When a study contains the words “memory” and “aging” it’s almost never good news. The steady degradation of our mental faculties as we age has been documented in depressing detail. If you’re over 30, you’re losing it—the only question is how fast.
So it’s nice when a study comes along suggesting that people post-50 are capable of remarkable mental feats. Take 74-year-old John Basinger. When he was 58, he decided on a lark to see if he could memorize Milton’s Paradise Lost. The whole thing. All 60,000-plus words. It took him nine years, but he pulled it off and has even recited it in public.
That takes three days. It’s a long poem.
Researchers wanted to discover Basinger’s secret and also how well he really knew the poem. Turns out, he memorized the poem in small segments—about seven lines a day (this is consistent with other research on what the immediate memory can hold). And it wasn’t just rote memorization: Basinger was attempting to comprehend the motivations of the characters, to gain a “deep, conceptual understanding of the poem.” He tried to connect with it emotionally.
The researchers tested his accuracy by prompting him with two lines from the poem and asking him to recite the next ten. They found that he made few errors and, when he did, they were usually errors of omission.
He’s not some memory superhero, though. Basinger has the same memory troubles that annoy most seniors (and plenty of us non-seniors, too). He forgets names, can’t find his keys, etc. He’s pretty much normal for his age, except for the memorizing-all-of-Paradise-Lost thing.
From the paper:
When viewed in the context of deliberate practice theory, we believe that our findings are in agreement with other research on world-class memory performers, which indicates that exceptional memorisers are made, not born.
You can go here to watch Basinger recite “Death Addresses Satan” from Book I. It’s spooky.
(Here’s the abstract for paper, titled “Memorising Milton’s Paradise Lost: A study of a septuagenarian exceptional memoriser.” The authors are John G. Seamon, Paawan V. Punjabi, and—wait, who’s the third author? Oh that’s right—Emily A. Busch.)
4 Responses to Memorizing Milton
cslaaschair - July 22, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Well, my father is 94 and in a nursing home for dementia and can still recite all of Il Paradiso by John Milton that he learned in high school….I am not sure that accomplishments like this are all that unusual….
commsadmin - July 22, 2010 at 3:57 pm
cslasschair–what you describe is not at all unusual. The point of the piece above was that the gentleman didn’t begin the memorization until he was 58 years old, testing the ability of a 50+ brain to memorize new material.Impressive feat, especially since he strove for more than rote memorization. Fun story. Thanks.
hamletnc - July 23, 2010 at 3:08 am
A couple of years ago, when I was 54 yo, I decided I should be able to recite some poems. I started with Kublai Khan by Coleridge, then Second Coming by Yeats, then The Raven by Poe, then more Coleridge: Frost at Midnight, The Nightingale and This Lime Tree Bower My Prison; then I embarked on Shakespeare and memorised all of Hamlet’s soliloquies and I’m working on all the sonnets (only 14 done so far). I do it by rote but it doesn’t take long. Of course, no-one is interested in hearing me recite but I enjoy saying them out loud when no-one else is around or just doing them in my head before I fall asleep.
jffoster - July 23, 2010 at 7:34 am
Do like I did when a boy, learn to quote Rudyard Kipling. And it has an added dividend I never anticipated — quoting Kipling annoys and drives the humanitiesist leftoisie and leftoveriat into almost as much hysteria as does the spectre of Sarah Palin!