Title The Memory Code

Author Lynne Kelly

Year Published 2017

Kind of Book History/Memory

How strongly I recommend it 6/10 

My Impressions: This book was a bit dry and written academically which is why I gave it such a low rating, however it is written on an incredibly fascinating topic—the role memory played on pre-literate cultures. This area of our history hardly gets talked about outside of the niche circles of people who learn mnemonics. It is astonishing the amount of things our ancestors used to be able to remember; the names of thousands of plants and animals, the names of 50 generations of their genealogy, and their way around large stretches of terrain. It helped me understand that things like songs, myths, totem poles, and monuments were used by these people first and foremost as memory aids and not as purely aesthetic pieces of art It is such an important piece to understand our ancestors and where we came from. I really wish the book were more engaging so I could recommend it to everyone.

Date Read Dec 2020

Practical Takeaways

  • Mark every 5th station of your memory palace in some way-Greek Tradition

  • Create a memory palace for timeline of history

  • Every day, choose to either recall what has been encoded in your memory palace or add something new

  • When trying to understand oral culture ,don't forget to consider how large a role memory played in the lives

Big Ideas

  • In small-scale oral cultures with no individually wealthy leaders, control of knowledge is the major source of power.

  • Stonehenge may have been built as a memory device

  • Small-scale indigenous cultures were not egalitarian because those who were the keepers of the knowledge (shamans who held knowledge in memory palaces etc.) had a great deal of power

  • Monuments like Stonehenge and the statues of Easter Island were constructed to serve as mnemonic devices (theory)

  • The reason the Incans were able to be dominant even without writing is because they used memory devices and landscapes to memorize information. (theory)

  • Hunter-gatherer people were/are not intellectually inferior to "civilized man"

  • When we come across ancient memory tools we have no way of knowing what information it contained for the people who knew how to use it, but when we come across old writing it can be read and transcribed by historians.

Surprising Facts

  • Songs were used as a mnemonic devices by hunter-gatherers for remembering things like the names of animals, landscapes, and plants

  • Some Maori can recite an 800 year genealogy dating from when the ancestors first reached New Zealand.

  • Hunter-Gatherer's memorized the names of thousands plants and animals

  • The Digeridoo mimics animal sounds

  • Totem poles were used as memory devices to recall information

  • A 'learned man' of the Iatmul in New Guinea may remember between 10,000 and 20,000 multisyllabic names

  • Excavations have shown the the Maoi giant head statues are statues with complete bodies and the torsos have become buried by sediment up to the shoulders

  • On the giant rock in Uluru aborigines use every notch and crevice around the perimeter to memorize information

  • Myths were used to pass down morals as well as practical information

  • Hunter-gathers used remembered stars by the legends associated with them

  • Aboriginal art is always used to help the people remember stories and knowledge like landscapes (aesthetics is never its primary purpose)

  • Indigenous stories had many functions: Entertainment, teach morals, teach landscape, teach about local plants and animals

  • Stars were used as a navigation tool during pre-history

  • Indigenous cultures around the world will destroy a memory space or restricted memory objects if there is no fully initiated elder to take them over.

  • Other Popular theories for why Stonehenge was built

    • Aliens

    • Elaborate cemetery

    • Astronomical observatory

    • Stone age health spa

Unknown Terms

Songlines (Dreaming Tracks): A song that is song by indigenous people in order to help them remember their routes through a certain landscape

Knowledge specialists: People (usually men) who were the holders of the culture's knowledge usually through memory aids. 2) These people go by different names in different cultures eg. Australia=clever man Africa=n/om k"ausi Ican=Rememberers African Luba= Men of Memory

Lukasa: a memory device that was created, manipulated and protected by the Bambudye, a once powerful secret society of the Luba (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

Tjuringa or Churinga: a memory device that was created, manipulated and protected by the the aboriginal people of Australia 2)an object considered to be of religious significance by Central Australian Aboriginal people of the Arrernte groups. Tjurunga often had a wide and indeterminate native significance

Mortuary Poles: Totem poles used to represent the genealogy of a people and act as a memory device for memorizing their names

Memory Space: a location in a settlement where elders could perform the knowledge and oral traditions that contained information that was to be passed down to others 2) Lynne Kelly believed that Stone Henge was one of these)

Chinese whispers (Telephone): an internationally popular children's.

Players form a line or circle, and the first player comes up with a message and whispers it to the ear of the second person in the line. The second player repeats the message to the third player, and so on. When the last player is reached, they announce the message they heard to the entire group. The first person then compares the original message with the final version. Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first player, usually with amusing or humorous effect. Reasons for changes include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, and the difficult-to-understand mechanism of whispering.

Chinese Whispers effect: when information is passed orally from person to person and accidentally gets changed or modified along the way

Glyph: the specific shape, design, or representation of a character