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L O W L A N D S - L - 20 February 2011 - Volume 01<br>
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<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal">From: <span class="gd"><span style="color: rgb(200, 137, 0);">Sandy Fleming</span></span><span class="gi"> </span><span class="go"><<a href="mailto:fleemin@live.co.uk">fleemin@live.co.uk</a>></span><br>
Subject: <span class="gi">LL-L "Memorization" 2011.02.18 (01) [EN]</span><br>
<br>
> From: Obiter Dictum <<a href="mailto:obiterdictum@mail.ru" target="_blank">obiterdictum@mail.ru</a>><br>
> Subject: LL-L "???" 2011.02.?? (01) [EN]<br>
<br>
> Hello Lowlanders,<br>
<br>
> Has anyone wondered exactly why poetry is<br>
<br>
> (i) easier and sooner memorized, <br>
>(ii) easier and readier recalled and <br>
>(iii) longer remembered?<br>
<br>
>What do you think the rythm, meter and rhyme has to do with it? </p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal">You seem to be asking about
the neurological aspects, but since I don't know about that I'll just make a
few remarks.<br>
<br>
People who memorize pi to thousands of decimal places generally swear by the
rhythm method - they just say it in their heads or out loud over and over again
until the sound sinks in and acquires a perceived rhythm (which I imagine is
imposed by them rather than actually in pi, since pi is in some sense random).<br>
<br>
So it would seem that the constructed rhythms of poetry make it memorizable.<br>
<br>
My own experience is that rhyme also helps, because when I sing, or recite
quatrains or rhyming couplets, the next rhymed line just springs to mind
automatically given some familiarity with the verse.<br>
<br>
This seems to break down with a lot of modern poetry or poetry not slaved to
rhyme for traditional reasons (eg Latin, Japanese).<br>
<br>
I find prose practically impossible to memorize (annoying, because I feel I
could learn languages a lot better if I could memorize whole chunks of prose in
them), and I suspect that actors who do a lot of this have developed some way
of thinking of prose in terms of its rhythms, just as pi memorizers find
rhythms in pi.<br>
<br>
Do the Chinese and Japanese have traditions of memorizing poetry, or is it more
linked to the structure and beauty of their writing systems? Certainly I find
it hard to memorize short Chinese and Japanese poems (haiku and suchlike), but the
longer poems with longer lines I find easier to memorize because the lengths of
the lines impose some sort of rhythm.<br>
<br>
I find the hardest thing in recitation is when the poem or song is broken into
quatrains or suchlike: it's hard to remember how the next verse starts. The
best way is if there's a coherent progression of the argument so that whatever
the next one is is a matter of following the argument. Failing that, I can
always just construct a sentence using a keyword from the first line of each verse,
but such artificial methods of memorization (including well-known systems such
as the location memory system) don't help with understanding or enjoyment, and
can make recall a bit dodgy too when you're under pressure to produce the next
verse straight away.<br>
<br>
Sandy Fleming<br>
<a href="http://scotstext.org/" target="_blank">http://scotstext.org/</a></p>
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<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">----------</p>
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<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From:
<span class="gd"><span style="color: rgb(121, 6, 25);">Paul Anisman</span></span><span class="gi"> </span><span class="go"><<a href="mailto:panisman@gmail.com">panisman@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Subject: <span class="gi">LL-L "Memorization" 2011.02.18 (01) [EN]</span><br>
<br>
I sent the query posted by Vlad Lee, AKA Totomi Ri, to a close friend of
mine, Hugh Buckingham, who is a neuroscientist and neurolinguist at Louisiana
State Univ., in Baton Rouge LA. Since Hugh is not a member of our Lowland
group, I have cut and pasted his response into this post.<br>
--Paul Anisman<br>
<br>
Kind Sirs:<br>
It is certainly not just any old poem, verse, or piece of liturgy, but rather
something oft repeated during the life of the speaker. Poetic verse with
musical surround is music, and, the words in frequently sung songs often spring
up after stroke in later life, because calling up fequently said or done things
eventually gets streamlined in the more automatic cells of the brain....and
most often, those cells are not in Broca's area, but deeper down in memorial
chunks automated in various circumstances as production. You also have
scatological terms that will pop out as automata...and a similar phenomenon
takes place with theological terms, excretion terminology, and parts of the anatomy
involved in excretion. These are in a sense taboo words, and are often
learned when the contextual environment is overladen with emotionality....of
one sort or another.<br>
<br>
Severely speech apraxic persons with very serious brain damage in the left
hemisphere Broca's Area ( posterior, inferior frontal cortex - numbered 44 and
45 by Korbian Brodmann in the early 20th century) have quite often been
noted to be able to articulate overly learned "chunks" of
soliloquies, frequently liturgical lines from religious participation. It
has also been noted that these kinds of patients, when frustrated at their
inability, can curse with the best of them, and with near normal fluency.
These "formulaic" islands of language production come to be
stored in less volitional zones of the nervous system. Broca's area is
cerebral cortex. These abilities are not at all unrelated to Gilles de la
Tourette Syndrome and the frequent finding that people who have severe stuttering
can nevertheless sing, and while singing, they do not stutter.<br>
<br>
Poetry quite often for some individual may very well be recited many times for
sundry reasons, specific to that individual. Furthermore, and very
importantly, the scansion of poetry (the meter) is a suprasegmental property
which scaffolds the poetic segments. Not only is meter conserved in many
adults with aphasia, but so is their ability to summon up and utilize syllable
matrices. Many Wernicke's aphasics who are fluent, but who have extreme
difficulties successfully recruiting lexical items during ongoing speech, will substitute
segments from left to right (carry over from something articulated) or from
right to left (anticipating something to be articulated in close succession).
Syllable phonotactic constraints are mediated by the brain such that
large portions of the left temporo-parietal cortex can be damaged, while
leaving phonotactics untouched. Often, the makeup of stretches of speech
in Wernicke's aphasics is replete with alliterative vowel and consonant
repetition.<br>
<br>
The brain is cool.<br>
<br>
Hugh Buckingham<br>
<br>
On 2/18/11, Lowlands-L List <<a href="mailto:lowlands.list@gmail.com">lowlands.list@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
><br>
><br>
> From: Obiter Dictum <<a href="mailto:obiterdictum@mail.ru">obiterdictum@mail.ru</a>><br>
> Subject: LL-L "???" 2011.02.?? (01) [EN]<br>
><br>
> Hello Lowlanders,<br>
><br>
> Has anyone wondered exactly why poetry is<br>
><br>
> (i) easier and sooner memorized,<br>
> (ii) easier and readier recalled and<br>
> (iii) longer remembered?<br>
><br>
> What do you think the rythm, meter and rhyme has to do with it?<br>
> Does, say, the meter or rhyme incidence get in tune/resonance with<br>
> what brain scientists call brain electric activity frequencies so that<br>
> neuronal patterns form sooner and easier and stay longer?<br>
><br>
> (To say nothing of more memorable fresher verbal images the poetry is known<br>
> for).<br>
><br>
> Has someone researched the matter? The proverbial British scientist, for<br>
> example?<br>
> Does anyone know any resources a mouse click away?<br>
><br>
> Thanks in advance.<br>
><br>
> Vlad Lee aka Toyotomi Ri<br>
> Sakhalin, Russian Far East</p>
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