Chapter 1 - Memories
I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world.
(fictional character Ireneo Funes in Jorge Luis Borges' story "Funes, the Memorious.")
In "Funes, the Memorious", Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of a man, Ireneo Funes" who, after a fall from a horse, found his perception and memory had become essentially limitless.
On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories…his perception and his memory were infallible.(1)
Where we might walk into the library of a home and see a wall of books, Funes would see every individual book. Not only its author and title (provided they were shown on the edge of the book), but the color and pattern of every book, the wearing at the edges of some books while others were more pristine, the shading of the light that fell on each, their respective positions with respect to other books. And that only mentions the visual. He felt every movement of the air, every tiny change in the pitch of a visitor's voice. The multitude of odors that combine without comment in our own minds were each individually noted by Funes. And everything he perceived, he remembered.
Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.(2)
Hence not only could Funes perceive every detail of every scene presented to him, but his memory was exact in its self-referential possibilities. That is, he remembered not only everything, not only every context in which it was experienced, but also every context in which that memory came back to mind, thus enriching the original.
As is common in many of his stories, Borges has an unnamed narrator whose tone is so like that of Borges that we can take him to be Borges, thus providing a further air of verisimilitude to the incredible story he tells. Whether his history matches that of the actual Borges is of little concern to Borges, who is also fond of actually naming a character Borges then mixing fictional history with actual autobiography.
At the time he was to meet Funes, the fictional Borges "had begun, not without some ostentation, the methodical study of Latin." Among the Latin volumes he was trying to make his way through was "an odd-numbered volume of the Historia Naturalis of Pliny, which exceeded (and still exceeds) my modest talents as a Latinist."(3) Funes heard of Borges possessing these "anomalous books" and sent him a note asking if he could briefly borrow any one of them, together with a Latin dictionary "for I do not know Latin as yet." Full of his own tiny erudition, Borges was, of course, irritated at the effrontery of Funes' assumption that he could make his way through these difficult volumes with only a dictionary, so he sent him the dictionary plus two volumes that exceeded his own capacity, one of which was the Pliny.
When Borges later came to visit Funes, he found him sitting alone in a dark room reciting from memory the Latin books he had read, with Latin original text interspersed with Spanish translation. He didn't yet know that Funes had little need of any company except his prodigious memory. For his visitor, Funes recited stories of fabulous memory which had been told in the single volume of Pliny's Historia Naturalis he had been so appropriately loaned. Of course, all those stories faded in comparison with Funes' own memory. As Funes told him, "my memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal".(4)
Alien Dreams
Among my earliest memories are lying in bed in that inner twilight stage just before I fell asleep, making up stories in my head. Though it is misleading to say that I made up the stories; they just seemed to come to me. Sometimes I would make little conscious changes in them, but in large part, they were as far beyond my control as their close cousins: dreams. A great number of these stories involved being taken up into a space ship and subjected to physical and mental examinations. I almost never recall seeing any space people in the reveries, though sometimes I would see robots. The inside of the space ships were always coolly mechanical, gleaming with shiny metal, almost bare. When an examination table was needed it would emerge out of nowhere, sometimes extruded by the ship itself. The robots were much like the ship: gleaming and efficient, with no attempt to appear humanoid.
Often there would be some humiliating element in the dream; e.g., I was usually stripped and had to remain naked throughout my time on the ship. Sometimes I would have to wear diapers, which seemed especially humiliating since I was still so young when I first had these dreams that I was proud to no longer be a baby who needed diapers. But I was never mistreated during the dreams, and often received some bonus from the unseen aliens: better health or greater intelligence, etc.
Though I did both see the space ship and hear sounds inside, I largely recall my emotional experience, and that experience was a bodily experience. This is hard to communicate unless someone is kinesthetic, and most people are either visual or auditory; i.e., it is much more common to experience inner reality primarily through pictures or sounds that it is to feel it in the body. And even within that modality, people vary widely in their abilities. An artist friend I knew could easily call up a scene in her mind with as much detail as if it were actually in front of her. And anyone who has ever read James Joyce is I'm sure struck by how strongly his world is dominated by sound, both the sounds of Dublin and the sound of the word-world he presents on the page. For me, it's very easy to make extremely fine discriminations in my emotional state, and I can readily recall how I felt in almost any past situation. In contrast, a more visual friend often doesn't even know when he's angry or sad; I know his emotional state long before he does. As we will see later, this difference in sensory modality had to later be incorporated into my magical skills.
These fantasies went on for several years, starting perhaps about three, though I can't be sure. I do remember that a sexual element entered them, long before I was conscious of such a thing as sex. In those dreams, I would find that I was not alone on the ship. There would also be one or more girls (less often also other boys). We would be mated in some way, though I never recall this involving any actual sexual intercourse. I think normally the mating was accomplished by artificial means by either the mechanisms of the ship or by robots.
Sometimes I didn't have to be abducted; I actively sought out the alien space ship myself. In those fantasies, I was especially likely to get some boon for my troubles. But even in the dreams where I was abducted and experienced humiliation, I never remember experiencing real fear at my situation. The worst was some degree of discomfort and irritation at my lack of control.
I find it telling how similar my fantasies were to those now being presented by those who truly believe they were abducted by aliens. There is so much uniformity of reporting that is easy to see why many believe that they are actual physical experiences. Skeptics dismiss the uniformity of experience, arguing that there has been such a wide-spread dissemination of information about UFO abductions that people now know what they are supposed to experience. But my memories go back nearly fifty years, long before there was any substantial amount of reporting of UFO abductions. In fact, I don't remember even hearing about space ships and space people before I had these fantasies, though I'm sure I had to have something as a basic structure on which I built my fantasies.
If these were not experiences of actual physical abductions, the fact that my experiences so closely resemble those of others, indicates that there has to be an underlying uniformity of inner structure that garbs itself in these forms. Jung laid the groundwork for understanding how we can project such inner experience onto the outer world through his model of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. More specifically, he discussed the UFO experience in his seminal essay "Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth."(5) A brilliant recent book--Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience(6)--presents a number of essays that agree with, extend, or deny Jung's thesis more broadly to the UFO contact experience in general.
An acquaintance told me of her own experiences in this area. She had these experiences as an adult, not a child, after information on UFO's was common, but before the proliferation of alien abduction stories appeared. Her experience involved mescaline. I'll discuss my own mescaline experiences later. Here is her account:
Several years ago, I had an experience that I found curious. It was during my own drug experimentation days. I really knew nothing of any of the "higher consciousness" aspects of drug use, I just spent time exploring the effects of drugs, without worrying about getting into any psychic trouble. An acquaintance who knew of my drug experimentation told me about astral planes and warned me that I could open myself up to "possession" and so on. I was pretty skeptical, I didn't believe in that stuff.
One night after taking mescaline, I was lying on my bed in my room when I had the distinct impression that small beings came through the door (which was closed) and through the walls. They were indistinct, misty in color. They surrounded me (uh oh, I thought, now what have I done to myself--but I wasn't particularly frightened) and proceeded to "examine" me. Without speaking, I understood them to communicate that I was marked or otherwise already belonged to another entity. They left--through the walls. Whew, that was strange, but ok, whatever. I did not talk about the encounter and I especially did not want to say anything about it to the person who had warned me about "playing" with drugs.
A few years later, when the media began to talk about the abduction phenomena, and people appeared on television and in print talking about their abduction experiences; I realized I had not been abducted by aliens, but rather REJECTED by aliens. I realize this is probably metaphor, but I would have liked to have had the opportunity to have asked why the metaphor chose rejection and where in the world this metaphor came from! Actually, during the luncheon mentioned above when I mentioned my experience to my friend, she said very seriously, "just be glad they didn't want you."
This account communicates some of the ambiguous quality of alien contact experiences. As I have already emphasized, my own fantasies were very real and very powerful. Still, even while I was having these fantasies, I knew that they were fantasies. I never thought that I was actually taken up on real space ships by real aliens. I also knew that I wasn't in control of these experiences, though I had no idea who or what was. They were experiences that seemed unique to me, a special gift, one that I knew enough from the beginning to keep to myself and not share with anyone. They were my first experience of that nether-land that lies between supposed real experience and made-up experience, a world where "definitive answers are hard to come by".
The Mind of a Mnemonist
Though, of course, no actual memory could quite match that of Funes, A. R. Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory(7) records a young Soviet man who came close. The young man worked as a reporter for a local newspaper. When, at the beginning of the day, the editor read the day's assignments to his reporters--"lists of places he wanted covered, information to be obtained in each"--he saw that the young reporter never took notes. When he berated him for this, the reporter calmly repeated the "entire assignment word for word."(8) The editor was so impressed that he sent him to Luria, who was the head of a psychological laboratory, for study.
When I began my study of S.(9) [as we will call him hereafter in this discussion], it was with much the same degree of curiosity psychologists generally have at the outset of research, hardly with the hope that the experiments would offer anything of particular note. However, the results of the first tests were enough to change my attitude and to leave me, the experimenter, rather than my subject, both embarrassed and perplexed.(10)
Luria gave S. series of different numbers or letters, either reading them out loud or showing them in written form. S. listened closely then exactly repeated what he had heard. With growing excitement, Luria increased the number of items in each series, "giving him as many as thirty, fifty, or even seventy words or numbers." The number of items listed seemed to have no effect on S.'s memory. He could repeat seventy numbers as easily as he had the smaller lists. He could repeat any list forward or backwards with equal alacrity, or tell the word or number before or after any other word or number. He didn't care whether the words were real words or nonsense words. The only requirement was that the words and numbers be pronounced or written clearly, and that there was a pause between each element in the series.
These experiments continued over the following days and weeks, and eventually stretched into years. Luria was to find that S. remembered every one of the tests, every series given on any day in any year. Luria was shocked and "simply had to admit that the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits [his emphasis]."(11)
Both S.'s and Funes' remarkable memories were primarily visual, though as we will see, other senses merged with vision in remarkable ways. Each word, each number brought forth a distinct image, but "for S., there was no distinct line, as there is for others of us, separating vision from hearing, or hearing from a sense of touch or taste.(12) This strange ability--or liability as one views it--is termed synathesia from the Greek "syn", meaning "together" and "aisthesis" meaning sensation. Hence sensations mixed together.(13)
When Luria discovered that S.'s astonishing memories were accomplished through a mixture of senses, he began to record the images and other sensations S. associated with various words, numbers, sounds, etc. Tones, for example, brought forth unique visual images for S. He saw a "brown strip against a dark background that had red, tongue-like edges" and had a taste like "sweet and sour borscht" when he heard a 100 decibel, 50cycles/second tone.(14) In case that sounds like the sort of artistic creation that anyone could produce with enough prodding, the compelling fact was that the same sensations would occur whenever that tone occurred. In other words, the tone, the image, the taste were all one for S. The same was true for all his sensations, all his memories.
Nearly all of us have some experience of synesthesia, especially in childhood. Many of us who have ever experienced a "blinding headache" knows how the pain mixes with distinct colored images if we turn our mind inward. When someone talks of "cool" or "hot" colors, we know instinctively at a sensory level what they mean. Marshall McLuhan created a near revolution in thought with his realization that various media were either "cool" or "hot". Children, who are not trapped in the rigidly linear cognitive framework of adults, are quite prone to a mixing of the senses, though nowhere near so markedly as with S. or with others who suffer (?) from synesthesia. In studying patients with synesthesia, neurologist Richard E. Cytowik concluded that "synesthesia is not something that has been added, but has always existed. A multi-sensory awareness is something that has been lost from conscious awareness in the majority of people."(15) Cytowik sees synesthetes (as he terms them) as cognitive fossils, reminders of the riches that are buried inside our neurological history.
We might think nothing could be more wonderful than to effortlessly remember everything we see, everything we read. Consider the drudgery of the endless childhood drilling in order to memorize vocabulary words, multiplication tables, scientific facts, dates and events in history. For an S. or a Funes, once would be sufficient. So much of our life is dependent on our ability to remember. We might imagine how wonderful to be able to bring forth in conversation perfect quotes from books we had read, exact descriptions of past events that for most of us become muddled.
Another way to view remembering everything, however, is that we forget nothing. And it is often our ability to forget that makes life bearable. "The big question for him [i.e., S.], and the most troublesome, was how he could learn to forget."(16) He found it very difficult to read through a book because each word brought up an image which linked with other images in a nearly infinite regress. Only with difficulty could he pull himself away from the chain of images each word brought up, in order to move through the text. Not only reading but thought itself was prone to the same problem. For every thought was coupled with an image, and every image with other images. Thinking is very difficult if we lose our ability to abstract due to the vividness of the imagery. As Borges says of Funes: "I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost continuous details."(17)
Just imagine if all the memories of a lifetime were before you, each as vivid as when they were first experienced. How then do you separate images that never occurred from images that did, if both are equally intense? How even to separate images in your mind from your actual experience of the world. Psychologists refer to children's ability to believe that what they imagine has or will occur as "magical thinking". S. was especially prone to "magical thinking". Though, in his case, it is hard to be certain that he couldn't actually induce the magic.
For example, S. could control his body temperature and heart rate merely by calling up an appropriate image. To accelerate his heart rate, he just imagined himself running after a train; to slow it, he saw himself resting quietly in bed. To raise the temperature of one hand while lowering it in the other, he saw one hand resting on a hot stove, the other holding a piece of ice. Luria, of course, confirmed with tests that this was not merely S.'s imagination.
Though Luria didn't confirm it, S. also claimed to be able to eliminate pain when he was in the dentist's office having his teeth drilled by simply imagine himself standing by watching the drilling. This ability to dissociate from one's primary personality occurs spontaneously in many people under extreme stress. Children with especially traumatic childhood situations may do this to the extent that it creates alternate personalties within, which we will discuss more later.
As S. said of this magical thinking, "to me there's no great difference between the things I imagine and what exists in reality. Often, if I imagine something is going to happen, it does."(18) He gave examples of telling a friend that a cashier was going to give him too much change--and later she did. Or he would imagine he could cure himself of illness, or even cure others. He tells a story of a friend's son who experienced stomach pains. S. remembered the boy had eaten something cooked with lard, so he imagined pieces of the lard in the boy's stomach, then dissolved them in his mind. The boy got better. Though Luria was much more open to considering the existence of unusual abilities than most psychologists of his time (or of our own for that matter), he did not take seriously the possibility that S.'s naive belief that he could control reality with his visualization might actually be true. One wonders.
Memory Act
At one time in my adolescence, when I was doing platform magic, I added a memory act as part of the show. Members of the audience would call out 25 or sometimes 50 objects, which would be listed on a blackboard in the front of the stage. They were allowed to provide quite a lot of detail about an object if they liked. For example, if it was an automobile, they might add that it was a blue '59 Ford Coupe with a dent in the front right fender. Then I would read back the list from memory, forwards or backwards. If they named a number I could tell the object at the number. If an object, I could name the number associated with it.
Though not on the same scale as Funes or S., that sounds pretty miraculous in itself. Alas, I have no particularly remarkable memory; I was using an artificial memory system familiar to magicians. I'll explain that system here, just to show how quickly it can be learned. First each single digit from 0-9 is associated with one or more consonants. Simple devices are used to make these associations easier to remember. Then two digit numbers are associated with an image by using the two consonants, with appropriate vowels in between, to form easily imaged words. Let's try it in detail. Here's a chart summarizing the associations for the 10 digits from 0-9.
| # | Letter | Mnemonic aid |
| 1 | t or d | t has 1 downstroke; t and d sound alike |
| 2 | n | n has 2 downstrokes |
| 3 | m | m has 3 downstrokes |
| 4 | r | four ends in r |
| 5 | l | l is Roman numeral for fifty, which is like a big five |
| 6 | j or sh or ch | j looks like a backwards 6; j, sh, ch all sound similar |
| 7 | k or ck | 7 looks like a key, which starts with k |
| 8 | f or v | 8 looks like a written f, which also sounds like v |
| 9 | b or p | 9 looks like a b or a p turned around or upside down |
| 0 | z or s | 0 is zero, which begins with a z; z and s sound alike |
Though many of the mnemonic(19) aids above may seem logically ridiculous, try reading through the list a few times, and see if you don't very quickly remember what letters are associated with what numbers. The next stage is to construct and memorize images for all the 2 digit numbers from 00 to 99. Let's pick one at random, say 25. 2 is associated with n and 5 with l, so we want to make a word which begins with n and ends with l and has only vowels in between (the vowels don't count, only consonants convert to numbers.) For example, "nail" is an easily imagined word. We might imagine a large carpenter's nail, perhaps 6" long. In making these images, the larger and more exaggerated they are, they easier they are to remember. Or we could instead use a finger nail as our image. We'd envision a fist with the index finger sticking out and our attention on a close-up of the finger-nail. Even someone as non-visual as I am can call up such images. We need to go through all 100 such 2-digit numbers, and construct an image for each which we can easily imagine. It's best to construct our own images rather than just taking a list someone else has created, as the images will stay more firmly in our mind. This might take a while, so start with just 1-10. Use "01", "02", etc. for the single digit numbers. Though as I've said, it's better to construct your own words, here's a list I've made for you:
| 01 | SuiT (a suit of clothes on a hanger); |
| 02 | SuN (a big cartoon sun with rays coming out of it); |
| 03 | SuM (a sum of numbers on a blackboard) |
| 04 | SiR (a soldier saluting a General) |
| 05 | SaiL (a big sail on a sail boat) |
| 06 | SaSH (a wide ribbon draped across a chest} |
| 07 | SoCK (a sock with a big hole in the toe) |
| 08 | SaFe (an old-fashioned safe with a numbered dial) |
| 09 | SoaP (a bar of soap floating in the bath tub) |
| 10 | ToeS (a foot with the toes wiggling) |
You need to go over the list until when you think of a number you instantly see the image, think of an image and instantly know the number. It takes a little practice, but not nearly as much as learning the multiplication tables, for example. During the learning process, the mnemonic aids serve much as a scaffold does while a building is being constructed. They are helpful in the early stages of learning the list, then are forgotten themselves after the numbers and words become associated directly.
Now only one more mnemonic trick is necessary in order to be able to perform the memory act. When an object is called out by the audience, you imagine a picture which combines an image of the object named with the image associated with that number. For example, if the 5th item was a dog, you might imagine a dog standing up sailing a sail boat. If a book was chosen as the 25th object on the list, you could envision a big carpenter's nail sticking all the way through the middle of a book.. At first, you'll need a little time to associate each object, but remember even S. needed a few seconds for each word or number named. You will find that when a number is called later, it instantly brings to mind the combined picture of the image for that number and the object they named. And vice-versa--if they name an object, you automatically know the number. To read back the objects in order, forward or backwards, you merely go through your list forwards or backwards. Again this becomes second-nature. Finally, how do you remember all the additional details they might add about an object. You don't do anything special. Most of the time, those additional details will come to mind without any effort.(20)
Simonides and Artificial Memory
This mnemonic method I have described is peculiar to our own highly abstract time: numbers to letters to words to images. The Greeks and Romans of classical times had a very different method of artificial memory which they developed to a point where those who mastered it came close to rivaling a Funes or an S.
In 1596 Matteo Ricci taught the Chinese how to build a memory palace. He told them that the size of the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember: the most ambitious construction would consist of several hundred buildings of all shapes and sizes; "the more there are there the better it will be," said Ricci, though he added that one did not have to build on a grandiose scale right away. One could create modest palaces, or one could build less dramatic structures such as a temple compound, a cluster of government offices, a public hostel, or a merchant's meeting lodge.…
In summarizing this memory system, he explained that these palaces, pavilions, divans were mental structures to be kept in one's head, not solid objects to be literally constructed out of "real" materials.(21)
The above quotation describes the method used by the Greeks and Romans which continued to be used in the Western world during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. By custom it was assumed to have been discovered by the poet Simonides of Ceos in the 5th-6th century B.C. The story goes that a nobleman named Scopas was giving a banquet. He commissioned Simonides to compose and chant a lyric poem in his honor, which also praised the legendary twins Castor and Pollux. When Simonides delivered the poem, Scopas evidently felt the twins had received more praise than he had intended, as he gave the poet only half his fee, telling him to get the rest from the gods.
A few minutes later Simonides was called out of the banquet to talk to two men (?) who wanted to see him. Outside he found no one waiting to talk to him. While he was outside, however, the roof collapsed, killing everyone inside. The destruction was so devastating that the relatives who came couldn't even identify the bodies. But Simonides was able to remember where everyone had been sitting, so their identities could be determined from the location of their bodies. As scholar Frances Yates notes, "Castor and Pollux had handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by drawing Simonides away from the banquet just before the crash".(22)
Realizing how significant the mind's memory of place was, Simonides determined to develop a memory system drawing on that seemingly native ability. You might imagine a room which you enter through a door, then move around in a fixed pattern. As you walk around the room in your mind (clockwise we'll say), you imagine visual images of the words to be memorized in the various locations you visit. In order to later remember the words in order, you had only to move through the room in your mind, noting the objects that have been placed there.
As the opening quotation to this chapter showed, in the perfect system, a simple mental room could grow to a house, to a palace, to a town if necessary, all depending on the number of words to be memorized. Classical orators memorized entire speeches this way. Usually they assigned key words for parts of their speech, allowing themselves to extemporize around those key words, but some memorized every word of a lengthy oration using this technique. And if that still seems a little tame, consider the 16th century preacher Francesco Panigarola, who "was described by acquaintances in Florence as being able to roam across a hundred thousand memory images, each in its own fixed space."(23)
Though this method of place was artificially developed, it is clearly based on an apparently inherent ability of the mind to remember places we visit. Luria's wondrous S. used this technique in remembering his lists.
When S. read through a long series of words each word would elicit a graphic image. And since the series was fairly long, he had to find some way of distributing these images of his in a mental row or sequence. Most often (and this habit persisted throughout his life), he would "distribute" them along some roadway or street he had visualized in his mind.(24)
When he later became a stage mnemonist, and daily had to remember thousands of words and numbers to satisfy his audience, he tidied up this method a bit. "The device he developed was a shorthand system for his images."(25) Before, when he simply relied on his incredible visual imagery, the images he remembered were incredibly rich and varied, filled with every detail imaginable. Now he made the images cruder. "I just try to single out the details I'll need to remember a word."(26) It's easy to see here how the natural methods of memory begin to blend with the artificial methods.
1. Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes, the Memorious", in Ficciones (English edition, New York: Grove Press, 1962), p. 112.
2. "Funes, the Memorious", pp. 113-114.
3. "Funes, the Memorious", p. 109.
4. "Funes, the Memorious", p. 112.
5. C. G. Jung. "Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies". In Collected Works, Volume 10: Civilization in Transition, 2nd Edition. Princeton, Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series, 1970.
6. Dennis Stillings, editor. Archaeus, Vol. 5, 1989.
7. A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory (English translation, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1968).
8. The Mind of a Mnemonist, p. 8.
9. Actually S. V. Shereshevski. See Richard E. Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes (New York: Putnam, 1993), p. 32.
10. The Mind of a Mnemonist, p. 9.
11. The Mind of a Mnemonist, p. 11.
12. The Mind of a Mnemonist, p. 27.
13. The Man Who Tasted Shapes, p. 5.
14. The Man Who Tasted Shapes, p. 23.
15. The Man Who Tasted Shapes, p. 167.
16. The Mind of a Mnemonist, p. 67.
17. "Funes, the Memorious", p. 115.
18. The Mind of a Mnemonist, p. 146.
19. mnemonic means relating to, assisting, or designed to assist the memory.
20. See Al Baker, Magical Ways and Means, 2nd edition (Minneapolis: Carl Waring Jones, Publisher of Magic, 1946), pp. 96-98. Baker uses a different association between the letters and numbers than I have presented here.
21. Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 1.
22. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 2.
23. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, p. 9.
24. The Mind of a Mnemonist, pp. 31-2.
25. The Mind of a Mnemonist, p. 42.
