The Mnemonists

The Mnemonists

In the olden days, the reliance on memory was excessive and it was an essential tool for interpersonal transactions.

The method of learning whether of academics or of the common person in daily life transactions depended largely on his memory. The learning was from mouth to ear, and I am surprised, how the fidelity of the learning was maintained in such mouth to ear methodology. 

More interestingly, the Vedas, Illiad and Odyssey, were all transferred from mouth to ear, and yet the fidelity of their length and metre was preserved.

How incredibly tough such an environment would have been for a person of my dispensation, for whom, rote learning was like a Sysiphian Labor, repeat to only lose what you thought you had  committed to memory already. But I must admit, while I may be challenged as far as the Semantic memory (memory for facts), but I am very cogent as far as the Episodic memory (that for events and episodes) is concerned.

While the written word did find existence even in the time of Socrates, but it was still disdainful to refer to the written word.  The reliance was still on memory, though the written word was primarily to aid memory and not so much to propagate the philosophy or the content. 

Interestingly, it took several of hundreds of years, to bring in simple innovation in writing like leaving gaps between words, and both poetry and prose were scribed as a continuum, which made personal judgment critical to decipher the difference in “God is now here” and God is nowhere” when written as a continuum : GODISNOWHERE (scriptio-continua).

But since the written word was not for propagation, but more as an aid to the author such deciphering was not an issue. Interestingly, it took about 900 years for the gaps between words in the writings to come in, and to that extent, it is very interesting, that the Indian scripts evolved with a structured gap built in into the script itself in the form of a headline.

And as one would imagine, the scriptio-continua was first over come by gaps in Hebrew than in Greek. But from modern research wherein sophisticated models of speech recognition have been developed it is obvious, that we speak as a continua and hence if the computer was to right, it would right as a continua. 

Even after the onset of writing and later printing, the books were not indexed, and to find the part of relevance meant trawling through the entire book to bait it. And the reason was that the book was more for the aid of the writer or for those who understood the context so well that could devour the whole document which in the old days used to be in the form of continuous scrolls sometimes 60 ft long, than for the education of the commoner.

Many civilizations over came this complexity by attaching an overarching importance to a Guru who would hand hold and guide you to the relevant parts of the maize of the knowledge.

I remember, even as late as the time of my grandfather, the reading of a book was about memorizing a book. It had to be returned to its owner - individual or a library, and before doing so, at least the relevant parts had to be memorized. And only that which had been memorized, was yours, rest was yonder.

A large part of the curriculum in monasteries was to skill the monks in the art of developing mnemonics so that texts particularly the canonical texts could be committed irreversibly to the memory lane.

Of course, as we know, technology, often the one that has recourse to the masses, has often been the singularly most important tool to disrupt ossified behavior and cause behavioral changes. And this was the case, with the onset of the printing press in early 1400s. With the access to books as a reference and guide in your possession, dependance on the memory lane declined and pattern of reading commenced the transition from “intensive” - which involved reading just a few books but committing them to memory to “extensive” where you will read many and yet not be obligated to memorize them.

And now of course with all time internet, the need to memorize or even to index has become redundant.