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Eran Katz
WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK? ANCIENT MEMORY TECHNIQUES FOR REMEMBERING PRACTICALLY ANYTHING New York. Three Rivers Press. 2010. 256 pp. Paperback ISBN-10: 0307591972 reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 11/20/2010 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Probably. 3.5 stars, rounded up to four. review: If I remember correctly, I last studied the history of memorizing techniques (mnemonics) more than 30 years ago. My source was THE MEMORY PALACE OF MATTEO RICCI by Jonathan D. Spence. What stays with me from that study of a pioneering Italian Jesuit who translated Seneca and the Gospels into Chinese in 16th and 17th Century China is how Renaissance scholars revived ancient techniques used by Greeks and Romans. Ricci learned Chinese especially through the "memory palace" way or "method of loci" associated with the ancient Greek poet Simonides. Hereby key ideas from a speech to be given or a list of irregular verbs to be memorized are first vividly attended to, then hung on pegs on walls of a fantasized palace and imaginatively one to another linked through association of ideas and images. Crediting ancient Jewish writers with even older techniques than the Greeks and Romans, author Eran Katz romps down the millennia with proven ways to memorize people's names and faces, credit card and telephone numbers and long strings of specific information. The techniques used regularly involve paying close attention to the initial stimulus (e. g., a person you meet at a cocktail party), associating the name or face with some mnemonic aid or other, using very vivid images and then practicing, practicing, practicing. Memory techniques are embedded by Katz in wider contexts such as how to learn foreign languages, how to prepare for examinations on complex subject and how to avoid last minute cramming. Each of us has our own green zones for learning: use them. Do not study when fatigued. Like a surfer riding a wave, if you are in your "zone," learning effortlessly and at a great pace, then by all means stay atop that wave. You will learn far more and far faster when being carried pleasantly along by positive inner energy. Take breaks. The beauty of the Jewish Sabbath is that it requires absolute periodic "rest" from mundane chores. Our brains and our memories need rest at least as much as they need exercise. For old hands at mnemonics, this is a two-star book. For novices pondering memory techniques for this first time, this approaches or exceeds four stars in value. My final rating: far better than average for beginners. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/366205756.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 11/21/2010 name of review: "We hardly notice anything anymore" rating: * * * * review: The rather good book with a rather silly title: WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK? has a more lucid subtitle: ANCIENT MEMORY TECHNIQUES FOR REMEMBERING PRACTICALLY ANYTHING. It is by Israeli author Eran Katz, who makes a living by writing and lecturing on memory and intelligence. We are invited to ask ourselves whether Noah remembered where he had parked the ark. In Chapter 23, the book's last, we are enlightened: either Noah did not remember or if he did remember (Mount Ararat), so what? It wasn't important. "In truth, Noah didn't
really need the ark after the flood was over, so he didn't need to
remember where he parked it. The point being, it's not necessary to
remember everything."
Eran Katz in a good-humored, incessantly bantering tone and via a text loaded with Jewish humor, carries us on a romp through the still evolving history of mnemonics (memory techniques) and describes in considerable, helpful detail "tricks" to help us remember names and faces, historical dates, calendar appointments, long string of numbers and more. Katz's most basic tip is to notice, really notice, a stimulus when it reaches your brain. For instance, at a cocktail party you meet a short little German named Pope Benedict XVI. You exchange names and views. You probably need no memory shortcuts to remember that encounter. Why? Because you NOTICED! And yet we use only ten percent of our memory capacity. We forget where he laid our keys. We can't remember our nephew's phone number. Why? Argues Eran Katz: "maybe
it's because ... we're overwhelmed with information, but the disturbing
fact is that our collective level of attention and concentration has
radically decreased in the past twenty years. We hardly notice
anything anymore. ... Take Burger King's (logo), for example. How many
times have you seen that logo? Yet are you able to draw it? ... What
about Starbucks, 7-Eleven and Pizza Hut? Can you recall their logos in
detail?" (Ch 4)
What we notice, really notice, the first time: that we remember. What comes to us while we are tired or distracted or if we consider it dull or unimportant, we don't notice, or notice poorly. So we forget. To remember these stimuli we need help: for instance, ancient Greek and Roman "memory palaces" or "method of loci." Or ancient Hebrew gemetria (relating numbers to letters). I am currently using a modern updating of gemetria, very well described at length by the author in Chapter 11. As he recommends, I began slowly. I have finally memorized a credit card number. To do that, I related the numbers to letters as formalized by a German monk, Gregor von Feinaigle, in 1811. 0, for instance, is a Z (as in zero) or an S. By golly, it works! I personally would prefer a book less smart alecky and cutesy, with fewer jokes translated from Yiddish. But I put up with the presumably popular silliness for the author's really good substance. The book is worth a quick read by you, followed by selective trials of recommended "tricks." It is all about noticing, associating sense impressions with words and numbers, making vivid imaginative linkages and putting what you want or need to remember in mental filing cabinets of your own design. Many of these techniques were known to Roman orators, including Cicero, and were revived in the Italian Renaissance. They were then used by Father Matteo Ricci and other pioneering Jesuit astronomers at the Chinese Imperial Court in Peking to master the Chinese language. Enjoy! -OOO- http://www.lunch.com/EditReview?id=1664268 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 11/21/2010 title of review: Why we can't remember: "We hear, but we do not listen." rating: * * * * review: Posted 11/21/2010: -- Question: what is not worth remembering about Eran Katz's book of 2010, WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK? -- Answers: (a) its silly title; (b) its
jokes.
-- Question: and what should we remember? -- Answers: (a) its lucid, accurate
subtitle, ANCIENT MEMORY TECHNIQUES FOR REMEMBERING PRACTICALLY
EVERYTHING; (b) its pithy substance; (c) the memory techniques
described, especially "memory palace" and gemetria.
Students already familiar with mnemonics will find nothing new in this book except some few of its many jokes. But for people looking for the first time into memorizing techniques, this could be the book for you. The history of memory techniques is spread across a couple of chapters. It includes work done by ancient Hebrews, Greeks and Romans as well as modern Europeans. There are omissions (not specifically crediting Renaissance Italy with the excited rediscovery of ancient Latin techniques such as "memory palace" and "method of loci" that Katz flags) and minor errors (e. g., in comparative dating of lives of Caesar and Cicero). But a good start for the novice. Author Katz's basic thesis is that we have either never learned to pay selective attention to phenomena as they reach our consciousness through our senses or we have forgotten how to pay attention. Certainly, he asserts, people today notice less well than they did 20 years ago. Why? "The
basic problem with memory is lack of attention. We'll never be able to
remember something if we don't pay attention to it to begin with. We
hear, but we do not listen. We see, but we do not observe. In other
words, we focus on a few things that catch our interest and neglect the
total picture" (Ch. 4).
Before you learn techniques ancient and new to improve your ability to memorize things, you have to want to remember. You have to believe it is possible. You have to imagine yourself (and other people real or fictional) doing it. That is why, as step one, I personaly recommend that you read Kipling's KIM. As part of his training to be a spy in British India in "the great game" with Tsarist Russia, young Kimball (Kim) O'Hara learns to take in and remember at a glance the contents of a tray or even an entire room. His method is associative, spatial, vivid and requires tutoring, practice, and repetitive drilling. All these points are nicely emphasized in Katz's WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK? You will find Sherlock Holmes noticing and remembering objects in any of the tales about him written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And Doyle absorbed the importance of accurately noticing details and remembering them as part of patient diagnosis. This he did as a medical student in Edinburgh under the famous Doctor Joseph Bell. Feats of memory (e.g. learning Chinese so well in the early 1600s as to be able to translate Seneca into it and then write original cross-cultural works of Christian apologetics) are key to the mission of famed Italian Jesuit linguist Father Matteo Ricci as recorded in Jonathan Spence's biography. The technique known as "memory palace" or "method of loci" is spelled out in Katz's book. As are other techniques for remembering faces, names of persons, your credit card number and much else in Eran Katz's useful little tome. Skim WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK? once through lightly. Then go back and try out selective techniques for remembering your niece's email address or your mother-in-law's phone number. They work. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Howard Engel - MR DOYLE AND DR. BELL -- Rudyard Kipling - KIM -- Jonathan Spence - THE MEMORY PALACE OF MATTEO RICCI http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review.aspx?reviewid=1482481 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 11/21/2010 title of review: Keeping the Sabbath can improve your memory rating: * * * * review: After about ten pages into Eran Katz's WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK? I was ready to stop throwing bad time after good and quit reading. For I disliked the Delphically obscure title (still do) and I found the tone of the writing smart alecky and the jokes corny. But I kept doggedly reading carefully to the end, as I usually do, with notes on eight 3" X 5" cards. And by then I was glad I had stayed the course. Only the promise implicit in the subtitle ANCIENT MEMORY TECHNIQUES FOR REMEMBERING PRACTICALLY ANYTHING had kept me at it. I took it that Katz and I had made a psychological contract: if I read to the end, he would have taught me something worth remembering. Once upon a time, say thirty years ago, I probably had a gentleman's knowledge of 3/4 of the memory techniques described by Eran Katz. In particular, I have never forgotten one book, Jonathan Spence's THE MEMORY PALACE OF MATTEO RICCI, an Jesuit who in the early 1600s learned Chinese using an ancient mnemonic system. That technique was and still is called either "memory palace" or "the method of loci." It was very popular among Roman orators and grammarians, especially Cicero and Quintilian, and was rediscovered during the Renaissance in Italy and became something of a scholarly craze. Like so many of the dozen or so techniques laid out in WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK?, the memory palace that you build with your imagination is based on associations of ideas, images, faces, names, numbers, dates, etc. Say that you are learning to write Chinese ideograms, such as that for mountain (shan in Mandarin), a character that imitates three peaks of a chain. You first pay close attention to its shape and meaning. Then you file it away. And when needed later you retrieve the Chinese character for mountain. The memory palace is a spatial filing cabinet that you create in your brain, with rooms, fixtures and layouts on which you "hang" characters like shan/mountain or numbers of your credit cards, driver's license, social security ID, etc. Another method described by Katz is gematria, invented by ancient Jewish scholars. It has been adapted in recent centuries by Europeans and relates numbers you want to memorize (e.g., your girl friend's telephone number) to a number of consonants that cover digits from zero through nine. I found that this worked well for me with a credit card number and I plan to keep working to master modern gematria to help my ageing noodle remember things better. In current European gematria, zero is represented by S or Z (for zero?), five by L (Latin for 50), etc. You hear or say a four digit number, turn it into two pairs of mandatory gematria consonants plus vowels of your own choosing. For instance, I can turn 54 into LuRe. I can imagine the number 54 stamped on a red and green fishing lure of enormous proportions. And if I do things write I might associate all such numbers and letters and images into a mental filing cabinet holding Pi to the 30th decimal. Katz also tells you how to remember to turn off the kitchen stove every day before you leave for work and how to remember the people likely to show up at your 30th high school reunion. And he gives lots of blank pages or pages with photos for you to practice on. The author embeds his memory palaces, gematrias, acronyms, reverse acronyms, etc. in a broader philosophy of how to learn, how to pass examinations, how to get through college without cramming and on and on. Like surfers catching a wave, we should stay with a study session while we are in our green zone, brimming with energy when learning is easy. When we tire, when the red light goes on, quit. At that point cramming becomes counterproductive, Katz asserts. God did Jews a favor
by teaching them to keep the Sabbath holy. One day in seven it does
anyone's memory and learning processes good to break obsession with
things of this world and do something utterly different. Then return
refreshed to your daily grind! "You
might have less time to study, but the efficiency of your learning will
be doubled" (Ch. 14).
Eran Katz says that you should ignore features of your memory that are already strong. Rejoice in them. Instead, learn, absorb, be coached, study and drill in techniques to overcome your weaknesses, say, remembering people's names or the core ideas of a textbook you are going to be examined on. This is a wise little book. I could have done without the corn and the hoke. But they are a price I willingly paid. -OOO- tags: marcus fabius quintilianus, quintilian, memory palace, method of loci, gemetria, mnemonics http://www.amazon.com/Where-Did-Noah-Park-Ark/product-reviews/030759 1972/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_4?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy =addFourStar =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 11/21/2010 Review Title: How to remember practically anything Product Rating: * * * * PROS: History of memory-strengthening techniques. A score of them well described. Ample exercises. CONS: Awful jokes. Cutesy, smartsy writing style. Curious inattention to Renaissance writers. A minor dating mistake. BOTTOM LINE: Pay the price for lame jokes and cute writing. Your reward is confidence that techniques exist to strengthen your memory prodigiously. Learn them, repeat them, drill them. And remember! aohcapablanca's Full Review: Every month amazon.com's VINE program sends me a list of books to choose from to review. A couple of weeks ago, not having seen anything listed that prima facie turned me on, I passed the slim offerings to my wife Mary. Instantly she browbeat me into ordering Eran Katz's book of 2010, WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK? Neither of us liked or could make sense of that title. But Mary, unconsciously using memory aid "la Technique Bonaparte," imagined, stamped on my forehead, Eran Katz's subtitle, ANCIENT MEMORY TECHNIQUES FOR REMEMBERING PRACTICALLY ANYTHING. I readily admit that I have 75 years behind me of not remembering most people's names. Mary, by contrast, has a few years fewer remembering just about everyone. She therefore finds it baffling that I can recite verses and sing songs by the hour and know the names of dogs -- but not those of their owners. So I went ahead and read WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK? I filled eight 3" by 5" cards with my jottings. By page 30 (at the latest) I was ready to quit. The jokes (apparently translations from the Yiddish) were lame. Corn and hoke dripped from every paragraph. But then that subtitle kept swimming into my imagination: ANCIENT MEMORY TECHNIQUES FOR REMEMBERING PRACTICALLY ANYTHING. By the time I had finished, I knew that I had to do more than simply read once through lightly Katz's little book as a detached ho-hum observer. I had to go back and start over, trying out techniques with names like memory palace, method of loci, reverse acronyms and nicknames technique. The author said that I should ignore my strengths (verses, song snatches, historical dates) and focus on weaknesses (people's names, how I mislay my keys, my credit card numbers, and on and on). I should start with what is easy, be patient with myself and believe, believe BELIEVE that I can remember whatever it is my wife wants me to remember. --(1) Okay, let's look first at the method of "nicknames" (Ch. 19). Former President George W. Bush is good at this, said Eran Katz. For example, consider his nicknames "Condi" Rice and "Hogan" (for John McCain). Hey, I was a master of nicknaming back in a Jesuit high school in Shreveport. And sure enough, I still recall with no slightest difficulty the complete real names of people I dubbed "Yo-Yo Ears" or "Hartwell of the Death Squad" or another friend dubbed by a third friend, "Four Eyes, the Fish Faced Aborigine," regularly abbreviated to Fo'EyesSkriginee." I just need to dust that old skill off and start nicknaming current neighbors "Pickett beyond the thicket" or, with apologies to Hans Christian Andersen, "Betty Thumbelina." -- (2) On to "la Technique Bonaparte," also presented in Ch. 19. The great Napoleon used to imagine his many generals and marshals with their names written on their foreheads. I will try, Mary, really I shall! -- (3) I was already familiar with the famous Greco-Roman "memory palace." It had been re-discovered by Italians during the Renaissance and used by Jesuits in the early 1600s to master Mandarin Chinese. I am currently applying memory palace in connection with the next technique described below to learn the numbers of my driver's license, credit card and my children's telephone numbers. Katz tackles memory palace in detail as early as Ch. 8. -- (4) Ch. 11 is entitled "How to Remember Any Number, Any Time." Several tips are given. What I am currently using, however, in combination with "memory palace," is an ancient Hebrew technique called gematria. Gematria has been Europeanized in recent centuries. Every number from 0 through 9 has been assigned a letter or a pair of related letters. Thus 0 is Z or S, 1 is D, T or TH, 4 is R, 5 is L (Latin for 50) and so on. If you try to remember a combination like 5401, here is how you might proceed: 54 =L + R. You then pick a vowel or two to create a word. Perhaps L u R e. You then imagine a fishing lure, perhaps misshapen, huge and flashing neon lights (exaggerations and monsters are easiy remembered). If you are playing Napoleon, you make yourself see 54 written on that lure's surface. You then store this in your memory palace (I am building my current memory palace room by room around my bachelor apartment in Saigon when I was with the U.S. embassy during the late war). Then proceed to 01. Try your own mnemonic based on what I have suggested. Then link the four digits via pegs in your memory palace. And so it goes. Katz presents perhaps a score of distinct mnemonic techniques like the four I have mentioned. If one works for you, go for it! Each is built around focusing strongly on whatever sense impression you want not to forget, then mentally filing it away, vividly imagined and linked with other objects, in such wise that you can surely retrieve it when you need it and other subsidiary "tricks." Eran Katz, an Israeli, embeds his many techniques in a series of mini-essays about how to learn, how not to waste time cramming for exams and how to be an effective public speaker. Good stuff. Somewhere in this book there is something for you. Perhaps it is how to remember the play of cards so far in a hand of bridge or poker. Perhaps the elements of the atomic weights table or how many points worth of foods Weight Watchers will let you consume the rest of this week. Thank you, Mary, for inducing me to take up amazon/vine's offer to read and review WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK? Oh, by the way, where did the patriarch park that legendary vessel? Read Chapter 23 and find out. Maybe he remembered. Maybe he didn't. If Noah forgot the ark, it was because he didn't need to remember. Forgetting the ark had no pragmatic consequences. Once he disembarked, Noah had no more use for that boat. Moral: "... it's not necessary to remember everything." -OOO- Recommended: YES http://www.epinions.com/content_531848400516 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= file: katz_noah http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/katz_noah.html |