Memory and improvisation

In his celebrated study The Mind of a Mnemonist, the Russian psychologist A. R. Luria tries to explain the means by which a Jewish journalist managed to astound European audiences in the 1930s by memorizing vast swatches of text, or series of numbers. Onstage, he would ask the audience to generate a series of words, which he would then recite, methodically, back to them. Hoping to stump him, audience members would sometimes bring sadistically nonsensical or difficult fragments - or, in one case, the first quatrain of Dante's Divine Comedy - in its original Italian. And yet S., the mnemonist, correctly repeated the medieval Italian - even though he knew no Italian at all.

How did he do it? According to Luria, he asked that the words be read clearly, with pauses between them; as they were read, he quickly developed a mental picture that incorporated details that were predicated on the evolving passage. These could vary widely, but in the case of the Divine Comedy, they happened to be, initially, musical. Let's listen in, as the mnemonist explains:

[First lie]
(Nel) - I was paying my membership dues when there, in the corridor, I caught site of the ballerina Nel'skaya.
(mezzo) - I myself am a violinist; what I do is to set up an image of a man, together with Nel'skaya, who is playing the violin.

And so on. But the kicker? He was still able to remember this image, and to recite the text correctly in full, fifteen years after initially memorizing it.

Over the past few years, I too have been forced to do some rather involved memorizing - albeit of a much more modest nature. Several of Cleo's puzzles depict gathered Disney princesses: Belle, Jasmine, Snow White, and so on. Cleo, of course, knows each on intimately by now. But her dad - not so much. Sure, I can identify Snow White, and I know Belle through her fiery hair? But Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty? I tended to get their generic beauty confused, until I finally set my mind to it: Cinderella wears blue, and Sleeping Beauty pink. Behold: the mnemonist at work.

I'm kidding, of course; learning two minor details is hardly a feat. But I am struck, in thinking about it, at how Cleo's sense of memory can work much more unconsciously than mine. I set my mind to it, and learn the colors of the dresses. Cleo, meanwhile, seems to relate more abstractly to her memories. Often, when we return to a site that we haven't visited for a few weeks or months, she'll ask to do exactly what we did when we were last there. At the Towson Barnes & Noble, we sit on the floor, against the south wall, and read. Golden West is the restaurant at which each meal ends with a York peppermint patty. And so on: it's not quite a conscious process, but rather a re-enactment of deeply embedded memories.

That said, though, it's not as though each of her steps is pre-ordained. Far from it. And as a demonstration of that assertion, I offer the video above. Cleo has sat at pianos dozens of times, and generally tries to bang out a series of notes as loudly and as quickly as possible. In a lounge at Johns Hopkins last week, though, she tried something new, something unremembered, something improvised. And I like, I have to say, the result.