![]() After a few days, the images from the speech would fade from memory, but the more highly learned loci could be used to memorize a new speech. ![]() While making his speech, the orator thought of each location in turn and used the image seen in his mind’s eye as the prompt for the next part of his address. ![]() The spear might be imaged as penetrating the tenth locus, a door. Third, the image created for each topic was combined with the image of its corresponding location. Second, some object was thought of to represent each important part of the oration, such as a spear to represent the tenth topic, war. Their procedure was as follows: First, a series of locations (loci), such as those in a public building, were memorized. It became so much a part of the study of rhetoric that the most venerable of the Roman orators used the method of loci for memorizing their speeches. Such was the discovery of the method of loci (or locations). Simonides, however, remembered the places they had been sitting and so was able to identify the dead. When the rubble was cleared away, the victims were found to be so mangled that their own families could not identify them. Tales of this sort were commonplace in Greek literature, but this one has an unexpected moral. Castor and Pollux, traditionally imaged as two young men, had indeed paid their half of the fee. When Simonides went to see them, there was no one there - but in his absence the banquet hall collapsed behind him, killing the impious nobleman and all the dinner guests as well. Shortly thereafter, a message was brought to the poet that two young men had come to the door of the house and wished to speak to him. The host, however, objected to this diversion of the flattery, deducted half of Simonides’ fee, and told the poet he could seek the rest from the gods he had praised. In the fashion of the time, the poet began with a few lines in praise of divinities - in this case, Castor and Pollux - before going on to the serious business of talking about his host. Simonides, as the tale has it, was hired to recite an ode at a nobleman’s banquet. The historical development of mnemonics and mnemonic devices begins with a poet named Simonides of Ceos in the fifth century B.C. Defined in narrow terms - and what is usually meant by the word - a mnemonic is a specific reconstruction of target content intended to tie new information more closely to the learner’s existing knowledge base and, therefore, facilitate retrieval. Defined in broad terms, a mnemonic is a device, procedure, or operation that is used to improve memory.
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