memorization

We don’t know for certain who composed The Odyssey, which is generally and perhaps inaccurately ascribed to a single bard, Homer in the 8th century BCE. Most modern experts, including Emily Wilson in her otherwise excellent introduction to her recent translation, routinely comment that one person could not possibly have memorized the entire epic poem. Most assume one person could not have written those two book-length epic poems much less remember them. They suggest that both The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed over a period of time with adjustment and additions by several or many people.

Not necessarily so. The human capacity for memorization is astounding.

This vase from the British Museum (c. 480–470 BCE) was decorated during Athen’s classic age three centuries after the story of Odysseus was known and eight centuries after at least some of the events described may have occurred in ancient times.

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One of the assignments I used to give my juniors was to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

We listened to the School House Rock song (which leaves out four words) and sang it together several times. Then we wrote the fifty-two words on a slip of paper. Students had to write it perfectly, with all the peculiar caps, punctuation and spellings, before they were done. Almost no one got it the first time they tried to write it out. Some needed a dozen tries. For many, this was the first time they noticed the word “posterity” and I had to define the term. Many initially complained it was “impossible.” Yet most of these same students could likely sing the lyrics of favorite songs. Eventually they all got it.

Students routinely underestimated their own capacities in many ways. Memory was one.

In the past, I have used the example of my younger son’s experience as an undergraduate Theater major. Ian will say he is fortunate, and that is likely true, but he is also smart and a skilled performer. He was a gamer from the age of 4 and now makes his living in theater, mostly as a master electrician.

In earlier days, Ian starred in high school musicals, performed in community theater, and while a college student at Portland State he played on every university stage as well as in commercial theater, and starred in an indie film. When the male lead in a local community theater walked off four days before the opening of a play, the director called Ian. He was on stage for the opening, off script and brilliant.

I recently read a new translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson. It functions as a comfortable introduction to that ancient story, offering an excellent overview of its background and an attempt at form—the original Greek is in a poetic form that does translate so Wilson chose to use iambic pentameter with shorter lines, which do not allow for all the detail of other translations. But the story is lively and interesting with monsters and divine storms and bloody battles. The claim that most disturbed me was her insistence that no one poet or performer could have memorized the entire epic of over 12,000 lines. I could only conclude she didn’t know theater people.

One of the plays my son performed in college was the restoration comedy She Stoops to Conquer. The play includes many characters and he memorized all the lines—he had little choice since he performed all six of the major male roles in rotation as well as all the unnamed male roles such as “servant.” It is a long play.

So is Hamlet, which contains just over 4,000 lines and anyone playing the lead would likely, by necessity, learn the entire play. It is not enough to know cues, the lines immediately previous to those the actor knows. The actor needs to know more than that. And that is not the only role a lead actor in Shakespeare’s day would have known. In repertoire, where a limited groups of actors perform several plays in rotation, he might be performing a dozen roles. It would not be unusual for a single actor to have 12,000 lines mostly memorized. And then a month later he would have a new play and another and another.

Assuming a minstrel sang only long piece or perhaps a handful learned over a lifetime? To perform 12,000 lines is not “impossible.” It would require 12 hours, be sung over a series of nights. Again and again.

It is, frankly, incredible what the human brain can do.

Many of us struggle to commit a phone number to memory. How about 67,980 digits? That’s how many digits of pi that Chao Lu of China, a 24-year-old graduate student at the time, recited in 2005. Chao uttered the string of numbers during a 24-hour stretch without so much as a bathroom break, breaking the world record.

It is only in modern literate times that we have so underestimated the capacity of the human mind to memorize. Modern research suggests that most people know as few as 10,000 or as many as 35,000 words. A working vocabulary, words we use routinely in conversation, is much smaller, a few thousand words. The Kottke blog (one of the oldest) offers an interesting overview:

In his collected writings, Shakespeare used 31,534 different words. 14,376 words appeared only once and 846 were used more than 100 times. Using statistical techniques, it’s possible to estimate how many words he knew but didn’t use.

This means that in addition the 31,534 words that Shakespeare knew and used, there were approximately 35,000 words that he knew but didn’t use. Thus, we can estimate that Shakespeare knew approximately 66,534 words.

According to one estimate, the average speaker of English knows between 10,000-20,000 words.

True, Shakespeare cannot be considered typical, but words were his business. His command of language was not so unusual, even in Europe. Wordplay was entertainment as well as occupation. Courtiers invented puns on the fly. People got the joke. When my typical Honors students were assigned to read Huck Finn, they often complained about the difficulty of reading Jim’s dialogue and rarely found the book funny. When I read it aloud to my regular English classes, they laughed continuously. They heard all the jokes. My “smarter” readers were not often hearing the language, but skimming.

(A reading specialist once told me that reading under 350 wpm was failure. This represents a misunderstanding of how the brain processes language. True, a very slow reader, sounding out one word on the page after another, struggles to make sense of a sentence. But a very fast reader fails to grasp anything but an overview of content. The fast reader cannot help but resent poetry for the demands it places on the reader, and thus loses the art on the page completely—a complaint for another time.)

The impact of cell phones, audiobooks, and other technology on language has been estimated to be anywhere from debateable to improved. It might result in little change to overall usage or actively cause vocabulary and grammar to deteriorate or even improve usage.

In any event, the memory capacity of the human brain is enormous. There is no danger of filling it up. Whatever we might believe limits our abilities to learn and use new information, we are likely wrong.

People are capable of learning and growing throughout their lives. It is wise for us to do that, a healthy habit. However long we live and any way we look at learning—through formal education, memorization, life experience, or invention—it is what we are meant to do throughout our lives.

Our brains are never full.

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