G'morning David, 

 ->  DW> I'm not afraid of being dead. I was dead for billions of years before
 ->  DW> my birth, and nothing awful happened to me during that time.
 -> Nice one ... I apologise in advance for stealing it....
 DW> I stole it from my friend Ken Tucker (who sometimes contributes to the
 DW> science-based Usenet newsgroups). I have no idea where he got it from.

These things often keep on going further and further back...

I teach a technique to adult classes here for memorising lists and 
inventories that is usually called "the method of locii" and 
involves having a well-rehearsed mental walk through a real or 
imagined house, garden or suchlike.   Faced with a new list to 
remember,  you `post' the first one on the hall-table, the second 
in the umbrella stand, the third on the coat-hangers and so on.

It works well when practised for most people,  and has been 
tracked back through history to the early travelling story-tellers 
who became Homer or Beowulf;  the latest Scientific American Mind 
(vol 16,2,`05 or www.sciammind.co) has a neat article that 
identifies an early accidental proponent named Simonides the Poet, 
circa 500 BC in Greece.

Seems that Simonides got up from a major feast and left the hall 
just moments before the expansive ceiling fell, crushing all the 
remaining guests in their seats.  When workers finally uncovered 
the rubble,  the victims were so horribly disfigured that 
identification was impossible.

The poet came to the rescue by walking mentally alongside the long 
table, reconstructing which guest sat where to name each deseased.

400 years later, Cicero related the story in his own texts on 
learning and memory ... and New Scientist (#2501 for 31-5-05) 
included the same technique in the memory-improving section of its 
`11 Steps to a Better Brain'

And of course,  the latest star in personal improvement will offer 
`just the latest fMRI-proven memory technique' in his or her 
totally-new self-improvement book/course/seminar...

In some things, the further you advance, the behinder you started.

:-)
 
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