I could not imaging being able to memorise an entire book word perfect... Anyone here ever tried to do it?
shareI've memorized three books of Homer's Iliad . . . and perform them occasionally. Perfect? No. Each performance is always a little different. I met a retired professor a few years ago who was memorizing Milton's Paradise Lost and saw him perform one book of it. Staggering.
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John Basinger, of Middletown, CT, has memorized Paradise Lost completely. He once gave a marathon recitation at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, CT which was taped. You can view clips here http://www.paradiselostperformances.com/
People don't memorize books because they simply don't have to. I don't have to memorize Fahrenheit 451 because I can get it off my bookshelf, get it from a library, or buy it off Amazon.com.
Because the information in books is readily available, the human brain works to remember which book and where in the book the information is. So if I want to read about book burning, my brain tells me I can find stuff in Fahrenheit 451 or a book on Nazi Germany I have called "The Fuhrer" (good book.) I might not remember any specific details about the information in those books, but I know exactly where to find this information. Psychologists call this "transactive memory" (I know this because I was just reading an article on this. I couldn't remember the exact term, but because of my mind's use of transactive memory I knew exactly which article to look up on the internet to find the term. Here's the article for those interested: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/07/15/technology-search-engines-memory.html)
If I had a book that I knew was the last copy in existence, a book I loved that would soon be destroyed and gone forever, I would try my very hardest to memorize the book, and I bet that apart from a few wrong words, I would get it right.
I memorised Patrick Marber's After Miss Julie. I was playing John, but I was nervous about doing the play seeing as John stays onstage for the entire play (well... almost), so I learnt every single line and could recite the play in its entirety. All I did was read it for an hour every night right before bed, and it just stuck.
shareWell, I know people that can recite a good chunk of the New Testament from memory. It is crazy that people can do it, but it is possible.
shareI've got a best friend that can recite all of the books of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, in order, in less than three minutes.
Me, I'm lucky if I can remember the last time I saw my Dad. (I think it was about five years ago, but don't quote me.)
I think that having a photographic memory is possible, and preferable. It would certainly save a lot of time and effort with some things.
Can it be induced? Hmmmm....I have no idea, it would depend upon the method.
There was an episode of the new 'Outer Limits', where the situation was somewhat similar. Everyone was literally part of a telepathic computer network, except for ONE person, who had suffered brain damage as a child and couldn't take the implant. Learning to read was a necessity for him.
Others regarded him as a simpleton because he had to go looking for information, whereas they simply had access to it. Until everything went belly up of course.
In the end, the network was shut down, and he was shown teaching a group of adults how to read from old books that had been put into storage, but never thrown away.
I certainly wouldn't want any kind of implant in my head, no matter how helpful it is supposed to be.
Nonono not recite New Testament books, I mean WORD FOR WORD THE NEW TESTAMENT! VERSE BY VERSE! CHAPTER BY CHAPTER!
LIKE: "Hello, want me to sit down a tell you all of Acts and John for the next 45 minutes?"
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Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae was meant to be learned by heart by the Sorbonne students of the time.
Only after the invention of the printer copies of such books were made available in colleges and dioceses.
Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to watch Interstellar.
Movie girl: I did! When I was about 12 years old ( a few years ago - lol ) I used to wait for hours and hours in the car for my mom who was an inveterate shopper. She could have entered a marathon and won!
Anyhow, the first book I memorized was THe Mystery at Lilac Inn, a Nancy Drew mystery which was the original and had a little over 200 pages. After going over and over them in my mind - a few weeks, I would have the whole thing, word for word. Next it was The Sign of the Twisted Candles, also an original. THis was in the 60's, but you could buy the originals written in the 30's.
After that I memorized the Chapter names of most of the Nancy Drew books. Mom went on with her shopping for years; nearly every Saturday Dad would drive and my sister and I came along. Over a period of time from the mid-60's through the mid-70's I found this way to endure the pain of Mom's heedless use of time. DAd waited too and I let him listen to ball games while I read. He gave me a choice; he would have put ROck and Roll music on radio for me. (Mom was a grammar schoolteacher who found endless shopping in malls or regular stores relaxing. WE would not have minded, but she forgot everything once she got started - even lunch. Don't know how my big sister coped. She went in the stores with Mom mostly. We survived, I think because we had each other. (Sadly. we were made to come shopping even when we did not feel well. Mom thought we were exaggerating. After awhile neither of us said anything, as it did no good.