[jorgenev]

> Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing

Is this a true fact, or just a story people keep repeating because it sounds interesting?

If it were true... how would we know? Presumably you would cite sources from Ancient Greece where people reported that they knew bards who could memorize a whole story with one listen, but like, there are sources from Ancient Greece claiming to know of a woman who was so ugly that looking at her could turn a man to stone.

We can kind of sanity check the claim by looking at modern peoples. Anthropologists have extensive experience with pre-literate peoples, and they do have fine memories --but not magical ones [1].

1. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/in...

[knodi123]

> If it were true... how would we know?

If it were true, how would they know?!?

It's like if my nephew came to my house and saw Star Wars, and then on the drive home with his mom, he told her the story and she (who never saw the movie) said "He recited the entire movie after one hearing!"

No, what he did was remember most of the plot outline (imperfectly), and describe several scenes (imperfectly), and reproduce the gist, more or less, of some of the dialogue... He's not some incredible savant, he's just a normal person who paid attention to a story. I mean, sure, he "can recite the whole thing after one hearing", but in a pre-literate society, how would you even double-check? It would take someone else with total recall to verify that the bard had total recall. So you have to assume storytellers have perfect memory in order to demonstrate that a storyteller has perfect memory.

[lazyasciiart]

No. It would take one person who had memorized the story, over however much repetition, to tell the story and then listen to the other person repeat it back. It's more like, if your nephew came to your house and saw Star Wars and then told you the story, and you, having seen the movie multiple times, said "well, that's actually not a perfect retelling".

[knodi123]

> It would take one person who had memorized the story, over however much repetition

From whom did this person hear it repeated over and over, perfectly, without variation? And who did THAT person find, capable of reciting a quarter million words in a specific order, multiple times without mistake? And so on.

At some point in the chain, you either have a person with an unverifiable claim of single-hearing perfect superhuman memory, OR you have a story repeated imperfectly which no one is capable of validating.

In your Star Wars analogy, remember that there's no DVD copy, and no way for me to have "seen the movie multiple times" without just pushing the whole "perfect memory" claim back one generation.

[lazyasciiart]

Maybe 250 people perfectly memorized 1000 words each. Maybe your nephew is attempting to retell the story to a theater full of obsessive nerds who had also just seen the film and had each had a five minute slot assigned for memorization.

[ramblerman]

I don't know which story you guys are telling at this point, but I think you both have lost the plot.

[VLM]

There's also a huge difference between telling a formulaic story with traditional style and some sort of sermon like moral statement, vs photographic memory of a "where's waldo" book.

For example, look at formulaic rebooted sequel Hollywood movies. Given less than a paragraph outline, you can recite the details of most movies pretty well. Consider the first Star Trek Reboot movie, doesn't that compress down to only a couple lines, even if you talk for hours about lens flare and pew-pew sound effects? The second reboot movie compresses down to perhaps one or two complete paragraphs worth of raw data, its at least twice as complicated as the first movie.

Something like the iconic original Star Wars was tight because it provided a new formula, a pretty cool formula, but within that formula which admittedly is difficult to learn, the story is also not terribly long.

I guess I'm getting at teach a Bard about Hollywood Star Wars films for awhile, then learning specific movies only takes one viewing and is easy to memorize.

If you know the Adventure Time world and in-jokes, each episode is like two lines of text to memorize, maybe.

[kanzure]

You could stripe the memory across multiple different people who are responsible for smaller fragments. Each person can be responsible for some number of shared fragments. See your issued handbook, subsection "Surviving information storage in ancient times". (They could also just write it down, they had that.)

[polm23]

I take it you're joking, but some vedas have features that work like error correcting codes that help them survive oral transmission unchanged.

http://www.hindupedia.com/en/Mathematics_of_the_Vedas#Error_...

[kanzure]

Not joking at all. Thank you for the link.

I recently proposed error correction codes for an entirely separate purpose: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/enzymaticsynthesis/WvDidIldm...

I would like to also add my support for some of the ideas expressed earlier in the thread regarding the questions around whether literacy negatively impacts human memory, especially in children or in studied aboriginal populations. There are even studies that show that the vividness of mental imagery is reduced in people who wear eyeglasses: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/imagery/Refractive%20e...

[knodi123]

> They could also just write it down, they had that.

Of course. That's why I stipulated a pre-literate society.

[shakil]

"In the ancient times, when writing was scarcely used, memory and oral transmission was exercised and strengthened to a degree now almost unknown" [1]

1. https://books.google.com/books?id=8fYNAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22The+ora...

[knodi123]

?!? Yes, that was the original claim. I challenged how we would prove such a thing, and so you quote a different random person making the same claim? That doesn't answer my question.

[devindotcom]

It wasn't rote memorization IIRC but a highly structured retelling that used all kinds of tricks to keep it poetic (epithets for characters that took up one, two, or three syllables for instance, used without fail in those situations) but still retained flexibility. Poets would tell the story of the Iliad differently depending on the audience, and I mean they're not going to tell the whole thing every night. But there would be epic competitions where they would.

[a_bonobo]

This is correct -

there are many mnemonic devices strewn throughout the text of the Illiad and the Odyssey, for example, 'rose-fingered dawn' shows up many, many times as a 'stopping point' for remembering.

There are many, many different manuscripts of the Homer's works which all had minor or major differences, depending on who wrote them down - there's one project that tries to pull them all together: http://www.homermultitext.org/about.html

Only relatively recently has there been 'one' Iliad, before that it was whatever the orator remembered, and memory isn't perfect

[jxramos]

I'm curious if it's true too. A current living source of folks memorizing stuff is the crowd of Hafiz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafiz_(Quran)

I wonder how that subset of the population would rank on their evaluation.