle at the world champions.h.i.+p was Dr. Gunther Karsten, the balding, angular forty-three-year-old G.o.dfather of German memory sport, who had won every German national contest since 1998. Gunther showed up wearing what I learned is his standard uniform: an imposing pair of black earm.u.f.fs and metallic sungla.s.ses whose insides have been completely taped over except for two small pinholes. "Extraneous stimuli," as Gunther calls them, are the memorizer's bete noir. (A retired Danish mnemonist used to compete wearing horse blinders.) He also wore a gold belt buckle embossed with his initials, a gold chain over his tight white T-s.h.i.+rt, and black sailor pants that flared at the bottom. Gunther informed me that in college he was a photo model for Nissan cars, and depending on how you squinted, he looked like the villain in a James Bond movie or an aging figure skater. He was in terrific physical shape, and was, I would soon learn, a fierce compet.i.tor. Despite the fact that one of his legs is slightly shorter than the other (from a childhood bone disease), he regularly races in-and wins-track events for middle-aged men. He was carrying around with him a locked, s.h.i.+ny metal suitcase filled with between twenty and thirty decks of playing cards, which he planned to memorize. He wouldn't tell me the exact number for fear it would get back to Ben Pridmore. Ben's t.i.tle at the world champions.h.i.+p was Dr. Gunther Karsten, the balding, angular forty-three-year-old G.o.dfather of German memory sport, who had won every German national contest since 1998. Gunther showed up wearing what I learned is his standard uniform: an imposing pair of black earm.u.f.fs and metallic sungla.s.ses whose insides have been completely taped over except for two small pinholes. "Extraneous stimuli," as Gunther calls them, are the memorizer's bete noir. (A retired Danish mnemonist used to compete wearing horse blinders.) He also wore a gold belt buckle embossed with his initials, a gold chain over his tight white T-s.h.i.+rt, and black sailor pants that flared at the bottom. Gunther informed me that in college he was a photo model for Nissan cars, and depending on how you squinted, he looked like the villain in a James Bond movie or an aging figure skater. He was in terrific physical shape, and was, I would soon learn, a fierce compet.i.tor. Despite the fact that one of his legs is slightly shorter than the other (from a childhood bone disease), he regularly races in-and wins-track events for middle-aged men. He was carrying around with him a locked, s.h.i.+ny metal suitcase filled with between twenty and thirty decks of playing cards, which he planned to memorize. He wouldn't tell me the exact number for fear it would get back to Ben Pridmore.

The actual compet.i.tion took place in a large oak-paneled room in one of Oxford's storied old buildings, with tall Gothic windows and oversize portraits of the third Earl of Litchfield and the fourteenth Earl of Derby. The room was arranged no differently than it had been during the school year, when it was used to administer exams to Oxford undergraduates. There were four dozen desks, each of which had a six-inch-tall digital stopwatch clamped to it, which would be used for the last and most exciting event of the contest, speed cards, when the compet.i.tors race to commit a single deck of playing cards to memory as fast as possible.

Unlike the U.S. champions.h.i.+p, which has just five events, none lasting longer than fifteen minutes, the World Memory Champions.h.i.+p is frequently referred to as a "mental decathlon." Its ten events, called "disciplines," span three grueling days, and each tests the compet.i.tors' memories in a slightly different way. Contestants have to memorize a previously unpublished poem spanning several pages, pages of random words (record: 280 in fifteen minutes), lists of binary digits (record: 4,140 in thirty minutes), shuffled decks of playing cards, a list of historical dates, and names and faces. Some disciplines, called "speed events," test how much the contestants can memorize in five minutes (record: 405 digits). Two marathon disciplines test how many decks of cards and random digits they can memorize in an hour (records: 2,080 digits and 27 decks of cards).

The first World Memory Champions.h.i.+p was held at the posh Athenaeum Club in London in 1991. "I thought, this is insane," recalls Tony Buzan. "We have crossword champions.h.i.+ps. We have Scrabble champions.h.i.+ps. We have chess, bridge, poker, draughts, canasta, and Go champions.h.i.+ps. We have science fair champions.h.i.+ps. And for the biggest, the most fundamental of all human cognitive processes, memory, there's no champions.h.i.+p." He also knew that the idea of a "world memory champion" would be an irresistible draw for the media, and a savvy way to promote his books on mind training.

With the help of his friend Raymond Keene, a British chess grand master who writes the daily chess column for The Times The Times (London), Buzan sent out letters to a handful of people who he knew were involved in memory training, and ran an ad in (London), Buzan sent out letters to a handful of people who he knew were involved in memory training, and ran an ad in The Times The Times advertising the contest. Seven people showed up, including a psychiatric nurse named Creighton Carvello who had memorized the telephone number of every Smith in the Middlesbrough phonebook and another person named Bruce Balmer who had set a record for memorizing two thousand foreign words in a single day. Several of the compet.i.tors wore tuxedoes. advertising the contest. Seven people showed up, including a psychiatric nurse named Creighton Carvello who had memorized the telephone number of every Smith in the Middlesbrough phonebook and another person named Bruce Balmer who had set a record for memorizing two thousand foreign words in a single day. Several of the compet.i.tors wore tuxedoes.

The contestants no longer adhere to such a strict dress code, but everything else about the champions.h.i.+p has gotten far more serious since 1991. What began as a one-day contest has now expanded to fill an entire weekend. Of all the disciplines in a three-day memory decathlon, the first one of the first day, the poem, is the most universally dreaded. Because of my own faltering efforts to memorize poetry, it was the one event that I wanted to watch most closely. Every year Gunther lobbies to have the event stricken from the contest, or at least replaced with rules that are more-as he puts it-"objective." But poetry is where memorization began, and to cut it from the champions.h.i.+p because a few of the compet.i.tors find it difficult would run counter to the compet.i.tion's underlying premise that memorization is a creative and humanizing endeavor. So every year, a new, previously unpublished poem is commissioned for the world champions.h.i.+p. For the first few years of the compet.i.tion, in the early nineties, the poem was written by the British poet laureate Ted Hughes, whom Tony Buzan describes as "an old friend." Since Hughes's death in 1998, the poem has been written by Buzan himself. This year's 108-line free-verse offering, t.i.tled "Miserare," came from a collection t.i.tled "Requiem for Ted." It began: adhere to such a strict dress code, but everything else about the champions.h.i.+p has gotten far more serious since 1991. What began as a one-day contest has now expanded to fill an entire weekend. Of all the disciplines in a three-day memory decathlon, the first one of the first day, the poem, is the most universally dreaded. Because of my own faltering efforts to memorize poetry, it was the one event that I wanted to watch most closely. Every year Gunther lobbies to have the event stricken from the contest, or at least replaced with rules that are more-as he puts it-"objective." But poetry is where memorization began, and to cut it from the champions.h.i.+p because a few of the compet.i.tors find it difficult would run counter to the compet.i.tion's underlying premise that memorization is a creative and humanizing endeavor. So every year, a new, previously unpublished poem is commissioned for the world champions.h.i.+p. For the first few years of the compet.i.tion, in the early nineties, the poem was written by the British poet laureate Ted Hughes, whom Tony Buzan describes as "an old friend." Since Hughes's death in 1998, the poem has been written by Buzan himself. This year's 108-line free-verse offering, t.i.tled "Miserare," came from a collection t.i.tled "Requiem for Ted." It began: With most things in the Universe I am happy: Supernovas The Horse Head Nebula The Crab The light-years-big clouds That are the Womb of Stars It went on to list the many things Tony Buzan was happy about, including "G.o.d's freezing b.a.l.l.s," and ended: I am not not happy happy That Ted Is Dead.

The compet.i.tors had fifteen minutes to memorize as many lines as possible, and then a half hour to write them on a blank sheet of paper. In order to receive full credit for a line, it had to be rendered perfectly, down to each capital letter and punctuation mark. Compet.i.tors who failed to underscore just how "not happy" the author was or who mistakenly thought that Ted was "dead" without a capital D would get only half the total points for that line. happy" the author was or who mistakenly thought that Ted was "dead" without a capital D would get only half the total points for that line.

The question of how best to memorize a piece of text, or a speech, has vexed mnemonists for millennia. The earliest memory treatises described two types of recollection: memoria rerum memoria rerum and and memoria verborum memoria verborum, memory for things and memory for words. When approaching a text or a speech, one could try to remember the gist, or one could try to remember verbatim. The Roman rhetoric teacher Quintilian looked down on memoria verborum memoria verborum on the grounds that creating such a vast number of images was not only inefficient, since it would require a gargantuan memory palace, but also unstable. If your memory for a speech hinged on knowing every word, then not only did you have a lot more to remember, but if you forgot a single word, you could end up trapped in a room of your memory palace staring at a blank wall, lost and unable to move on. on the grounds that creating such a vast number of images was not only inefficient, since it would require a gargantuan memory palace, but also unstable. If your memory for a speech hinged on knowing every word, then not only did you have a lot more to remember, but if you forgot a single word, you could end up trapped in a room of your memory palace staring at a blank wall, lost and unable to move on.

Cicero agreed that the best way to memorize a speech is point by point, not word by word, by employing memoria rerum memoria rerum. In his De Oratore De Oratore, he suggests that an orator delivering a speech should make one image for each major topic he wants to cover, and place each of those images at a locus. Indeed, the word "topic" comes from the Greek word topos topos, or place. (The phrase "in the first place" is a vestige from the art of memory.) Perfect recall of words is something our brains simply aren't very good at, a fact famously ill.u.s.trated in the congressional Watergate hearings of 1973. In his testimony before the Senate Watergate Investigating Committee, President Richard Nixon's counsel John Dean reported to the congressmen on the contents of dozens of meetings related to the cover-up of the break-in. To the president's chagrin and the committee's delight, Dean was able to repeat verbatim many conversations that had taken place in the Oval Office. His recollections were so detailed and seemingly so precise that reporters took to calling him "the human tape recorder." At the time, it hadn't yet been revealed that there had been an actual tape recorder in the Oval Office recording the conversations that Dean had reconstructed from memory.

While the rest of the country took note of the political implications of those tape recordings, the psychologist Ulric Neisser saw them as a valuable data trove. Neisser compared the transcripts of the recordings with Dean's testimony, and a.n.a.lyzed what Dean's memory got right and what it got wrong. Not only did Dean not remember specific quotes correctly-that is to say, verborum verborum-he often didn't even properly remember the gist of what had been discussed-rerum. But even when his memories were wrong in isolated episodes, notes Neisser, "there is a sense in which he was altogether right." The major themes of his testimony were all accurate: "Nixon wanted the cover-up to succeed; he was pleased when it went well; he was troubled when it began to unravel; he was perfectly willing to consider illegal activities if they would extend his power or confound his enemies." John Dean did not misrepresent, argues Neisser; he did get the details wrong, but he got the important stuff right. We all do the same thing when we try to recount conversations, because without special training our memories tend to only pay attention to the big picture.

It makes sense that our brains would work like that. The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body's ma.s.s, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it's where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved. One might say that the whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the glob of neurons that interprets it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines. And to work efficiently, they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories. From the vast amounts of data pouring in through the senses, our brains must quickly sift out which information is likely to have some bearing on the future, attend to that, and ignore the noise. Much of the chaos that our brains filter out is words, because more often than not, the actual language that conveys an idea is just window dressing. What matters is the res res, the meaning of those words. And that's what our brains are so good at remembering. In real life, it's rare that anyone is asked to recall ad verb.u.m ad verb.u.m outside of congressional depositions and the poetry event at an international memory compet.i.tion. outside of congressional depositions and the poetry event at an international memory compet.i.tion.

Until the last tick of history's clock, cultural transmission meant oral transmission, and poetry, pa.s.sed from mouth to ear, was the principle medium of moving information across s.p.a.ce and from one generation to the next. Oral poetry was not simply a way of telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the cla.s.sicist Eric Havelock, "a ma.s.sive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment." The great oral works transmitted a shared cultural heritage, held in common not on bookshelves, but in brains. of history's clock, cultural transmission meant oral transmission, and poetry, pa.s.sed from mouth to ear, was the principle medium of moving information across s.p.a.ce and from one generation to the next. Oral poetry was not simply a way of telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the cla.s.sicist Eric Havelock, "a ma.s.sive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment." The great oral works transmitted a shared cultural heritage, held in common not on bookshelves, but in brains.

Professional memorizers have existed in oral cultures throughout the world to transmit that heritage through the generations. In India, an entire cla.s.s of priests was charged with memorizing the Vedas with perfect fidelity. In pre-Islamic Arabia, people known as Rawis Rawis were often attached to poets as official memorizers. The Buddha's teachings were pa.s.sed down in an unbroken chain of oral tradition for four centuries until they were committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century B.C. And for centuries, a group of hired tape recorders called were often attached to poets as official memorizers. The Buddha's teachings were pa.s.sed down in an unbroken chain of oral tradition for four centuries until they were committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century B.C. And for centuries, a group of hired tape recorders called tannaim tannaim (literally, "reciters") memorized the oral law on behalf of the Jewish community. (literally, "reciters") memorized the oral law on behalf of the Jewish community.

The most famous of the Western tradition's oral works, and the first to have been systematically studied, were Homer's Odyssey Odyssey and and Iliad Iliad. These two poems-possibly the first to have been written down in the Greek alphabet-had long been held up as literary archetypes. However, even as they were celebrated as the models to which all literature should aspire, Homer's masterworks had also long been the source of scholarly unease. The earliest modern critics sensed that they were somehow qualitatively different from everything that came after-even a little strange. For one thing, both poems were oddly repet.i.tive in the way they referred to characters. Odysseus was always "clever Odysseus." Dawn was always "rosy-fingered." Why would someone write like that? Sometimes the epithets seemed completely off-key. Why call the murderer of Agamemnon "blameless Aegisthos"? Why refer to "swift-footed Achilles" even when he was sitting down? Or to "laughing Aphrodite" even when she was in tears? In terms of both structure and theme, the Odyssey Odyssey and and Iliad Iliad were also oddly formulaic, to the point of predictability. The same narrative units-gathering armies, heroic s.h.i.+elds, challenges between rivals-pop up again and again, only with different characters and different circ.u.mstances. In the context of such finely spun, deliberate masterpieces, these quirks seemed hard to explain. were also oddly formulaic, to the point of predictability. The same narrative units-gathering armies, heroic s.h.i.+elds, challenges between rivals-pop up again and again, only with different characters and different circ.u.mstances. In the context of such finely spun, deliberate masterpieces, these quirks seemed hard to explain.

At the heart of the unease about these earliest works of literature were two fundamental questions: First, how could Greek literature have been born ex nihilo with two masterpieces? Surely a few less perfect stories must have come before, and yet these two were among the first on record. And second, who exactly was their author? Or was it authors? There were no historical records of Homer, and no trustworthy biography of the man exists beyond a few self-referential hints embedded in the texts themselves.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the first modern critics to suggest that Homer might not have been an author in the contemporary sense of a single person who sat down and wrote a story and then published it for others to read. In his 1781 Essay on the Origin of Languages Essay on the Origin of Languages, the Swiss philosopher suggested that the Odyssey Odyssey and and Iliad Iliad might have been "written only in men's memories. Somewhat later they were laboriously collected in writing"-though that was about as far as his inquiry into the matter went. Also writing in the eighteenth century, an English diplomat and archaeologist named Robert Wood suggested that Homer was illiterate, and that his works had to have been committed to memory. It was a revolutionary theory, but Wood couldn't back it up with a hypothesis that explained how Homer might have pulled off such an astounding mnemonic feat. might have been "written only in men's memories. Somewhat later they were laboriously collected in writing"-though that was about as far as his inquiry into the matter went. Also writing in the eighteenth century, an English diplomat and archaeologist named Robert Wood suggested that Homer was illiterate, and that his works had to have been committed to memory. It was a revolutionary theory, but Wood couldn't back it up with a hypothesis that explained how Homer might have pulled off such an astounding mnemonic feat.

In 1795, the German philologist Friedrich August Wolf argued for the first time that not only were Homer's works not written down written down by Homer, but they also weren't even by Homer, but they also weren't even by by Homer. They were, rather, a loose collection of songs transmitted by generations of Greek bards, and only redacted in their present written form at some later date. Homer. They were, rather, a loose collection of songs transmitted by generations of Greek bards, and only redacted in their present written form at some later date.

In 1920, an eighteen-year-old scholar named Milman Parry took up the question of Homeric authors.h.i.+p as his master's thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. He suggested that the reason Homer's epics seemed unlike other literature was because they were were unlike other literature. Parry had discovered what Wood and Wolf had missed: the evidence that the poems had been transmitted orally was right there in the text itself. All those stylistic quirks, including the formulaic and recurring plot elements and the bizarrely repet.i.tive epithets-"clever Odysseus" and "gray-eyed Athena"-that had always perplexed readers were actually like thumbprints left by a potter: material evidence of how the poems had been crafted. They were mnemonic aids that helped the bard(s) fit the meter and pattern of the line, and remember the essence of the poems. The greatest author of antiquity was actually, Parry argued, just "one of a long tradition of oral poets that ... composed wholly without the aid of writing." unlike other literature. Parry had discovered what Wood and Wolf had missed: the evidence that the poems had been transmitted orally was right there in the text itself. All those stylistic quirks, including the formulaic and recurring plot elements and the bizarrely repet.i.tive epithets-"clever Odysseus" and "gray-eyed Athena"-that had always perplexed readers were actually like thumbprints left by a potter: material evidence of how the poems had been crafted. They were mnemonic aids that helped the bard(s) fit the meter and pattern of the line, and remember the essence of the poems. The greatest author of antiquity was actually, Parry argued, just "one of a long tradition of oral poets that ... composed wholly without the aid of writing."

Parry realized that if you were setting out to create memorable poems, the Odyssey Odyssey and the and the Iliad Iliad were exactly the kinds of poems you'd create. It's said that cliches are the worst sin a writer can commit, but to an oral bard, they were essential. The very reason that cliches so easily seep into our speech and writing-their insidious memorability-is exactly why they played such an important role in oral storytelling. And the were exactly the kinds of poems you'd create. It's said that cliches are the worst sin a writer can commit, but to an oral bard, they were essential. The very reason that cliches so easily seep into our speech and writing-their insidious memorability-is exactly why they played such an important role in oral storytelling. And the Odyssey Odyssey and and Iliad Iliad, excuse the cliche, are riddled with them. In a culture dependent on memory, it's critical, in the words of Walter Ong, that people "think memorable thoughts." The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized. The principles that the oral bards discovered, as they sharpened their stories through telling and retelling, were the same basic mnemonic principles that psychologists rediscovered when they began conducting their first scientific experiments on memory around the turn of the twentieth century: Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don't; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory. A striped skunk making a slam dunk is a stickier thought than a patterned mustelid engaging in athletic activity.

The most useful of all the mnemonic tricks employed by the bards was song. As anyone who has ever found himself chanting "By Mennen!" can attest, if you can turn a set of words into a jingle, they can become exceedingly difficult to knock out of your head.

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It's the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.

After moving to Harvard and becoming an a.s.sistant professor, Parry took an unconventional turn in his work. Rather than hunkering down with old Greek texts, the young cla.s.sicist took off for Yugoslavia in search of the last bards who still practiced a form of oral poetry resembling the Homeric arts. He returned to Cambridge with thousands of recordings that formed the basis for a new branch of academic research into oral traditions.

In his fieldwork, Parry found that rather than transmitting the text itself from bard to bard and generation to generation, the contemporary Balkan rhapsodists (presumably like their ancient Homeric predecessors) would impart a set of formulaic rules and constraints that allowed the bard-any bard-to reconstruct the poem each time he recited it. Each retelling of the story was not exactly like the one that came before, but it was close.

When the Slavic bards were asked whether they repeated their songs exactly, they responded, "Word for word, and line for line." And yet when recordings of two performances were held up against each other, they clearly were different. Words changed, lines moved around, pa.s.sages disappeared. The Slavic bards weren't being overconfident; they simply had no concept of verbatim recall. Not that this should have been surprising. Without writing, there is no way to check whether something has been repeated exactly.

The variability that is built into the poetry of oral traditions allows the bard to adapt the material to the audience, but it also allows more memorable versions of th