16 January -- The Book of Memory (Carruthers)

What did I read in my reading-hour today? I picked up Mary Carruthers's The Book of Memory, again. In general, I find it very hard to read books linearly (especially books in English, for some reason), and this book is harder than most. I took a class with Prof. Carruthers in graduate school, and it was fascinating, so I really want to read this book as a whole, but I find it hard, each time. Hard concepts, of course.

I dived into chapter 2 today: “Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory.” The book is about ancient and medieval conceptions, and of course the scholars of those eras would not have used the word neuropsychology, but they do describe the acts of building/storing memory (μνῆσις, memoria) and recollection (ἀνάμνησις, reminiscentia) as somatic processes. This goes back to Aristotle.

This chapter focusses mainly on descriptions from Antiquity (mainly Aristotle, but also a bit of Augustine, from Late Antiquity) and from the High Middle Ages. In the earlier Middle Ages, writers did not write much about the theoretical workings of these processes; but they did write practical information about how to memorize Psalms and prayers, and Carruthers says that much of that material reflects the same theoretical underpinnings as the ones in this chapter.

Basically, there were three fundamental assumptions, going back, at least in part, to Aristotle: (1) There are two distinct types of human knowledge, of “singulars” [particular material things] and of “concepts; (2) the whole sensing process (picking up sensations, storing them, recollecting them) was a somatic process; and (3) “everything created, even knowledge, has an immediate, proximate material cause”. (p. 58)

Aristotle thought that the sensory information was received by the heart, and stored by the brain. By Galen's time (3rd century CE), medicine knew that only the brain, not the heart, played a role in any of these processes, but nonetheless the language of "recordari" and "learning things by heart" has remained through today.

Section heading: Brain physiology and the formation of memories

For Aristotle, memory-impressions are made up of “physiological affections”, but are more than that -- just as a house is made up of bricks, but is more than that. The external images are impressed upon the memory, like the impression of a seal on wax. People with different physical constitutions (wet, dry, hot, cold) will have different capabilities in absorbing and retaining such impressions, just as wax will be be different in different states.

This physical understanding of memory and recollection persisted through the end of the middle ages; many books recommended various diets and activities for better memory retention. (So this is where the קשה לשכחה stuff comes from!)

Aquinas distinguishes between sensory memory and “conceptual memory”, to solve the problem that memoria stores only “phantasms of particular sense objects or composite images derived from particular sense objects”. How, then, can people remember concepts? With the Conceptual Memory, which is a part of the intellect (presumably, not a part of the memoria). And yet even this Conceptual Memory / Intellectual Memory is known through images: if we think of a concept of a triangle, we picture a triangle in our mind, even though we're not thinking of a specific triangle. (Aquinas attributes this point to Augustine, but in fact it's already present in Aristotle.)

Aristotle's "sensory soul" has two major faculties:

• 1. The "common sense" (sensus communis). This is the receptor of impressions from all five senses, and also the source of awareness. (This usage is interesting, because it is completely different from the English meaning of "common sense" that I know, namely, the wits to know how to behave in a given situation.)
• 2. Imagination (imaginatio). Not all animals have imagination, but any animal that knows how to learn (horses, dogs, birds, perhaps bees) has it. "Imagination" is the process whereby phantasmata (mental images) are formed, and move the animal to action. Human imagination is more than that: it means not just being moved by a phantasma, but also forming some sort of voluntary opinion about it: it is a quasi-rational activity.

Avicenna distinguishes between the imaginatio that is solely a retentive faculty, on the one hand, and "deliberative imagination", which involves composing an image and making a judgment about it. This is what Aristotle calls φαντασία λογιστική or βουλευτική, Arabic wahm, Latin estimativa. “Later Latin writers re-defined estimativa as something like ‘instinct’ in animals [...]; they called the human power cogitativa, defined as a conscious, though pre-rational, activity.”

[I'm not really sure what Avicenna is adding here to the distinctions that we already see in Aristotle.]

This is as far as I have gotten today. It's very difficult material.