Transcription
There's a medieval learning system that was massively enhanced during the 1500s by a rogue monk that lets you snap vocabulary from any language into place in your mind using rotational mental architecture. And today we're going to enhance this technique even further. And by the end of this tutorial, you'll know exactly how to use this rotational technique as described by a defrocked monk who really pretty much perfected this system. But there's a catch. Oh, there's always a catch.
Because more than perfect this learning [music] system, the Renaissance memory master Giordano Bruno used the broad range of his mental martial arts to impress a pope by reciting an entire psalm backwards. He lectured across Europe in Latin and while using other languages he taught himself. But that catch? Well, he didn't get caught by the catch. He understood it. He made it part of his practice and he used it as a leaping board into accelerating his progress in multiple languages and that's also what you're going to learn today.
But since not everything is sunshine and flowers and since Giordano Bruno was more than a wee bit of a stubborn rogue, it's important to know that his language learning skills, well, they had at least one Achilles' heel that I'll share with you, something I've experienced myself, and possibly his ability to use these techniques to help him learn languages and a lot of other things with great certainty and great skill played a role in how this extremely talented polyglot and polymath ultimately marked himself for destruction, especially after he came to the attention of a stay-at-home cardinal who actually bragged about a lack of a skill that's going to blow your mind when you realize later in this video that someone so willfully ignorant could be given such a high position of power, especially compared to one of the most impressive language learners and learners all around in history, a man who was repeatedly turned down for positions he was perfectly suited for. And in my view, perfectly suited for them precisely because he could be so stubborn, sometimes so arrogant and even [music] impatient with the slow and ponderous power structures of the world. But Giordano Bruno's heart, his ethics and his attempts to reach for the truth were definitely in the right place, even if they were in the right place at the wrong time.
Now, despite Bruno's eventual downfall and attempts to suppress his books, we thankfully still have the teachings of this innovative nemanist and his instructions on how to use these rotating memory wheel systems of agents, actions, and objects and even circumstances in the middle wheel. And that's just for starters when it comes to what you can do with the Brunonian memory wheels. But because of the books of Giordano Bruno can be very difficult to read, very difficult indeed, let me give you an immediate taste of how his memory wheels work before we dive into the nuanced mechanics and the tragic end of this incredible genius.
Take the English word think, t h i n k, and follow along as if you want to memorize it in both German and Mandarin, just the word think. We'll talk about memorizing entire phrases later. Since to think or denken in German starts with d and in Mandarin, xiang, I think it is, is think, all you have to do when you want to memorize words in multiple languages is reach out and touch the letter you're looking for. So, if it is d for denken, I would rotate to d and then, well, we'll get more into it, but if it's xiang, then I would go to x. And then from there I'm able to use what Bruno called agents, which are different than some of the inner wheels, but that's where you start with the outer wheel. And by the way, if you make a memory wheel on paper, that's called a volvelle. And of course, you're also welcome to use the technique purely in your mind. But for learning purposes, I do advise making at least one of these. And we know that it's something Bruno himself did and there are thousands of examples of paper volvelles. And if nothing else, a quickly drawn up memory wheel will reduce cognitive load and ensure that you're comprehending how the system works. And even just playing around with this one that I've made, I have come up with wonderful little mental ideas that just wouldn't have been possible without the physical memory wheel in my hand.
So, how it works is that each wheel contains a space or a cell for each letter of the alphabet. And that simply means that you want to assign these letters figures on the outer wheel. And that's where you have your agents. So, in our contemporary time, we would probably call an agent something more like a friend or a celebrity or something like that. Bruno, he used a lot of mythological figures in his time. So, if we were at the letter a, he may use the figure of Apollo. And for me, I use people like the actor Adam Sandler. And then if I go to b, I might use Brad Pitt. And then if I go to c, I might use my aunt Cassie, et cetera. So, there's different ways to do this, but one of the ways to do this for denken in German for think is to start with the first syllable. So, we rotate to d and then we would want to rotate to k for the next syllable. And this enables us to unpack associations. Now, I have my associations prepared in advance because I've been using techniques like this for years. And so, for d, I have my Uncle Dracula here and uh believe it or not, he really is my uncle, which is why I have him in a framed photograph. I'm just kidding. But the reality is is that he lives compressed inside of the letter d. And Dracula is not exactly like denken, so we would have him in a den. Now, for some people, Dracula in a den will be more than enough for the word denken to think. And you can imagine Dracula thinking, "How am I going to get myself out of this den?" Now, I'm not as imaginative as Bruno, so I definitely need to go to that k to get a k sound for denken to think. And uh I don't have any Ken and Barbie dolls in the Magnetic Memory Method headquarters. So, let's pretend that this dinosaur is Ken in the den with Uncle Dracula and Dracula is kicking him out of the den. And uh he doesn't like that very much, so he That sounds a bit like think, don't you think?
What about xiang for think in Mandarin? Well, now we can use the same memory wheel and not confuse ourselves and I would use either Professor X from X-Men or I would use an actual X-Man like Wolverine for the X sound, not only because he's an X-Man, but he can make an X with his claws quite easily. And this is still drawing upon the outer wheel, right? And what's happening here is that your decompressing an entire association from a single letter, in this case the x. And this is powerful because you can unpack all kinds of figures provided that you have compressed them into the memory wheel in the first place. And this memory wheel is a combinatory machine. And you know, these other wheels I'm going to explain in a little bit what they're all about, but that's the core idea. It's a machine that compresses and then decompresses mnemonic associations and allows you to combine them in many ways. And you can have as many inner wheels as you wish to help you make each association more and more multi-sensory. And these wheels can expand and contract.
Now, this technique is a bigger deal than it sounds. There's [snorts] a philosopher named Leibniz and many scholars since have argued that this idea of reducing complex information into compact symbols so that you can combine and recombine them was a critical step towards the development of algebra and modern computing. Of course, in Bruno's time, the brain was the computer and there were no X-Men. So, the combinatorial material Bruno might have programmed onto his memory wheels, well, it's quite diverse and he talks a lot about different figures in his various books, but he might have had more like Xenophon or Xerxes or even cheat a little bit by using Ajax or Ixion. He actually mentions Ixion in his book 30 statues. And this allowing yourself to have a little bit of an alternative where the letter you're looking for is not necessarily the first letter of the world word is very important because sometimes you can't just find a figure for each letter, no matter how hard you try. And Ixion is an important choice anyhow, even if the first letter is not x because the eon sound relates at least a little bit to the young in Xiang in Mandarin to think, right? So, eon Xiang. So, it works to be able to think that way, to have alternatives or substitutes. And for what it's worth, speaking of Ixion, in myth, Ixion was bound to a perpetually spinning, burning wheel. And burning is what ultimately ended up happening to Bruno. This is not a throwaway reference. It's actually the point. Bruno names Ixion in 30 statues, and me making this kind of association of one thing to another right now is an example of how memory works, how it builds itself through association. And I tend to notice these associations more and more and more, but I didn't in the beginning. It was only after I started using these associative techniques, and then I got better and better at pattern recognition while I was applying them to memorize different pieces of information, which is all the more reason for you to get started as soon as you possibly can, because you'll be able to weave together associations through deeper and larger sets of patterns that you're going to recognize, and it's going to help you remember more information over the long term, whether it's learning a language or anything else. You do have the cost of getting out of pen and paper and writing out some associations that make sense for you one letter at a time. And then you just improve them over time as you remember more and more information. Remembering more information is a self-improving act because it extends and expands your pool of associations.
Now, if you're listening to this and you're wondering, "How on earth am I going to use Dracula to remember denken or X-Men for Xiang, right?" Try to see the theory behind the example that I'm giving. And then just dive in by creating your own, because time is ticking and so much of life's treasure is left behind each and every day you aren't absorbing new information. And this is such a cool and fun and interesting way to memorize information. And coming up, there's so much more to say about these wheels, including the inner wheels, and how to expand all of this from individual words to entire phrases. So, if you like discovering alternative learning techniques like this and you're new to this channel, this is Dr. Anthony Metivier from the Magnetic Memory Method headquarters, inviting you to get subscribed and for the love of memory, smash that thumbs up so the robots never forget that we humans flourish when we have access to the nuances and the details of ancient memory techniques and ancient figures of great interest like these.
Now, I've chosen the word think as an example of how the memory wheels work for a very, very specific reason. You see, although this memory wheel system was developed by Giordano Bruno, he's actually not the inventor. He's innovating on previous versions of the technique by folks I've discussed on this channel before. I'm talking about Ramon Llull, Peter of Ravenna, and especially Jacobus Publicius, who has a very interesting memory wheel indeed. He was trying to circle the square, it was in some sense the way that he built his. Each of these great memory masters said that thinking is the ultimate memory technique. Using the wheels is all fine and dandy, and it'll help you think better, but you need to think about what you're doing with the systems, which means that you need to actually develop them. And the more you think about them, the more they will develop. It's a perfect circle. And, you know, these memory wheels operate like engines of association that just help you not only with memorizing, but also with coming up with more ideas in your life. So, it's not just about X-Men and Dracula. And if you want to add a phrase like "ni zai xiang shenme?" What are you thinking? Or in the case of German, denken has to be conjugated to say "Was denkst du?" or "Was denkt ihm?" Well, you can do that, too. More is coming on that operation later.
But I want to highlight a weakness, a white elephant in the room we have to address when it comes to language learning. And it's one that I haven't figured out how to solve. A couple weeks ago I was sharing how hard it is for me to hear tones, and because I can't really hear the tones, I can't really remember them properly. So, if you know Mandarin or German, you might already be rolling your eyes and quibbling with me at my pronunciation in those languages, even of these simple words. But, here's the thing that a lot of people don't know, and let me be the first to tell you that Bruno himself was mocked for his pronunciation in other languages. In England, he used what he thought was correct Roman pronunciation of Latin, but a lot of what he said went either unrecognized or shamed by the English scholars who had their own conventions, and they were very Hochnase, to use another German term that term they had very high noses and looked down at Bruno. And if Bruno had a solution for memorizing pronunciation to satisfy those who would diminish others by playing pronunciation police, I haven't found that solution in any of his books. He did have a solution for capitalization, where he says that you should have a figure standing up in your memory palace if a word is to be capitalized, but sitting down if the word is in small caps. But this idea is also in Peter of Ravenna's Phoenix Reborn and Jacobus Publicius' Rules Reborn. And it may not be all that useful in terms of, you know, a world of sloppy texting, where even professionals don't edit their texts anymore. But if you're learning a language like German, it actually can be quite useful to remember what words need to be capitalized. But when it comes to pronunciation, I've thought about it forever and a day, and I still can't quite figure out how to memorize it, and I don't think Bruno knew, either. Point being, be kind to yourself. Memorize, make mistakes, you'll figure it out, and if you can just communicate and be understood and understand what people are communicating to you, win, win, win all the way down.
Now, when it comes to sounding out words, I'd like to think that Bruno would have cracked the code of pronunciation eventually if he'd found better ways to deal with his critics, but his operation in this world did not always involve humility, certainly not near the end of his life. For example, after many years of travel, keeping just outside of the reach of the Inquisition, who was unhappy about his ideas about the infinite universe and other things that they heard he had said, some of which questioned the personhood of Christ, Bruno wound up being housed by someone named Giovanni Mocenigo, a Venetian nobleman who wanted Bruno's memory techniques. He essentially hired Bruno as a live-in tutor. Mocenigo wanted Bruno's techniques badly, badly, badly, but he refused to do the work Bruno said was necessary. So, Mocenigo locked Bruno up and turned him over to the Inquisition, literally holding Bruno in his house after he wrote a letter to the Inquisition and and waiting for instructions with what to do. And he taunted Bruno all along to teach him the secrets of memorizing words and geometry. Bruno insisted he had already shared every nuance, every detail. And he said all that remains is to practice, not more secrets. And since we know Bruno had a filthy mouth sometimes, the verbal battle he must have fought with Mocenigo probably sounded like a Quentin Tarantino movie. But just imagine someone denying the catch that you have to practice. Mocenigo insisted there must be some magic element that Bruno wasn't teaching him. And that's the guy who betrayed Bruno to the Inquisition. Bruno hadn't just spent years studying memory techniques and practicing them himself. He He told it straight, "It's practice, man. It's practice." But Mocenigo would not be swayed, and he not only betrayed Bruno to the Inquisition, apparently he transported Bruno by gondola himself to the Hall of the Council of Trent. Just imagine a man who could remember just about anything he wanted carried against his will toward the institution that would silence him forever. Carried by someone who probably was really just lazy and jealous. And that's not even counting the ignorant cardinal I'll tell you about in a moment.
First, [snorts] here's what else is important to understand apart from practice. A technique used by many, many polyglots to this day in order to learn languages as effectively and efficiently as possible. We know that Bruno didn't just sit around memorizing vocabulary and phrases. He read in the languages he knew. He wrote in those languages. In his books, when he edited them, he annotated them in multiple languages, right? And he spoke and quoted from these languages as he lectured across Europe. And then he listened during scholarly debates to multiple languages in England, in France, and so on. So, this rotational process of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and memorizing is itself a kind of wheel of memory. And the deeper you engage with a word, not just by reading it, not just by writing it, not just by saying it, not [clears throat] just by hearing it and recalling it, but by rotating through all of those things, the stronger your memory becomes. And this constant exposure creates a kind of natural spaced repetition that supplements the memorization. Psychologists call this the levels of processing effect, and decades of research confirm its power. And the more ways you actively work with information, the more durable the memory. And this constant exposure creates Wow. A lot of fun, actually. When I rotated through all of these activities when learning German, my languages in the German language soared. Much, much less so in Mandarin, because in Mandarin I just haven't been able to find that same balance of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and memorizing enough, and I just don't need to use Mandarin as much as I had to use German when I was giving lectures in Germany and so on. But nonetheless, this is the key, the secret on top of practice. The memory wheel of the levels of processing effect of the reading, writing, speaking, listening, and memorizing. And to succeed in any language, almost every single one of us needs to get those five activities into rotation.
Now, I've got one more example of how to apply Bruno's memory wheel techniques to the entire phrase using the memory wheel. It's one of the most interesting phrases Bruno ever wrote in my reading of his books in Latin, and it's a little bit more interesting than, you know, was denkst du denn oder ni zai xiang shenme, what are you thinking, right? But seeing how these memory techniques work and building them for yourself are two different experiences. That's why I'm inviting you to go beyond just listening to me talk about these techniques, but to come and register your interest for my upcoming language of memory boot camp. In addition to the main memory techniques I teach through the Magnetic Memory Method, for the first time ever I've got memory wheel exercises you'll complete live during the implementation session. You'll actually turn activity into accomplishment. And just for signaling your interest, there are three free tutorials available for you right now that go deeper into memorizing words and phrases in any language. So, this is available nowhere else, and the link is in the description or on the screen, or just by type, type, typity typing magneticmemorymethod.com/lom for language of memory. In case you're wondering whether these live boot camps with me are worth it, there's plenty of reviews on Trustpilot where people who've done the boot camp say they wish they'd started here instead of spending years trying to figure it out all on their own. So, that's magneticmemorymethod.com/lom for language of memory. And those three powerful tutorials, they're yours anytime, and they'll equip you with actual memory tools, and then you can build them live with me.
So, when it comes to memorizing a phrase, keep in mind that the Magnetic Memory Method takes inspiration from this process, but I've actually made it a lot faster, smoother, and more direct to use. But the wheel was essential for me to figure out how to improve the process, and I think it's worth your time to work with wheels as well. And so, let's memorize one of Bruno's least humble descriptions of himself. It is dormitantium et animorum excubitor. Oh, I love that one. And he's essentially saying that he is watcher or the sentinel of sleeping souls, and by implication, he will be the one who wakes up the masses to the truth not only of memory and the imagination, but of the oneness of the infinite universe, which may or may not be like a wheel. Well, whether Bruno was right or wrong about infinity and oneness is definitely something to think about, but let's look at this wheel and start to memorize the phrase. The key to memorizing phrases is to go deeper and deeper into the wheels. Bruno might use Well, let's go to D for dormitantium. He might use Daedalus for the first syllable from mythology. A more modern person we could use would be something like Donnie Wahlberg. And then on the second and the third wheels, the action and the object for dormitantium might be putting on, let's find the M, mittens. Or while on the while taking the action of going to the bedroom to look over the sleeping souls. And the circumstance of the fourth wheel could be getting a tan for the tan in tantium. So, I just would go through and go dor-me-tantium, that sort of thing. And, you know, you don't have to be super strict that it's person and action and object. It could be person and object and action, and you can change it around. But you basically want to physically rotate the wheel, and whatever it is that makes sense for you, that's how you're going to use the wheel for an entire phrase. So, once you get through dormitantium, you go back for animorum. Now, Bruno would probably have Apollo for animorum, and he would probably tending the animals, so the uh the action would be tend to tend, and he's probably drinking rum, so the object would be r animor. And that makes ATR. So, then you would go to excubitor, and then, you know, you would go to your E, and maybe you have uh Einstein being like an X-Man, and then excubitor, for the C you'd want a verb, perhaps, and so that verb could be lined up with the E, and you have a verb like cube Well, making playing with a Rubik's Cube, cubing a cube, that sort of thing. So, it's a really fun way to get your hands and your eyes involved, and it's not so mentally draining, because when you look at a letter with your very eyes, it's easier to think, like I just did now. Einstein for excubitor. When I first memorized it, I used something else, but that's the beauty of these techniques is you can come up with endless pure permutations of possible associations.
Now, what about that nasty cardinal who headed the inquisition of Giordano Bruno? What about him indeed? Well, unlike Matteo Ricci, who's another Jesuit priest that I featured on this channel before, and a truly impressive language learner, a language learner as impressive as Bruno, this man who headed the inquisition, his name was Robert Bellarmine, and he had a dark little place in his heart. He literally talked about wanting to punish people. And in that darkness, he apparently used Latin almost exclusively. According to Ingrid Rowland in this extraordinary book about Bruno, Bellarmine insisted that Latin was the only language to be used for learned discourse. Now, apparently Bellarmine also had learned Greek, but he probably was not as good at it as Bruno, and certainly not to the point of reciting a psalm backwards in front of the Pope, as Bruno had done in Hebrew. And that's something you can do, too, when you learn to combine memory palaces with memory wheels, something I demonstrate often in the live boot camps, reciting Shakespeare and whatever you like that I've memorized forward and backward, from the middle to the end, from the end to the middle, and I skip the lines and all that sort of stuff. And, you know, it's it's to show how the techniques work, but I know what Bruno was doing, cuz I've done it myself. And I doubt that Bellarmine ever ever ever ever did such a thing.
Now, another point that helps to kind of understand why Bellarmine was so dead set against Bruno is that Bruno had this radical concept that the Earth rotates around the Sun. And Bruno, being Bruno, not so subtly and very dangerously had placed a sun in the center of one of his memory wheel examples in his book De umbris idearum, on the shadows of the ideas. Now, I can't say for sure, but my feeling is is that Bruno knew what he was doing, and he was flirting with heresy by putting that sun inside the memory wheel. Cuz it was not just a memory improvement book, it was a book with a lot of various philosophical considerations written for a king. Well, Bellarmine had his own theory of the cosmos. He thought that space was liquid, and used that idea to support the Aristotelian notion that was still very popular with the church, and ultimately denying basic facts that Bruno had used his memory to help him remember about various innovations that were happening in astronomy that said otherwise. So, in other words, the man who decided Bruno's fate wasn't just closed-minded about language. He was close minded about reality itself and that's the real danger of refusing to train your memory and your thinking. You become the kind of person who punishes curiosity instead of practicing it. But because Bellarmine was both Jesuit and Cardinal, he was allowed to act as Inquisitor and the story of Bruno's trial is grueling and the great memory master put up quite a fight. It's tear inducing quite frankly. But in the end, we don't know all of the details. Many documents have been lost. We do have indication that Bruno did defend himself well given the circumstances after years of imprisonment, quite possibly torture. And he was defiant up until the end, stubborn and he seems to have taken on his execution like a champ.
But back to the positive stuff. It's important to remember that Bruno's catch when it comes to language learning, practice and rotating through the reading, writing, speaking, listening, memorizing wheel. Well, that's a price the greatest memory masters don't have to pay. You don't have to pay it at all because it is a leaping board into accomplishment. Bruno used both memory wheels and memory palaces and additionally rotated through these levels of processing, reading, writing, speaking, listening, memorizing. These foundational techniques were used in combination and they are the shortcut you're looking for. And if there are any additional shortcuts to be found, rest assured I work every single day on finding them. In fact, I don't think it's going to pan out, but I'm working on a video right now about Philip K. Dick's reported experience with xenoglossia, the spontaneous knowledge of languages that you never studied. And coincidence upon coincidence, Philip K. Dick actually references both Bruno and Ramon Llull's memory wheels in his science fiction novels and in a way that involves astronomy as well as just the themes of learning and memory. So if you're interested in seeing that, make sure to subscribe now so you don't miss it or anything else as my research into the wild and wonderful worlds of memory and learning deepen and deepen and deepen further still. And as you wait for language of memory live, the boot camp to begin, go and get registered using the link and watch my tutorial on the memory palace technique for language learning next. I'm confident you'll find the additional details powerful for whatever language you want to learn. Noting that yet another boot camp is always around the corner. So if doing it on your own is not an option, you don't have to. I will help make sure that activity becomes accomplishment and I'm not as stubborn as Bruno so >> [laughter] >> we'll have a lot of fun. Thanks so much for joining me to discuss the memory wheels and the life of Giordano Bruno and until we have a chance to speak again, take action, action, action and rotate those activities so that you can keep yourself magnetic.