A chat with Professor Lynne Kelly
Lynne Kelly is an Australian writer, researcher and educator, who has delved into the study of primary orality, as well as the mnemonic memory devices used by ancient and modern oral cultures from around the world. She has written many well known books including ‘Memory Craft’, ‘Songlines’ and ‘The Memory Code’, and has written extensively about her theory on the purpose of Stonehenge. Lynne has a passion for uncovering the little known mysteries of information transfer in ancient and indigenous societies and is playing a central role in working with Indigenous Australians to rediscover and bring back the lost art of memory tools. Lynne also suffers from Aphantasia and struggled with memory when she was younger — leading her on the quest she has embarked upon.
For someone who knows little about memory tools, what is the best way to apply these methods to studying? What is the best way to get started?
Without doubt, the best place to start is with a memory palace. They suit anything which you can put in some kind of order, and then want to add more and more information to any of the locations. A memory palace is just a path you can walk from one location to the next and each of them become special, sacred. So you might walk from the front door to the kitchen table to the stove to the window to the bookcase to the…each of them are a location.
Let's say you wanted to do the parts of the brain, which I don't know too much about other than the hippocampus. You need those parts of the brain in some order. You might choose alphabetical order or you might choose some kind of order which reflects their position in the physical brain. Or you might have some other order that you know about.
I would allocate one room in your house, or wherever you spend most time, to each of those sections. Take each of the parts in the forebrain, for example, and allocate a location within the first room to it. Make some kind of imaginary pun or joke or image to associate the two things. For example, if you were in the kitchen and you were doing temporal lobe then you could associate it with something that gets hot - temperature - such as the stove (even though temporal means time). You then start imagining all the things that you want to associate with the temporal lobe with the stove. Your brain will automatically create a story, especially if you add a character to the whole thing. Some kind of brainy person or some kind of kid genius or really dumb dude or, even better, someone with a personality that is somehow associated with the temporal lobe when it functions particularly well or particularly badly. Don't worry about being polite. It's all just happening in your mind.
Just making up that story will force you to concentrate on the term and some kind of information about the temporal lobe. You are doing what's called a mode shift. If you just write things down you're not forcing the brain to do things differently with the same information and that is less effective. Even though it seems like more work, you will learn faster and have more fun doing so. The wilder your stories and more vivid your character, the better you will retain it.
Can these processes be used for things that aren't primarily memory based (eg. maths)?
Yes, but that needs you to be a little more familiar with these methods. What you do is give characters to each of the abstract terms, X or Y or Z or whatever. The formula and their interactions become a story. The way for remembering anything numeric is to create a character for each of the numbers, or as most people like me do, for the first 100 numbers, 00 to 99.
That will help you with formulae and the properties of numbers such as pi and e and other constants, say. You can use it for geometric properties and so on. But a lot of mathematics is logic and, for me, a glorious language. I don't think memory methods are as important in mathematics or physics, which is the reason they were the only subjects I was any good at. I know a lot of IT specialists use memory techniques to remember commands and command structures. But at this stage, you need to get used to the methods, and I would stick to something more memory based initially.
How could an understanding of this help Indigenous Australian culture be revived and possibly even help reduce the inequalities we see in Australian society?
This constitutes most of my work at the moment, especially since the publication of Songlines with my Aboriginal co-author, Margo Neale. It is very hard to revive an oral culture if the songs and stories are lost, and it's very close to being that way for those that are still active. Some have been lost completely now. This is an urgent issue. Scientists and geographers and others are just discovering the depth of knowledge that we can draw on for contemporary science that is stored in indigenous oral tradition. A number of authors are writing about this, such as Patrick Nunn and Duane Hamacher, and many others.
My personal mission is to introduce these memory techniques in schools and universities. If we can do that and show people that we have something to learn from indigenous cultures, not just learn about them, then people will start to respect them more. Plus aboriginal cultures are telling me that the youth are not interested in the old ways, because they consider everything western, especially American, as much better. Teaching these memory methods to people will show indigenous youth that they have something very very special that the rest of us need. My hope is that by seeing the intellectual component of indigenous cultures people will start to respect them much more. Everything we see and hear tends to be either political or fairly mundane things about hunting and simple stuff, because people do not talk about the complex knowledge systems. They are too far away from things that we are familiar with. My goal in life is to get people to be aware of those knowledge systems because, my indigenous colleagues tell me, I have found the language to bridge what indigenous people have been trying to tell us for decades, if not centuries, and I am part of the movement forcing Western cultures to take note. I would love to leave a legacy like that.
It is respect for intellectual capacity that will make people see that indigenous cultures are every bit as intellectual as western culture, they just store information totally differently. But science and philosophy and ethics and law and all the other things we admire are all there in oral cultures.
You can find Lynne’s books at any local book retailer.
Thank you Lynne!
Disclaimer: Parts of the transcript have been edited slightly for reading ease