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Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if/how this applies to memorization of long works that are not exclusively dialogue.

Growing up, I knew a pastor who had memorized the entire New Testament. It wasn't a trick. You could drop your Bible open at any page, start reading half a sentence, and he could continue on from there as long as you wished. He really did have the entire thing committed to memory.

When I asked him as a curious 12-year-old how he had done it, his answer was long on wisdom, but short on tactics. He said, "Don't overestimate what you can do in a year, but don't underestimate what you can do in a decade."

Maybe that's the difference? Actors need to memorize their lines quickly, while he had as much time as he cared to use?

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I actually came here to comment on how this memorization "technique" or "strategy" reminded me of what is done in some religions. Catholic meditation, for instance, is structured around _lectio divina_ and _meditatio_: the former means reading a sacred text slowly and attentively, "listening to it as if it was spoken by God". The latter means, after that careful reading, to ponder the text, take the time to reflect deeply on its possible meaning(s).

I have no idea if your pastor had this kind of practice, but from the article, if he did, it might have helped him memorize the texts. And the memorization, in turn, moght help focusing more and more on the meaning, rather than the words.

Also note that, as far as I know, all texts in the bible (except maybe some parts of the new testament, I am not sure) were transmitted orally for periods ranging from decades to centuries before being written down, and are structured in a way that helps memorization.

We tend to think of memorization as unnecessary if we have unlimited access to the text, but this discussion actually makes me wonder whether memorization might be a powerful way to "unlock" the hidden meaning of some texts.

I'm sure he loved the texts for their meaning. He dedicated his life to this work, after all.

I find when I practice lectio and meditatio, though, I don't pay as much attention to the words as the images or sentiments or experiences that surround them.

I spent the first half of my life (so far) in Evangelical circles, with that pastor, and became a Catholic in the second half, so have experience with both extensive rote memorization by chapter and verse, and now engaging the texts more comprehensively. Obviously there's also the difference between being a child and an adult, but I find that now I remember the sense of stories when I refer to them, not the actual text, except when I call to mind some fragment of a quotation from my childhood.

I don't think either is necessarily better, and it's entirely likely to me that my overall growth in age and maturity would have led me to this deeper experience even if I hadn't converted. I just don't find it quite as helpful for memorization.

By way of tangential analogy, my current (Catholic) pastor regularly tells the parishioners not to take it when non-Catholics accuse us of not knowing the Scriptures. He pointed out that not once has anyone in the congregation been surprised at how the reading ended. He says Protestants and Evangelicals tend to know Scripture like a mailman knows a neighborhood. They know the street names and numbers and can easily find them on a map. But Catholics know Scripture like families who grew up in the neighborhood. They may not know what number house Mrs. Jones lives in, but they know the Smiths lived there until Junior went off to college, and wasn't that the same year Younger Brother fell out of the tree on the corner and busted up his arm?

Thank you, it is great to have the opinion of someone actually practicing this. I was indeed wondering if regular lectio of a text would lead almost automatically to memorizing it, but it seems not to be the case.

Still, I could imagine that the new testament is more easily memorized by getting "involved" in the story. I have this impression mostly by comparing with the pali canon (the oldest set of sacred buddhist scripture): buddhist pali texts (with a few exceptions, such as the dhammapada) are very technical and contain very little in terms of "story", and their structure contains much more repetition and structured lists than the bible. So much so that all written versions I know of abridge the repetitions, as it would otherwise be extremely boring to read. That biblical texts (or more poetic pali texts) did not have to resort to this makes me think that the meaning and emotional involvement with the text indeed helps in memorizing it.

The gospels and the Acts of the Apostles certainly have a strong narrative element; the letters rather less so. It doesn't surprise me that they could all be memorized in a decade, but not a year. I just think the techniques in this article might not be the way to do it, focused as they are on rapid memorization of dialogue.

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