One thing I have done a lot of these past few months is read. Of course pictures of Korean adventures are more exciting, but I am also experiencing new things with each book I read. So since this blog is about keeping in touch and what I've been up to, I feel like it's okay to share this type of thing every now and then. I just can't stop talking about this book, and Isaac is probably about sick of the snippets and random facts I keep sharing.
So the book is Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein. It is unique because it is: so interesting that it's hard to put down, non-fiction AND teaches a practical skill.
Basic summary: Joshua Foer is a journalist who was given the assignment to cover a memory competition. He became entranced by these mental athletes, who could memorize strings of meaningless numbers, poetry and decks of cards in record time. Even more surprising to him was that those he interviewed seemed and even professed to be utterly average people. Beneath the wings of a memory champion, Joshua began a year of training to become a mental athlete himself and went on to win the American memory competition just one year after entering this strange culture. This book tells his story and recounts his research all about memory - our brains, history of methods, society's changing perspectives and human anomalies.
This book challenged my ideas about memory and what it means to memorize. I have heard many criticisms about schools requiring memorization. Over the past two years in my teacher's education program, I developed a wrinkled-nose-smelling-something-bad sort of face in reaction to the word "memorize". This book showed me that such negative views towards memorization are a result of our current culture's misuse and misunderstanding of this lost skill.
Contrary to what I have always heard and often thought myself, memorization does not have to be a mindless, robotic task. Effective memorization, as employed by many generations of great thinkers before internet and books were around, is done using wild creativity and imagination. The basic idea is that you create an outlandish mental image which will help you retain whatever information desired. For this is how our memory works naturally. The reason any American can tell you what they were doing on September 11 is because it was an abnormal and surprising day.
So using this method, memory is the ability to paint strange mental snapshots. The more senses you can imagine, the deeper, more memorable the image will be. That sounds much less intimidating than the memorization I tried in school, repeating lines of poems and definitions again and again.
Another aspect that helps our memories is location. Foer and the mental athletes refer to memory palaces, which are locations very familiar to you which you can comfortably walk through in your mind and insert the crazy snapshots you form. Popular memory palaces places like your childhood home or old high school.
This idea is the basis on which world-class mental athletes do much of their performing. To memorize numbers or playing cards, they create a system, assigning an atypical and specific image to each number or card - which can then be combined to create strings of images just like my walk up the driveway, allowing them to recreate the correct order of a string of numbers or cards.
Although memorizing the order of a deck of cards is a cool party trick, I wanted to try out this method on something a bit more useful. So I have begun to memorize Korean vocabulary words, imagining fun and unlikely images and inserting them in my childhood home. I thought I would share the first few just to give you an idea. And because I can't stand to have no pictures, I did some doodles on my cellphone just for fun.
가까스로 ga-kka-seu-ro | adv. barely, nearly
My list starts with me turning off the engine of my car in the driveway. There is a giant crow on the windshield violently pecking at it, yelling "ga! kka!" as cracks spread across the glass like a spiderweb. I know the verb form of this Korean word means to be close, so having a crow pecking close to my face just barely not breaking the windshield makes this image vivid and connects it to the specific word.
세다 se-da | v. to be strong, severe
I get out of the car, assume an impressive martial arts pose, yelling "se" in my best Asian accent. Then crying "da!" I leap through the air to kick the bird. This word was totally new to me, but imagining bashful Betty yelling and furiously jumping seems so ridiculous that I easily remember it.
고르다 go-reu-da | v. to choose, to make level
I walk towards my house, still in the gravel driveway when our dog Rocky appears beside me. On top of his high, broad back there is a silver tray holding two drinks, pink lemonade and regular lemonade. I hesitate, trying to choose which one I want and impressed at Rocky's balance.
I'll stop now, because as you can see, there is nothing miraculous about this process. But I think that is the beauty of it, that it is so simple and doable. Without much effort, maybe 15 minutes daily over the past week spent imagining silly scenes, I have memorized 60 Korean words and their meanings. If I can't sleep or when I am bored, I can walk through my memory palace and check on each word and its definition to see if anything is fuzzy.
It has been a fun and useful exercise to try this memorization method. I am beginning to recognize the words I learned in conversation, like Isaac's father telling me last weekend to choose where we would eat dinner. "Betty-a, gol-la!" That's the conjugated form of the third word on my list.
So if you've made it far, thanks for sticking with me! I hope you found this interesting, and maybe even feel inspired to pick up the book or try this method too to remember something, whether it's a new acquaintance's name or your to-do list.
I totally love the "make level" one
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