Invitations and Becomings

It's the curse of the intellectual: the elevation of what JS Mill would call the higher pleasures over the mundane practicalities of life. You can quote eighteenth century idealist texts, but can't remember to pay your bills, or pick up the milk. Despite most memory techniques being more suited to remembering random numbers than the milk, I've recently found reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of improving my memory, and repairing my reputation for absent-mindedness.

For years, I've been berated for my terrible track record of retaining ordinary, uncomplicated, but often critical details or tasks. The worst thing about this is that it's easy to jump to the conclusion that I don't remember because I just don't care. To some extent, it's true. I don't *care* about the milk. But caring about others is caring whether or not they have what they need. This goes double if it's something that your own family needs. Triple if it's milk, and you have kids who need bottles.

From time to time, I do a little research and try to see if there are any techniques available to help a guy like me. There is plenty of material out there on "improving your memory". Some of it is bullshit, but some of it is incredibly interesting, like this piece that appeared recently in the New York Times ("Secrets of a Mind-Gamer").

What's so tantalising about stories like that one, in which Joshua Foer, a reporter with no apparent talent for remembering everyday things, ends up competing in the finals of the US Memory Championships, is that they suggest that memory is something that can be improved drastically through practice. That's very inspiring.

The techniques available, as Foer points out, haven't changed much since about 90BC when an unknown author penned Rhetoricum ad Herennium (English translation by Bill Thayer). They include:

1. The method of loci - this involves building so-called "memory castles", or highly detailed backgrounds in which to place events or images to be remembered. Supposedly discovered by Simonedes of Crete after a tragic banquet hall incident.
2. Association with images or events which are "exceptionally base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable" because these are more memorable than the banal or random details we are trying to remember
3. The use of rhyme or sing-song to provoke verbal memories - think of how well you remember song lyrics years later

These techniques are fascinating, and continute to be the basis for competitive mnemonic training today. But the very same story shows just how hard it is to apply these techniques to everyday tasks like remembering the milk.

True, what I hoped for before I started hadn’t come to pass: these techniques didn’t improve my underlying memory (the “hardware” of “Rhetorica ad Herennium”). I still lost my car keys. And I was hardly a fount of poetry. Even once I was able to squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I seldom memorized the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call.

Foer puts this down to a lack of application "The techniques worked; I just didn’t always use them." But I now think he's wrong about this. There's something fundamentally different about remembering the milk to memorising a deck of cards, or a series of random digits.

There are at least two differences here. One is that remembering the milk is not in fact remembering the milk, it is remembering to do something, namely buy milk and take it home. That is, we are not talking about the passive recollection of facts, but the performance of an action. It's not even sufficient to remember that milk is needed. You can imagine someone who is able to correctly answer the question - what did we need? - even when they have returned home empty-handed.

So, remembering the milk is active memory. It is also timely. By this, I mean that someone who is good at remembering the milk is good at remembering the milk at just the right moment, i.e. when they can act on that memory. People like me who are bad at remembering the milk may successfully remember the milk five or six times during the course of the day, and then forget it on the way home.

This makes remembering the milk itself a pretty interesting piece of practical reason. Philosophers often treat actions as driven by belief-desire pairs. But it's pretty clear that having the belief that I should buy milk on the way home, and the desire to buy milk on my way home, are both pretty useless, unless I actually am aware of that belief and that desire on my way home. (The corollary is, of course, that if you forgot the milk, you're either an idiot, for not believing we needed milk, or an uncaring bastard, for not wanting to satisfy that need, or both!) The analysis of motivating thoughts ("intentions" in a philosophical sense of the word) as belief-desire pairs leaves out the need for the motivation to be timely.

These distinctions are not unfamiliar to people working in the science of memory. The technical term for the kind of remembering we do when (if) we remember the milk is "prospective memory". (There's a ok article about prospective memory on Wikipedia.) You can think of prospective memory as the skill of remembering to remember. Researchers in this area normally distinguish between time-based and event-based prospective memory. Remembering the milk is usually event-based - namely, it's a memory that needs to be triggered by an event "leaving work" or "going home" - but it could also be time-based, if for example you need to pick up the milk before 5.30pm when the shop shuts.

The timely character of remembering the milk I described above is captured nicely by categorising it as an example of event-based prospective memory.

All this allows me to pretty succinctly articulate what's wrong with most mnemonic techniques - they aren't designed for improving prospective memory. Actually they're better suited to declarative memory, which isn't the opposite, by any means, in fact, it's required for prospective memory, but it's something of a non-sequitur when it comes to the problem of perennially forgetting the milk. This may be related to the active aspect of remembering the milk, which may make it more dependent on procedural memory, which is the kind of memory that allows you to ride a bike after a break of ten years. (Actually, the more I think about this, the crucial step may be interrupting procedural memory - breaking out of the auto-pilot mode that many of us switch into on our way home.)

However, distinguishing between these types of memory is also a cause for hope, because, with a little adaptation, the same time-honoured techniques might be used to improve prospective memory. The key is to notice that there is a very weak association between what is to be remembered (the milk) and the event that's supposed to cue remembering to buy some (leaving work). Improving my ability to remember the milk might be as simple of strengthening that association.

So, finally, here's the suggestion:

• Improve prospective memory by turning the ordinary world into a memory castle

Memory castles are detailed, imaginary locations in which one places striking, memorable images that are associated with the thing to be remembered. I take it that the benefit of these castles is to give these images a place, and to allow us to "find our way back" (reducere) to memories that would otherwise be buried by more recent experiences.

In the case of prospective memory, the problem is not to give the memory a place, but to strengthen the association between the thing to be remembered and the actual place (or time) to remember it. What we need to do is to "mark up" the actual world in a way that makes it more potent in cueing the relevant memory.

Now, when I need to remember the milk, I spend a few moments picturing the crossing just before the convenience store closest to work as flooded with... you guessed it... milk. The streets are turned into white rivers of frothing splashing milk, but that is not all. In an attempt to incorporate the use the images or events which are "exceptionally base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable", I add a two or three very attractive women, completely naked, lying on the street, bathing in the milky river.

If this works, I think it's because the sexual nature of the imagery is enough to jolt me out of my procedural auto-pilot, and attend to the milky memory castle I've built, and because that castle is embedded in the real world in such a way that it is indeed a timely cue; one that I can act upon pretty much immediately.

When it comes to time-based prospective memory challenges, I suspect that rhyming or sing-song techniques will work better for me. "When the clock says four, you're out the door, 'cause the boys'll be happy to see you", or something like that. Normally I rely on online reminders for this kind of memory (which it's worth mentioning are useless for event-based prospective memory), but this is a crutch that a recent failure of mine has exposed as inadequate.

I'd love to hear how others overcome this debilitating weakness, and if anyone finds any of this useful. One more thing that's worth mentioning, before I go, is that I've realised that none of this will work unless I actually apply one of these techniques to the memory task when that task is set. These techniques have to be consciously applied, so it's no good to just intend to remember something, you have to decide on the technique and the particular execution in each case.

I've gone so far as to add a Post-It to my desktop monitor with the following note (which I guess is a kind of meta-mnemonic):

Fine, but HOW will you remember that?