<story><title>How actors remember their lines</title><url>https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-actors-remember-their-lines/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boerseth</author><text>I am reminded of Socrates, who lamented the practice of memorization being replaced with writing. Today one might dismiss this idea as silly, since memorization alone is frequently associated with dumb parroting and regurgitation, neither of which imply any depth of understanding.&lt;p&gt;But from this discussion, we see the old man may have been on to something! If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.</text></item><item><author>quartesixte</author><text>This resonates.&lt;p&gt;As a frequent public speaker and coach of others in public speaking, the top priority is to just deeply understand the material. The second priority is to create the habit write like you publicly speak (i.e develop a style).&lt;p&gt;You put these together, and you have no choice but to explain it the way you’d have written it anyways. This enforces resilience against interruptions and allows for improvisation.&lt;p&gt;But this is hard. It requires two great efforts: to deeply understand the material, and to craft a speaking&amp;#x2F;writing habit that makes for powerful, public speaking.&lt;p&gt;It doesn’t surprise me then, that actors do the same.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>loughnane</author><text>Memorization def gets a bad rap, for the reasons you mention.&lt;p&gt;Yet I bet most folks who have memorized a poem or a passage---out of an affinity for it, not when demanded by a teacher---know the value. Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s good.</text></comment>
<story><title>How actors remember their lines</title><url>https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-actors-remember-their-lines/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boerseth</author><text>I am reminded of Socrates, who lamented the practice of memorization being replaced with writing. Today one might dismiss this idea as silly, since memorization alone is frequently associated with dumb parroting and regurgitation, neither of which imply any depth of understanding.&lt;p&gt;But from this discussion, we see the old man may have been on to something! If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.</text></item><item><author>quartesixte</author><text>This resonates.&lt;p&gt;As a frequent public speaker and coach of others in public speaking, the top priority is to just deeply understand the material. The second priority is to create the habit write like you publicly speak (i.e develop a style).&lt;p&gt;You put these together, and you have no choice but to explain it the way you’d have written it anyways. This enforces resilience against interruptions and allows for improvisation.&lt;p&gt;But this is hard. It requires two great efforts: to deeply understand the material, and to craft a speaking&amp;#x2F;writing habit that makes for powerful, public speaking.&lt;p&gt;It doesn’t surprise me then, that actors do the same.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>telesilla</author><text>This extraordinary book from Frances Yates explains how before writing, scholars and story tellers would visualize architecture so they could store memories in rooms, then they would walk from room to room and recover memories, for example to tell very long stories.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;The_Art_of_Memory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;The_Art_of_Memory&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>