The songlines of the Yanyuwa people from Carpentaria in Australia’s far north have been recorded over 800 kilometres. A songline is a sequence of locations, that might, for example, include the rocks that provide the best materials for tools, to a significant tree or a waterhole. They are far more than a navigation aid. At each location, a song or story, dance or ceremony is performed that will always be associated with that particular location, physically and in memory. A songline, then, provides a table of contents to the entire knowledge system, one that can be traversed in memory as well as physically.
Another study shows that the Hanunoo people of the Philippines were able to identify 1,625 plants, many of which were unknown to Western science at the time. Add to that knowledge of astronomy, timekeeping, navigation, legal and ethical guidelines, weather and seasons, complex genealogies and belief systems, and you have a vast encyclopaedia stored in an interwoven memorised web: a web that is tied to a real or imagined memory palace.
Previous researchers have claimed that the ‘men of memory’ of the Mbudye society would spend years learning a vast corpus of stories, dances and songs associated with the bead and shells attached to a piece of carved wood. My initial attitude when I read this was complete skepticism. It was surely claiming far too much for such a simple device. So I made one. I grabbed a piece of wood and glued some beads and shells on it and started encoding the 412 birds of my state: their scientific family names, identification, habitats and behaviour. It worked a treat. I no longer doubt the research. Though simple, this is an incredibly powerful memory tool.
Inspired by my success with the lukasa, I have also created songlines for more than a kilometre around my home. I have a location on my walk for each of the 244 countries and dependent territories in the world. I walk through them from the most populous in China to little Pitcairn Island. I also walk through time from 4,500 million years ago until the present, nodding to the dinosaurs, meeting our hominid ancestors and greeting numerous characters from history. My memory has been hugely expanded by using this ancient mnemonic technique.
In some ways this is not so unfamiliar : we have linear scale models of the Solar System and timelines of the Universe. I remember the order of things on the EM spectrum by imagining the typical visual representation you see in textbooks.
https://aeon.co/ideas/this-ancient-mnemonic-technique-builds-a-palace-of-memory
I remember James Burke in THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED explaining how memory theater worked.
ReplyDeleteHe said this is the origin of that expression "in the first place..."
How have I not heard of THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED??!?
ReplyDeleteDan Eastwood
ReplyDeleteJames Burke used to make science history series.
The first was CONNECTIONS, and showed how, for instance, the ancient discovery of the touch-stone to check the purity of gold led to a chain of scientific discoveries that ended with the atom bomb. Fascinating, though a tad dated.
The next was THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED. It showed how what you know (or think you know) alters what you see.
It started with this:
Let me tell you a joke. Someone apparently went up to the great philosopher Wittgenstein and said:
"What a lot of morons back in the Middle Ages must have been to have looked, every morning, at the dawn and to have thought what they were seeing was the Sun going around the Earth," when every school kid knows that the Earth goes around the Sun, to which Wittgenstein replied,
"Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going around the Earth?"
Of course it would have looked exactly the same. You see what your knowledge tells you are watching.
Well, this is what this series is about: what you think the universe is and how you react in different times according to your knowledge and when that knowledge changes, the universe changes too. This is true for the whole society or a particular person.
I think you can find both series around the net if you look.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I am concerned, I think both series should be required viewing in high school science class rooms.
ReplyDeleteI saw Connections long ago, but didn't realise this series existed. Great stuff.
ReplyDeleteI like both Connections and TDTUC, because even though they both cover the history of science they do so from different viewpoints.
ReplyDeleteThere are book versions as well.