on maps and memories

2023-10-15

Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. [...] All those facts and anecdotes, even the stuff interesting enough to be worth underlining, have a habit of briefly making an impression on me and then disappearing into who knows where. There are books on my shelf that I can’t even remember whether I’ve read or not.

• Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein

My foray into the land of maps and memory started off as diversion in the isolation of the pandemic. But in isolation, diversions quickly became obsessions. Soon enough, I was reading books about memory masters and oral traditions and connecting them to the latest findings in neuroscience. Now, I can't shake the feeling that there is some deep connection between our memories and our spatial awareness.

The strange world of self-help and memory championships

It all started, as many of my interests do, with a pop science book. A few of my friends recommended Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. I had initially dismissed it as one of those "train your brain with this one easy trick" books, and was therefore quite disinclined to read it. My friends persisted and, in the monotony of the pandemic, I caved in.

A whole new world opened up to me.

Reading Moonwalking with Einstein is like watching the "The Queen's Gambit". The author takes you into his obsession and walks you through his world. In this case, it's the world of competitive memory championships. Foer writes about his feats in memorizing decks of cards and lists of unrelated items, culminating in winning the 2006 USA Memory Championship.

how to remember anything

The book focuses on exploring various kinds of memory techniques, mostly in memorizing quite arbitrary things. The key underlying almost all techniques is to encode a list into a memory palace, a physical space you can traverse in your mind. It turns out people are particularly good at remembering the layout of physical spaces, and you can place memorable characters doing wacky actions in different places to encode lists.

Within the book lied a short side comment that I couldn't quite shake.

Ed recounted how on a recent visit to Vienna, he and Lukas had partied until dawn the night before Lukas’s biggest exam of the year, and only stumbled home just before sunrise. “Lukas woke up at noon, learned everything for the exam in a memory blitz, and then passed it,” said Ed.

This felt like a superpower! Why aren't these techniques more prevalent? If this guy could just memorize an exam's worth of information in a couple hours, what I am doing? I had spent the last few years memorizing foreign words and brain parts in flash cards. Clearly, I was doing it wrong.

are these just tricks in the end?

Still, Moonwalking with Einstein felt like a collection of party tricks, interspersed with some bragging from the author and surrounding people for achieving said tricks. Would these tricks work for encoding actually useful knowledge? Foer doesn't really answer, he's too busy bragging about memorizing decks of cards in record time.

I read another book from a memory champion (Dominic O'Brien), entitled Quantum Memory Power. Despite its awful title, the book is actually quite readable and provides great exercises for learning memory tricks, like memorizing todo lists, holding your whole calendar in your mind, and memorizing speeches and quotes. Nevertheless, like with Foer's books, it still felt like a bunch of tricks, padded with some bragging from the author.

Sure it's cool to memorize your todo list, but I want to hold the world in my head. How can I more easily remember the full web of knowledge?

The memories of our ancestors

As we sing, as we cry milkarri, we tell a story. We tell of the contours of the land, the contours of ourselves. Songspirals are a map of Country. We are seeing Country as we fly over it. When we sing or hear milkarri, we fly. We see our self flying through the land, like a bird. We see our soul, sand, land, soil, the grass. The vision of the ground from above, the landscape we travel past; our mind is like Google Maps, we see all through the song.

• from Songspirals by Gay'wu Group of Women

In searching for how to hold the world in my head, I landed at the Art of Memory Forum, where the world memory champions gather. Most of the posts are around memory tricks, but a few more broad discussions led me to the books Memory Code and Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly.

Kelly does not shy away from questions of memorizing the world's knowledge. She explores how oral traditions across the world pass on what they know about the world. People living within these traditions have a map of their country within their minds, annotated with detailed briefings on the animals and plants that inhabit it, and intertwined with the stories of their ancestors.

when the map and the territory describe each other

Learning and remembering the cultural knowledge takes time. In a way, it is reassuring to hear there's no easy solution I'm missing.

In Memory Code, Kelly notes:

The elders have always had to work at acquiring knowledge. They worked hard. Too often it is claimed that indigenous peoples just know their landscape or ocean through some kind of paranormal link to the earth which Westerners don’t have, as is so popular with those who prefer a romanticised version of indigenous reality. The implication is that this knowledge is just handed on from father to son, mother to daughter, around the campfire or out on the daily gather and hunt, apparently with no need to actually work at learning. There is no society I could find that operated this way. In all cases, knowledge was formally taught over many years through the levels of initiation within the tribe.

In general, Kelly says that the elders remember through much more holistic versions of memory palaces. The country itself may function as memory palace. Songspirals are songs that describe a passage through Australia, often spiraling into tangential stories for specific places. Australian Aboriginal people use these to remember their collective culture, including names and uses of animals, plants, and terrain. In dual spiral fashion, the song reinforces the memory of the landscape and traveling the land reinforces the song.

creating art to remember

But the memory palaces go beyond places! People have stored memories in string knot patterns, in drawings, in seashell arrangements, and much more. Any form of artistic expression with intrinsic spatial patterns can function as a memory palace. As Kelly states:

In the Western context, the primary measure of art is aesthetic. In non-literate contexts, the primary motivation is didactic. I am confident in making such a grand statement because indigenous people have told me that it is so. [...] I gradually understood why so many indigenous ‘art’ works were simply erased or left to rot after ceremonies and rituals. They had already served their purpose by the very fact that they were made.

I love the idea of wrapping memories into your art, making it hold a special meaning to you.

When reading through Lynne Kelly's books, I felt such a mix of emotions. At first, I was amazed at the memory feats and extensive knowledge of oral cultures. Then, I felt sad and upset that it took so long for me to find out the wonderful complexity of oral cultures. Why isn't all of this taught in history classes? These are basic facts about our ancestors, about the people who have managed the land we now take for granted!

I tried to remember the evolutionary history of life as I walked around the city I lived in.¹ It worked quite well! If I had revisited the same path and practiced the palace a few times, I'm sure I could remember the timeline forever. It really works!

In summary, memory palaces are prevalent across oral traditions for holding the world in your head. How did that come to be? I couldn't help but connect these to some recent findings in neuroscience.

Memories and maps group together within the brain

the root of memory formation in the brain

In the 50s and 60s, doctors would perform quite aggressive surgeries removing large amounts of brain tissue to help treat epileptic seizures.² Thusly, hundreds of people suffering from epilepsy had large parts of their brain removed. Now, neuroscientists are fascinated with these people. Do they behave differently? Depending on their behavior patterns, we could learn something about what brain regions are necessary for different behaviors!

With the consent of the epileptic patients, scientists started to probe the relationship between different regions and behavior. Soon enough, they stumbled upon a striking result. Patients with their hippocampus removed could not form new memories! They retained their previous memories prior to the operation, but after that they could interact for an hour with someone and then forget them entirely soon after.³

the maps within our brain

The hippocampus is a structure lies deep within our brain. Two separate anatomists discovered it and somehow both wavered between naming it after silkworms or seahorses. I'm really glad they went with seahorses!

A crazy thing happened when scientists started recording neural activity from the hippocampus in rats in the 1970s. They started finding cells that that fired when the rat was in a specific place. For instance, when the rat went to the upper right part of its enclosure, a neuron in the hippocampus would fire consistently. These were dubbed "place cells".

The concept of place cells took some time to be accepted. I mean, is there really a map of the world that's organized in a series of cells firing in sequence? Turns out.. yes? In the end, place cells became so widely accepted and so fundamental to following research that a Nobel prize was awarded for their discovery.

cognitive maps

So if there is a map of the physical world in our mind, what about when we travel in our mental spaces? Neuroscientists John O'Keefe and Lynn Nadel anticipated this (also in late 70s!) and proposed that the hippocampus actually acts as a cognitive book in their landmark book, appropriately titled The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map.

In the past few decades, neuroscientists really internalized the idea of a cognitive map and pushed the idea further and further. So, you know that feeling of traveling through time? Turns out there's neurons that represent time passage in the hippocampus. What about when you're learning the guitar and trying to map the strings to pitches? There's likely neurons in the hippocampus building that auditory map. Okay but what about navigating social situations? Surely the "navigation" is a metaphor..? Well, there's neurons that map the dynamics of interpersonal relationships in the hippocampus as well.

Space, time, sounds, social situations. These are all so different, yet somehow there is a map within our brain to represent them, sussing out the relationships and helping us orient ourselves in an ever changing world. As far as we can tell, these maps are not necessary for navigation in a familiar environment, but are critical for internalizing the maps.

So here we are, the region that processes memories also processes maps of all kinds.

In conclusion

Well, this has been a ride, hasn't it? The techniques from memory champions go way deeper, predating written history itself. In fact, they might even be elaborations upon our natural way of learning, which seems to be tightly coupled with internal maps our brain is building.

It's amazing to consider how clever the systems of the oral traditions were. They remembered facts about the world by interleaving them with not only their physical environment but also the complex social map of their relatives and ancestors. Although I didn't cover this, they also built memories through the maps of movements within dances or in complex musical relationships.

You know, although it may take years to build a coherent detailed map of the world around you, I think everyone processes maps like these naturally. It is even enjoyable! For instance, the author of Meatloaf Headache recounts the memories related to each song, within the context of other songs and the rest of their life. Isn't it also so enjoyable to read about the complex dynamics of relationships and build a map of them in your head? Thousands of people seems to enjoy it.

Now when I try remember something, I've started to consider the mental map I'm building around the topic and perhaps even whether there are other maps to connect the topic to. Physical (like building) maps could work, but auditory, social, and temporal could work just as well.⁴

After all, our memories and our maps are intimately intertwined in our minds.

#inktober #neuroscience