I see that gesture is becoming of increasing interest in educational psychology research. Apparently children's gestures can help teachers (if they pay attention to them) get a better notion of how much, and what, a child understands. Not only that, but a teacher's gestures can help their students' learning.

This doesn't just apply to children, of course. Recent research has demonstrated that people remember what's been said to them better if the person explaining to them augments their speech with gestures. Another study found that when people were asked to explain how they solved a problem, they tend to gesture in a way that's at odds with what they're saying, when they're talking about the moments when they had to make choices. In other words, gestures are not meaningless hand-waving, but provide valuable information that is not easily articulated.

But that's all by the by, as far as I'm concerned. My interest in gesture began when a researcher suggested that gesture reduces the load on working memory. [Working memory capacity - how many different items you can hold in the forefront of your mind at one time - is crucial for a whole range of things (including "intelligence" - whatever that is). ]

I remember recently telling my son that it was useful to practice visualising words in your mind's eye (I used to do this all the time when I was young, and can still do it easily if I want to - that is, "watching" the words as I say them, or as other people talk). Working memory is extremely limited in how much it can hold, but you can extend this by using different senses. Thus, if I, say, need to remember a phone number and a name, I might "hear" the phone number (hold it in mind by saying it over and over) and "see" the name. [Yes, I know, I could use chunking techniques to remember the number, but that's another issue].

Anyway, the point is, there's another sense/modality you could use, on top of hearing and sight - gesture.

Also, of course, more obviously, it supports the advice that gestures are useful in helping you remember songs, speeches, etc. We don't tend to encourage adults to formally use gestures to help them remember, but think of all the "action songs" we teach our children when very young. I remember my mother, too, when recounting the poems they learned to recite at school, performing it with stylized gestures.

James McGaugh, Director of the Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California in Irvine, has written a new book about memory and emotion. I haven't read it yet (it doesn't come out till October according to Amazon - although they also say it's available within 24 hours, so who knows), but he's got a few professors to say nice things on the back of the book. There's also a review in the Guardian. The consensus seems to be that it's very readable.

As readers of my newsletters will know, I was blown away by Mary Carruthers' book: "The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture". It gave me a completely different perspective on medieval culture, for a start, and also, I knew nothing about the mnemonic training of scholars in those times (my background being in cognitive psychology), so it was all new to me. Well, I was reading another academic tome (and these are academic works - Carruthers in particular is writing for her peers, all apparently well-versed in Greek, Latin, art history, and medieval studies), and this writer made the fairly compelling point that this emphasis on memory training that Carruthers documents so well, came about because of the information deluge.

There are deluges, and then there are deluges, right? To our eyes, the amount of written material was nothing compared to what we have today. But it's all relative, isn't it? And the scholars of those times didn't have the tools we have today. Forget sophisticated knowledge management technologies, these people didn't have indexes until the thirteenth century. And recall that this was before the invention of the printing press, so we're talking hand-written, idiosyncratic indexes. Usually thematic - the idea of using the alphabet to organise an index took a while to catch on, and even once it did, it was still, shall we say, eccentric. For example, one writer in a work published in Paris in 1518 put Apollo first in the index, because he felt it right that, in a work of poetry, the god of poetry should come first.

This puts a new perspective on memory training, because proponents of mnemonic strategies tend to emphasise the need to remember verbatim - word for word. But this suggests instead that memory skills were needed to help organise material that wasn't organised in any other way.

That doesn't mean we can sit back and say, well, it's all a matter of organisation then, I don't need to remember anything (although many modern educationalists seem to believe something along those lines). The fact remains, we have a huge, stupendously huge, amount of information available to us today, and we can't just say -well, I can find it out. On that basis, you wouldn't be able to read anything of moderate complexity, because you'd have to keep looking things up! Just keeping track of the information I have stored in my computer requires more than a superb organisational structure (I wish). I need to be able to remember at least enough to know when I have something stored on that topic, and sometimes connections might be obscure - it's very very difficult (read impossible?) to cross-reference all your material sufficiently to cover all the possibilities - including the ones you haven't thought of yet, but will, when you acquire some new information that puts other items in a different light.

Anyway, I was excited about this notion that these erudite and complex mnemotechnics so, apparently, beloved by medieval scholars, were not to enable them to memorise vast screeds of text ("memorise" in the sense we tend to use it - i.e., learn "by heart", word for word), but to remember the gist - what the texts were about, the narrative flow, etc. Because I think we tend to believe our memory skills are so much worse than those of our ancestors; we have not only a poor idea of our own abilities, but an inflated idea of what they should be, what they were.

And also, because it reinforces what I keep saying - memory is about organisation. In your files, on the paper ... and in your head.

(the book I was reading, by the way, was "Wax Tablets of the Mind" by Jocelyn Penny Small)

As some of you know, every month (or so) I send out a digest of the latest memory research I've come across, along with news of changes and additions I've made to the website. What is not, of course, evident, is the many interesting articles, websites, items of various descriptions, that I come across, and dump in my files. I know they're interesting, not only to me, but I don't have the time to immediately write them up in an article or set up a new page to incorporate these links, and so ... they go into the "I must do something about these someday" piles.
Well, the answer is pretty obvious, and it's finally come to me: a blog.
The content of the blog will reflect my website, of course: information about memory that helps you achieve permanent memory improvement. Admittedly, I take this further than is probably strictly necessary, on the grounds that, hey, who's not interested in how their memory works? Even if it's not of immediate practical value.
It also wanders into education, and information management, because that's what it's all about, isn't it? We need to improve our memory because we're being deluged by information. Filing techniques are just as valid a mnemonic strategy as, say, remembering which is your left hand by holding it up and seeing it makes an L (yes, I'm left-right challenged).
Feel free to send me any links you come across that you think other people might be interested in, as long as you realise I might be scathing about it, or ignore it completely. Remember that I take an academic stance, and I tend to cast a sceptical eye over techniques and advice that is not backed up by (good) research.