Chapter Nine: Memory Aids
This idea of matching our observations to patterns we already know is actually a very important part of learning; in teacher training, for example, we’re constantly reminded to link new content with something that students already know, to ‘give them a hook to hang it on’ or to contextualise it, so that students can see how it fits and thus remember it more easily. This makes sense: remembering one, random thing in isolation is a lot harder than remembering one new detail that fits in with a bunch of things you already know.
And of course, what is a story but a set sequence of events that you know and remember?! So matching external events to story patterns just makes sense. If you can match the random movement of some shapes on a screen to a familiar story pattern (in the case mentioned above, one of the triangles was frequently said to be chasing the other, smaller triangles, and the story-pattern surrounding domestic violence was repeatedly hinted at), then instead of having to remember random movements in isolation, you now have a story that you have already internalised to help you remember them.
In fact, estimates suggest that people remember information woven into stories up to twenty-two times more effectively than information provided through facts alone.
This is also why storytelling is such a popular component in many mnemonic techniques. If you want to improve your ability to memorise random lists of things (say, the items you’re supposed to buy when you next hit up the grocery store), most of the well-known recommendations involve linking the items together in a story in some way. You could, for example, remember the list ‘milk, stock powder, oranges, jam’ by concocting a story like this one:
Once there was a small child who really, really liked to drink milk. They liked it so much that even when they were banned from drinking milk, they would take it down to the stock yard so they could hide away and drink it in peace. Their favourite spot to hide in the stock yards was on the edge under the orange tree, where they could jam themselves in tightly between the rails and the tree trunk and drink milk in peace for hours on end.
The link to ‘jam’ is a little more obscure than I’d like, but as an example in a book that is not about teaching mnemonic tricks, it’ll do.
The point is that even in concocting this tiny, three-sentence example, I couldn’t help myself: I turned it into a real story. This was not pre-planned in any way, shape or form; I literally just invented this as I was typing it. And yet, I have a character, in a specific setting, with a clearly defined goal, and some conflict—there’s the child, in some kind of rural or semi-rural setting, who really, really wants to drink milk, but has to hide in order to do so because they’re banned from it.
(Maybe they have an intolerance, I don’t even know. Also, why you’d put an orange tree right next to your stock yard is beyond me. BUT NEVER MIND. It’s a shopping list, not a candidate for the Nobel Prize.)
Storytelling as a memory aid also has much more significant cultural implications than mnemonic tricks and shopping lists. People are significantly more likely to remember things and be impacted by them when they understand them both intellectually and emotionally, so if I simply tell my child not to play with chainsaws, that’s one thing, but if I tell them not to and tell them that they could get hurt and show them the pictures of my friend’s knee when he nearly severed his own leg off in a chainsaw accident? Yeah, whole lot more effective.
(And no, I haven’t traumatised my children, I promise. Well, not yet, anyway.)
(This is also why ads, both of the commercial variety and the ‘save a child’ social-issue variety, are careful to include an emotional pull, as well as mere intellectual information.)
This concept of passing important factual information via stories is illustrated clearly in the Indigenous Australian concept of songlines. A songline is a particular story or set of stories that is connected to physical locations within the people’s geographic area, and while the stories hold immense religious and cultural significance, they also expertly convey the factual information necessary to survive in that area: the location of seasonal water and food, to name just one example. And in an awe-inspiring example of the social currency of stories, many of these songlines are connected from culture to culture, over-arching narratives with individual chapters, with each culture the curators of the particular ‘chapter’ of the story relevant to their land.
Introduction
Ch1 The Point Of A Text
Ch2.1 Thesis Statements
Ch2.2 Thesis Statements
Ch3 Quotes Are Usually Themes
Ch4.1 Theme In Fables
Ch4.2 Theme In Fables
Ch5.1 Finding Themes
Ch5.2 Finding Themes
Ch6 Subthemes
Ch7.1 Theme + You
Ch7.2 Theme + You
Ch8 Why Stories? Recognising Patterns
Ch9 Why Stories? Memory Aids
Ch10: Why Stories? Social Cooperation
Ch11: Why Stories? Power Structures
Ch12: Why Stories? Empathy
Conclusion