Doubled Duty

I must admit I'm having a hard time grasping the entire usefulness of word and image association. What I mean is that while having a group of images in one's mind to use as a key to unlock the wanted information, for instance using Mel Gibson eating a pomegranate to remember Melpoeme, is really creating an additional step between one and memorizing the information. Perhaps it appeals and works for one because one might have an easier time remembering an image than a string of letters, why wouldn't one simply memorize Melpoeme, rather than Melpoeme in addition to the image of Mel Gibson eating a pomegranate? It seems to me that rather than simply memorizing the thing to be remembered, we create extra redundancy and irony by, rather than memorizing the thing to be thought of, we are including the extra subset of memory tools with which we use to recall the wanted information.

Why memorize a string of objects to associate with, say the names of the chapters in a book when we could, without having a second set of trigger images, forgo the imagery and simply memorize the titles, straight-up?

Synecdoche as memory

This whole memory system through item or word or image association reminded me of a very ominous word of late: synecdoche. In essence, I suppose that is what the system is, at its core; use a smaller, easier to remember trigger to remind you of the whole. Don't remember Christ being reborn and rising on the whatever day and returning from his cave and all that, just remember Easter. Especially manifested in our brief example from Yates. The witnesses and their testimonials are not what one remembers—a string of facts: a group of people and what they did—but the testicles, a private part of a male's anatomy, much more provacative and much less complex. We see the man in the bed holding these, and the image is there, not a string of marks that represent the letters of the information reguarding the testimonials, but a specific image that we can easily remember and savvy the implied whole represented by the part. While perhaps not litterally a metaphor nor a synecdoche, we use a part of the entirety, an image representing a piece of the informational whole, to conjure the implied particulars of the thing or things that image is meant to convey us.

Image as Memory

By attaching an immediate association with what is meant to be memorized and the image with which one would make the connection, one can use their strongest, most heavily-relied upon sense to do so. We humans are very visual beings. Take away our ability to see and we find that we simply cannot function on any normal level at ordinary tasks. I can see the power in using and developing a specific image in, say visualizing a one armed boy, to represent something in relation to it, such as the entire novel of "Johnny Tremaine," etc.

When we use our imagination to create a visceral idea in our heads, a specific picture, we can associate a plethora of events and significant things worth memorizing with the smaller, shorter and less involved idea of an image, rather than the actual thing to be memorized. As a very visual person (one of those deluded artists) I find this to be a rather effective way to understand and recall information, especially as I have a harder time simply committing strings of words or information to memory.