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| From Technology Review, January 1996 Long Live Roy G. Biv . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan A FRIEND OF Isaac Asimov's once challenged the prolific author to think up a science-fiction story on the spot. Spying the friend's office calculator—it was the mechanical kind, this being 1958—Asimov conceived the scariest techno-nightmare he could dream up on short notice. Suppose people centuries from now were to grow so dependent on computers that they forgot how to do arithmetic. In the story—later published as "The Feeling of Power"—the lowly technician who rediscovers the lost art is lionized by the military. He dazzles the world's leaders with feats like multiplying 9 and 7 to get 63. ("Congressman Brant lifted his eyebrows. 'Is that right?' ") The remarkable thing, of course, is not that a congressional representative mightn't know 9 times 7, but that Asimov thought it necessary to set the story a thousand years in the future. A generation or so into the digital age, there are indications that arithmetic as a basic mental skill—as a dependable and ingrained tool for apprehending the universe, the world of commerce, and our own fingers and toes—may be on the way out. The decision to allow calculators in SAT exams as of 1995 may be the most visible sign of this trend. In terms any schoolchild can understand, it proclaims that the ability to manipulate figures, either in one's head or with the aid of a pencil, will not be rewarded on Judgment Day. In some school districts, pupils no longer slave to learn times tables at all, saving their energy for "mastery of concepts" instead. Precisely what concepts a person can master without learning a few basic facts will no doubt be revealed in the fullness of time. But one thing seems clear even now: the inroads being made into basic arithmetic skills are in part inroads into the human memory, the remarkable carbon-based mechanism that stores and recalls information like "9 times 7 equals 63." With the passing of the times tables, so passes one of the last endeavors in which people routinely commit a large body of data to memory. The educational technique of rote memorization has, of course, been steadily going out of fashion. In 1940, George Katona, an influential psychologist at the New School for Social Research in New York City, concluded that "memorizing is not the prototype of learning." His alternative prototype—"understanding organized wholes"—has gained ascendancy in America's classrooms, squeezing out the gloomy march of monarchs and dates and endless lists of irregular verbs. So-called generative learning, the ability to derive facts from an understanding of principles and concepts, seems like a laudable goal for education. Maybe an unassailable goal. But as educators dump out the tepid bathwater of rote learning, one wonders if there is not somewhere, amid the froth of state capitals and half-understood chemical formulas, a baby. For example, is it not possible that some of the material joylessly committed to memory in youth may prove a comfort in old age, if not sooner? Anyone who enjoyed the crusty barrister on the PBS series "Rumpole of the Bailey" surely appreciates the ability to fling just the right Shakespearean passage at a deserving target. Is it not also possible that the very act of memorizing helps people to develop retention skills that will prove useful later in life? THE ART OF MEMORIZATION has been honed and codified through the ages. Roman orators, for example, memorized lengthy speeches according to a strategy known as locus et res (place and thing). They would invent vivid images to represent the topics on which they planned to speak and would mentally plant those icons in different parts of a familiar dwelling. The idea of raising taxes for a new statue of Neptune might appear in the mind's eye as a trident standing in the foyer. The need to quell uprisings in Gaul might find form as a mob of angry peasants in the hallway. While speaking, the orator would simply walk through his imaginary landscape, picking up visual reminders along the way. As today's self-help books on improving memory are quick to point out, similar techniques can be used for remembering grocery lists, names and faces, and other everyday facts. Medieval scholars devised a huge array of useful mnemonics. Guido D'Arezzo, an eleventh-century Italian monk, is credited with inventing the musical system known as solfeggio, in which each note of the scale is represented by a different syllable. The original syllables, drawn from a hymn called "Ut queant laxis," were ut, re mi, fa, sol, and la, and were intended to call to the minds of choristers the pitches on which those syllables occurred in the hymn. Although the syllables had changed a bit by the time Rogers and Hammerstein got a hold of them, the system continues to bring clarity to the difficult business of ear training. Victorian schoolchildren learned an elaborate system of verbal mnemonics for dates. The British psychologist Alan Baddeley notes in Human Memory: Theory and Practice that numbers were represented by letters of the alphabet, which were then incorporated into mnemonic verses. An example: "By men near Hastings, William gains the Crown/A rap in forest new brings Rufus down." Here the letters m and n in men both stand for 6, and the r and p in rap for 8 and 7 respectively. Hence the pupil is reminded that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 and that King William Rufus was killed in the New Forest in 1087. Contemporary schoolchildren are probably still familiar with Roy G. Biv, the letters of whose name stand for the colors of the rainbow, and with acronyms like CHON, for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the basic elements of organic chemistry. But as rote learning fades from the classroom and the need for such devices is diminished, it is not clear whether tomorrow's schoolchildren will have the pleasure of Mr. Biv's acquaintance. Should anybody care? Maybe, as memory experts today assert, it makes little difference whether we store knowledge—or to-do lists or phone numbers or the whereabouts of our car in the parking lot—in our heads or on paper, or even in cyberspace. Maybe one way of filing information is as good as another. But then again maybe, as Asimov's cautionary tale suggests, there's something sad, even ridiculous, about a species that has forgotten how to remember. db |