Within the book and volume of my brain

List, list, O, LIST

While I was working through the last 41 weeks of memorization exercises, I've had this paper taped to my closet door. It's just a chronological list of all Shakespeare's plays. Every time I read a play, I highlighted it in pink. Every time I learned a speech, I added a blue dot next to it. When I reached my goal, I snipped the paper into candy-colored strips, each with a play on it, and threw them into a bag. Now, every evening, I randomly select a strip from the bag and practice it a bit before bed, then proceed to spend my morning and afternoon commute to work reciting to myself, usually with the accompaniment of some old-school, wordless M83 songs.

Some are as easy to recall as that first "To be" speech; others require more polishing, as very often the one I grab from the bag is one I haven't revisited in so many weeks. But so far, this rehash activity has proven fruitful. Just yesterday, after a few weeks of this practice, I dumped the pile of re-visited speeches onto my bed and proceeded to pick one up, recite, then pick another and another until they were all gone. It took a half hour, and I did it with only one cheat: it was to make sure Hamlet said "my uncle" and not "mine uncle" in his first soliloquy.

My fear near the end was that I'd forget some of the less favorited speeches, so doing this both confirmed and destroyed that fear, since practice really is the silver bullet when it comes to achieving any level of proficiency at anything. (Plus, I've surprised myself that I even have enough room in my mental hard drive lately, since a large percentage of RAM has been dedicated solely to squeeing over Benedict Cumberbatch again.)

Obviously, this thing is not over.

I still have a mental list of speeches I'd like to still learn:
1) Hamlet's third soliloquy
2) John of Gaunt's speech about England in Richard II
3) Berowne's epic 77-line rave about love from LLL
4) Prince Hal's plea to his father about redemption in Henry IV Part 1
5) Ophelia's "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown" speech

I wonder if any of my readers could suggest any others for my tackling pleasure?

The longer the achievement, the more apt I am to unlock them. I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps it's just the meditative quality of a good, lengthy thought process that keeps my brain at attention for so long and serves to defrag it or something. Maybe it impresses me more deeply because it seems so intimidating when you see it on paper, but turns out to be quite natural once it's uploaded to my brain. Whatever the reason, it's always fun.

Has anyone else given this a go?

Such stuff as dreams are made on

Our memories are rounded in a sleep

Let an astrophysicist teach you a little something about learning Shakespeare. Yes, Neil deGrasse Tyson has helped me on my journey toward good memorization. The above video, which explains what biologists are finding out about the function of sleep in all animals' lives, points out that sleep is more than just rest. Sleep is like the great defragmenter of our brains, rearranging our memories of the day, organizing our jumbled thoughts and helping us access new memories more efficiently.

Just as Neil does in the video, I perform new memory tasks (repeating my speech of the week) right before bed. As I'm drifting off, I read the speech in my mind's eye. The next morning, while driving to work, I make myself repeat the speech at least two times without assistance. I find it works better than practicing in the middle of the day and expecting the same results. The lines I learned tend to get mixed up and lost with all the other events of the day. But when shoehorning some Shakespeare in before bed, the lines are more clear to me the next day.

After weeks and weeks of doing this on my own, I found this recent Talk of the Nation story on sleep and memory. Some subjects were trained in the morning and tested later in the day, and others were trained in the evening and tested the next morning. The study confirms what Neil's colleagues found; we tend to perform better with memory tasks if we are allowed to "sleep on it" before testing our recall.

I like to think of memories as tire tracks in a dirt road. The more the car or bike runs through that exact path, the deeper the grooves become. Also, the more your verbalize, the more than words become facial muscle memory, much as an athlete strives to achieve when drilling with a specified set of movements.

I can't tell you how many repetitions it takes to achieve an expert ease with a speech, but it's probably in the thousands. The first speech I ever deliberately memorized, Hamlet's "To be or not to be," took a few weeks to get down and I have often repeated it to myself over the years. I can do that one upside-down, drunk as a sailor if I have to.

Nowadays, it's a bit more scientific. On the first day, I start with four-line chunks. I usually repeat them until I can say them with my eyes closed (~10 times). By the time I've got all the lines of the speech down, I've probably repeated it all about 20-30 times total. Just before bed, I say it at least two more times. The next morning, two more times. After dinner, five to ten times, plus at least two more before bed, depending on how long it is and how tired I get. Over six days, that's well over 100 repetitions of a full speech in a week.

I often revisit old speeches from weeks before to keep them fresh. The grooves get filled in with rain and mud and I have to keep rolling through them. I've managed to add a handful of newer speeches to the "I can do it in my sleep" list, such as King Henry V's "Unto the breach" and Berowne's "Why? all delights are vain." Richard III's opening soliloquy is almost there as well as "All the world's a stage."

Sometimes, I feel like I'll NEVER get a certain speech as trippingly as that first one, but I've proven myself wrong already. It's a shocking, fantastic feeling, and I highly recommend it.