Notes from The Memory Research Group's Writing On Hands Session

I had the pleasure of participating in Kei Kreutler’s latest Memory Research Group discussion, which covered an essay and some selections from Writing On Hands, a work that should appeal to anyone who enjoyed reading Marafioti’s Art of Memory.

These discussions are a project of the Protocol Institute, which in its words:

The Protocol Institute is an independent research, education, and scene-making organization dedicated to the study of protocols — the rules, procedures, technologies, and coordination infrastructures that shape how individuals, organizations, and systems interact and co-evolve. In particular, we are interested in the contemporary evolution of planet-scale intelligence through the interplay of AI, modern cryptographic technologies like blockchains, and their physical embodiments, as well as the human ecologies that emerge on top of them.

Give my interest in the interplay between memory and technology, I had to check it out.

I’m a distracted motor mouth, so hopefully I presented myself at least somewhat respectably. Thank you for your patience Ke!

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Some highlights:

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The Before Times

The work we discussed explored the use of hands as computation devices. Kei discussed how time was experienced in a medieval monastic setting, and touched on the central importance of calculating Easter.

These are the kind of details which help fill in the dots when reading older works.

The first mechanical clock was only invented in the 1200s, and it wasn’t until 1656 that the pendulum clock hit the scene. Our relationship to time has changed substantially since then, so it’s hard to appreciate the kind of embodied practices people used to have to help navigate the world.

My favorite practice from the text was Jakob Köbel’s hand sundial device, where you use your hand as a way to tell the time. That’s something I might try practicing later.

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Bede’s Finger Reckoning System

Another highlight was Venerable Bede’s finger reckoning system, a practice that has been lost to us that I think might be fun to repurpose. It’s like an abacus, but for your hands. Different finger arrangements could be used for numbers between 1-9999, and you could go above that using hand gestures.

I think it might be possible to combine Bede’s finger reckoning with the major system in some novel ways, and I might take the time to experiment with it.

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Dancers & Body Palaces

One of the other participants was a dancer, and they got me thinking of how rich a dancer’s understanding of the body is, and how that can be used to their benefit in developing a memory practice.

As I’ve argued before, everyone’s memory practice should be tailored to their own strengths and weaknesses. Dancers who take their art seriously will have a very rich understanding of the human body, which will allow them to make some very detailed body maps that other people just wouldn’t be capable of creating.

Scaffolding your memory palaces around things that are easy to evoke makes it easier for you to assign cues to it. The more familiar you are with a place or a thing, the easier it is for you to leverage it for the sake of memory.

My guess is that the greater your understanding of the body, the easier it should be for you to map memory items to it. Someone who has a deeply felt physical sense of their bodies and a decent grasp of human anatomy simple has more to work with when constructing a body map.

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Crowding

We discussed the problem of crowding, or creating busy memory palaces.

This is a common issue, and it’s one reason I wasn’t sure how well Marafioti’s hand palaces would work in practice. Many ancient mnemonists suggest spreading memory images a part in terms of feet, while hand palaces involve placing images on a tiny surface.

My opinion right now, and it’s liable to change, is that the richer the order-sign, the less you have to worry about spacing effects.

At the end of the day, an order-sign is just a map with addresses. If the disposition of the addresses is internally coherent, you don’t have to worry about crowding. It’s the reason something like Conrad Celtes syllabary works.

In Celtes syllabary, you organize locations around letters of the alphabet based on the order of vowels. It’s an internally coherent system that anyone familiar with the alphabet will have a rich repertoire of experiences with.

The consonant-vowel images don’t have to be spread a part from each other because their position can be figured out logically.

In the same way, once the addresses of a hand palace are sufficiently known to a user, the crowding isn’t an issue.

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Division and Multiplication

We also discussed the distinction between division and multiplication in terms of memory palaces.

I overstated the case for my definition of multiplication, which reflects more of my bias than what the mnemonic record really allows.

However, given the techniques I’ve uncovered, I do think my use of the term is more appropriate.

I use division to refer to how we break down larger locations into smaller ones, so you divide a room into four walls, and then the four walls into four corners, and so on.

I use multiplication to refer to those forgotten techniques that let you recycle or reuse a memory palace, like this one by Martin Sommer:

If one has imprinted a camp on memory as completely as the alphabet, one must keep very striking colors ready in a fixed order. Given these two things, one can create as many camps as one wants by the time someone has recited a Paternoster. For I imagine another camp similar to the first, but with a different distinguishing color. Let this be red in the first camp, white in the second, black in the third, green in the fourth, yellow in the fifth, blue in the sixth, ash-gray in the seventh, chestnut-brown in the eighth, and so on. Then I have in each camp just as many places as in the first, namely 5200. But if one prefers to form a house of 100 rooms, and in each room 100 places according to the third figure, then the whole camp has 250,000 places. Such a camp can be formed just as easily and quickly as another, only more preparation is required.

And this one by Girolamo Marafioti:

But here one thing must be observed, for the completion of the whole work: namely, that the sensible places, which the art makes through images, can be multiplied, and diminished, according to the capacity of the universal place of the art. But the places which the art sets up in the hands can indeed be multiplied well, but not diminished. For on each surface of the hands there are ninety-two places; yet they are multiplied to infinity according to the diversity of the colors and signs by which the hands are signified and adorned.

And:

I have sometimes taken a book which I decorated with many hands and figures, showing the faces of both hands. In these I always placed the same figures, but I gave the hands four faces: for the first turn they were white, according to the nature of the page; for the second turn black; for the third red. Thus I continually varied the colors in the book, so that it would be easier to apprehend by the senses and by the intellect.

I think my use of the terms makes for a better mnemonic taxonomy, since it allows us to discuss two related yet distinct techniques: those that create addresses in a memory palace, and those that reuse addresses.

This brings me to my last note on the discussion.

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Transposing Palaces

This is not something I’ve ever seen written about, but it is something I’ve done in my own practice: transposing addresses from one palace to another.

Like the movie the end of Oak Street, it’s possible to just move your addresses somewhere new.

I’ll eventually discuss this in more detail, but when you realize that memory palaces are just arrangements of addresses, it becomes relatively easy to move those addresses to different palaces, provided a few conditions are met first.

I can take the alphabet palace of Conrad Celtes and transpose it to my hand using the hand arrangements I shared in the introduction to Marafioti’s book. Or I could transpose it to a more traditional roman room style memory palace.

The ability to transpose a palace requires that the order of addresses have some logical or customary force to it.

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This discussion gave me plenty of food for thought, and I look forward to future editions.