Advice for memorizing speeches is goes back millenia. Ancient Greeks and Romans were hugely concerned with good speech memory. It's one of the five main parts of the study of speaking, right? We have invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Memory was important to the ancients, they often had to memorize really long speeches and make them sound spontaneous. And in fact, one of the great insults to hurl at an ancient rhetorician, was simply to say that his speech smelled of the midnight oil, meaning I know you wrote this speech out. I can still smell the lamp oil on you that you were using when you stayed up late last night writing the speech. Being able to remember a speech and making it look spontaneous was important to them. And so, that ancients developed a lot of very helpful advice about how to memorize speeches. Now one of the most reliable tactics is using a mind palace, the Romans would have called this technique loci, places. It's a way of using visual and spatial cues to help you remember verbal content. The rhetorician quintilian advises speakers to come up with a common place. And usually this is a place that you know very well, your house, for example, that's the palace in mind palace. Then, you think of a reference for each component of the speech. So let's say your doing a wedding toast, and you want to tell the story about the time you went fishing with your daughter. Okay, so you visualize a fishing pole, okay, then you place that object in your mind palace. Then as you memorize and practice the speech, you walk through the house and see all those different visual components in order, all right? So maybe you start the speech with a welcome mat outside your front door. I gotta remember to welcome everybody before I start the speech. So you welcome them, you walk through the front door, you turn to your right and on the kitchen table is the fishing pole. I'm going to start with the fishing story, so on and so forth. You have a visual and spatial way of remembering your content. Quintilian adds that the more detail you want to remember, the more complex the location needs to be. This visual support for memory's borne out by modern research. So memory's not simply a matter of filling up your brains with content like strings of numbers. It's about finding a way to make the content meaningful to what you already have in your mind. This loci technique has you take a speech and turn it into a series of visual prompts. A related technique comes from the world of storytelling. So these are people who go tell stories, right, to children audiences to large groups, so on and so forth. But they have to memorize a boatload of stories, so one technique that they'll talk about is to storyboard the speech. So just like an animator would draw out key scenes in a movie before they actually animate it. You draw out pictures of your speech so you've got a visual cue for the content, Mark Twain did this. So early on when Mark Twain was starting on his lecturing circuit, he would use a similar system of visual images. He'd actually draw pictures on his fingernails. Now, eventually he got to the point where he could just draw pictures on a sheet of paper, and then just throw it away once it was locked in his head, but it's still a visual prompt. Now, there's another tactic that I think is a little more tactile than visual, and that's to memorize the speech through rewriting. So basically, you memorize your comments, and then you practice the speech by writing it down from memory. So the process of writing and rewriting helps you lock that content into your mind. Now, this is very time intensive but hugely effective, because it forces a type of deliberate mindfulness about the sentences themselves. Another tactic is to read the speech aloud and record it. Then you listen to the recording again and again as a way of aiding your memory. So back when we had tape decks, I would record talks and memorize them when I was driving around in the car. So I just put the tape in the tape deck and listen to it as I was driving around. Whatever you choose, all of these techniques are similar in the sense that they're trying to deploy other supports to your memory, visual, spacial, acoustic. This is ancient practice and modern science, modern cognitive psychologists call it elaborative encoding. We link new information to existing information in our brains. Now you probably want to try multiple techniques to find that blend that works best for you. And then the next lecture, I'll talk about the process that helps me most. [MUSIC]
