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Memories Are Made Of This

Posted on 01/07/2010 by admin

As early as the fifth century BCE the Greeks were making the most of their memory by creating the technique of imagining a room, and assigning the things they have to remember to the objects in the room. The technique is successful for two reasons: the room is one you already know well and the objects in it are not ones you also have to commit to memory as they are already there, and the brain recalls images very well. At least Greek brains did.

Using this technique can help you recall a whole deck of cards in shuffled order after only going through them once.  This though is a game, of no value other than to show-off. But it demonstrates something very important to education; those things that we choose to remember.

I recall meeting an American teenager at school and he was surprised no one knew who Paule Revere was and I told him (we were fourteen) you could hardly expect a UK school to teach the American War of Independence. We do ourselves an injustice by not teaching where our countries have been part of the memory of other countries, good or bad or indifferent.

And we can be more attuned as people if we considered more fully the memories we may have given to others because we exist in other people’s rooms and they have an image of us we would do well to commit to memory.

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Children’s author, novelist, editor and poet.

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