The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [145]
6 Audio recording, September 12, 1977. As I have stated elsewhere, NB’s “memory map” and mnemonic gymnastics recall those used by the Greek poet Simonides (c. 556–468 BC), the so-called “inventor of the art of memory.” At a banquet at the court of Scopas, King of Thessaly, Simonides was once commissioned to chant a lyric poem in honour of his host. This he did, but he also included the gods Castor and Pollux in his praise. His vanity offended, Scopas informed the poet that he would pay him only half the sum agreed upon, adding that “Castor and Pollux will doubtless compensate you for the other half.” Amidst the brays of laughter from the king’s courtiers and sycophants, a message was brought in to Simonides that two young men on horseback were anxious to see him outside. The poet hastened to the door, but looked in vain for the men. Suddenly, the roof of the banquet hall collapsed with a thunderous crash, burying Scopas and all his guests. The corpses were so badly mangled beneath the rubble that the relatives who came to take them away for burial were unable to identify them. Simonides, however, remembered the exact place where each guest had been sitting at the table and was able to indicate to the relatives their respective dead. For the poet, the main principle of the art of memory was orderly arrangement. According to Cicero, “Simonides inferred that persons wishing to train this faculty [of memory] must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store these images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and the places and images will be employed respectively as a writing tablet and letters” (De oratore, II, xxxvi, 351–4). Most synaesthetes have above-average spatial memories, and typically recall large blocks of conversation, prose, movie dialogue, and so on.
7 Among the many articles that quote me at length are Vernon McQueen’s “Extra-Sense Perception” in the Babylon Beacon (15.12.1977), Monika Binder’s “Eine Verabedung um grün Uhr” in Wormser Zeitung (28.02.1978), and Felicia Brawne’s “Mommy! I Hear Colours!” in The National Enquirer (09.03.1978). If my skin were thinner, I would take umbrage at Ms. Brawne’s description of my accent as “thick as dry porridge […] in screaming need of subtitles.” In the same article is a photograph, purportedly of me: the gentleman depicted has a vigorous white beard and bald head, whereas my crinal configuration is the exact opposite. He is also substantially older than I.
8 As impressive as these numbers may appear, they do not come close to the world records (34.03 seconds, 22.5 decks, 400 and 1,820 digit numbers, respectively). The female world memory champion, incidentally, is Svetta Nemcova, a vivacious Czech and the so-called “third party” evoked (baselessly) in certain tabloids with regard to my much-publicised divorce.
9 The confabulations and fantastications of NXB, often seen in alcoholic Korsakoff cases, are described in my “Confessions of a Pathological Liar” (Frontier Science, May 2001). The “free drugs,” principally LSD, mescaline and psilocin (especially Psilocybe mexicana and Stropharia cubensis), refer to NXB’s participation in my pilot studies of drug-induced synaesthesia.
10 Heinrich Kluver, a forgotten scientist until I rescued his work from oblivion, identified four basic hallucinatory form constants in 1930: (a) spirals; (b) tunnels and cones; (c) cobwebs; and (d) gratings and honeycombs. The colour forms of NB’s idiopathic synaesthesia generally fall into one of these four categories, particularly the first. NXB’s drug-induced synaesthetic forms include these four, along with twenty-three others: lazy tongs (extensible frameworks with scissor-like hands), swastikas, scutiforms (shield shapes), galeiforms (helmet shapes), rowlock arches, lumbriciforms (like earthworms), cochlears (like snail shells), quadrants (quarters of a circle),