How tragedy in Thessaly changed memory (and a tip for your next exam)

First a shudder. A shake. Then a crack. An ominous crumbling. A pause, during which he turned and realized what was about to happen. But before he could move, it gave one last groan, one last heave, and then, it fell.

No survivors. Not one. Except him.

The entire ceiling had given way, heavy rock falling down into the banquet hall below. Families wanted to mourn, but bodies were crushed beyond recognition.

Nothing works to motivate a person like need.

According to a legend passed on to us through Cicero, Simonides of Ceos was a Greek poet and wise man who was witness to a tragedy in Thessaly. He had attended a banquet where he was to present a lyric poem praising the host. Not long after his performance, he was called outside. And not long after that, the roof of the banqueting hall collapsed, killing everyone inside – all the other diners. Families wanted to be able to identify their lost ones so that they could mourn. In Ancient Rome, identification was particularly important so that the dead could have a proper burial, with all the necessary rites.

Simonides did something invaluable for these families. He identified the bodies.

How?

He used his visual memory, remembered where everyone had been sitting, and identified people based on where they were found. According to the story, this was the origin of the method of loci. Simonides realized that if people formed mental images of things they wanted to remember and stored them in selected places (locus in Latin meaning place), the order of the places would allow them to go through and remember the order of the things. He compared the places to a wax writing-tablet and the images to the letters written on it.

The Method of Loci:

Once upon a long ago, before we could store everything in our phones, even before the invention of the printing press, back when most people couldn’t store information in books, memory was everything. The method of loci became widely used, especially by orators who needed to remember their points in order. By the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, increasingly complex versions emerged, allowing people to remember more and more. A popular one was the use of unique imaginary places – a Memory Theatre or Palace (Sherlock, anyone?).

It has been argued that the method of loci had a significant impact on the development of Western intellectual tradition during the ancient, medieval and renaissance periods (learn more on this in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here). It ensured visual memory and the use of imagery-based mnemonic techniques remained important parts of people’s thinking about cognition, and even today research suggests that the simplest form of the method of loci can be very effective.

What does this mean for you?

Hopefully you never need to employ it under the same circumstances as Simonides, but using imagery to remember things can make life a lot easier.

Try it: when you’re revising for an exam or even making a shopping list, try visualizing the objects rather than just focusing on the words. Play around with the object’s appearance, make it bigger and brighter. See what happens. You’ll find each item is a lot more memorable.