EP 038 Lynne Kelly on The Memory Code

Lynne Kelly is a teacher, science writer and anthropologist of oral and pre-literate cultures. Her most recent book is The Memory Code, which deals with the use of memory techniques including rituals, songs, dances, portable devices, and large-scale geographic features and built structures as memory aids.

She has conducted a series of experiments to replicate memory techniques from the classical memory palace to handheld memory devices such as the Lukasa to rituals and storytelling. Today, we talk about how several early and modern cultures have used these memory techniques, why Stonehenge and Chaco Canyon may have been used as memory palaces, and why they were almost certainly centers for an oral culture's knowledge economy.

As with our other conversations with anthropologists, it's helpful to remember the following guidelines:

1. Do not confuse industrial technological advancement with intelligence. "Primitive" people, whether distant from you in space or time, were and are at least as smart as you. The less technology they had at hand, the more this is true. Fools die when times are hard, or as Lynne Kelly's colleague Nungarrayi said to her, "The elders are pragmatic old buggers. If they weren't, we wouldn't have survived."
2. Most often, they are observationally correct even when they are theoretically wrong. We can identify the exact species of animals in cave paintings despite the fact that the artist didn't have a grip on modern biology. Just as any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic, so does any technology sufficiently different from our own.
3. People of almost all cultures have been given to humor, hoaxes, tall tales, and flimflammery. Sometimes, when they tell you (or each other) something, they're just having a laugh. Sometimes, they're both having a laugh and expressing something serious.

Photo credit: Abigail Heitbaum

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Want to hear more like this?
More on memory palace techniques with Ed Cooke or Anthony Metivier. More on pre-literate cultures and magical technologies with Gordon White.

Show Notes and Links

Lynne Kelly's website

Songlines

Luba people, Lukasa

Alexander Arguelles, Shadowing language learning technique.

Grid Cells, Hippocampal & Cortical Spatial Maps

Aphonso Ortiz

Richard I. Ford Color of Survival

Nungarrayi- "The elders are pragmatic old buggers. If they weren't, we wouldn't have survived."

Stonehenge, Durrington Walls

Roz Cleal

Chaco Canyon

Poverty Point Culture