L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, MAY 18, 2017 www.italoamericano.org L'Italo-Americano 2 NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS Places, reminiscence and emotional memory W ho knows how many times we have seen pictures of Rome or Pompeii, postcards of Venice, snapshots of Florence or Pisa, corners of Naples or Palermo, brochures of Turin, Milan, Bologna. These images represent the most well-known and the most touristy version of Italy, the one described, told, promot- ed and sold by tour guides. The many that have already been so fortunate as to have vis- ited these places, will find them- selves saying: here, there, I was there! Right behind that corner there was that building..., we ate in that nice little restaurant there and then walked over and saw that monument... Images arouse memories, awaken emotions, tell stories and experiences. Various peo- ple, meeting someone new, situ- ations, odd experiences, pur- chases in a shop, moments of exhaustion, the temperature of that exact moment, or the food we ate during an outing will come to mind. In most cases, when we go back to a place we have experi- enced personally, we are flooded with sensations, we rarely observe apathy restraining the neuronal mechanism that is repeated each time our brain stores data and places it in our memory database, ready for the next use. This also means that we usu- ally do not see the one who saw that photo taken. We certainly see the place, the context, the characters, the beauty of the image, which in turn can trans- mit emotions, draw us in or leave us indifferent, but we tend to overcome it, and to go even fur- ther. We climb over a perspec- tive that is not our own, rebuild it and let ourselves be transported away from the experience we have already experienced. Likewise, if we look at a pho- tograph of ours, we fill it with a thousand other sensations based on what is portrayed by the col- ors, by the lights. We often give more value to images that are blurred or in motion because we were able to capture the exact moment that was important to us, which is better than any other photo in the memory album, even if they are perfect, by the book. In fact, if we show them to others, we flood them with invis- ible details in the picture. This process is also known as "Memory of Cicero Loci". The greatest speaker in Roman history, born in 106 AD In Arpino, near the current Frosinone, from a cheerful fami- ly that allowed him the best stud- ies in rhetoric and philosophy, used a simple technique to remember things: he linked thoughts to images and put them in order throughout different places. In practice, 2,000 years before the development of neuro- science, through a sort of "men- tal image walk", he transformed short-term memory into long- term memory. He simply knew intuitively that the brain is able to remember through images far better than through words. This ability is linked to partic- ular areas in the right cerebral hemisphere, the part that, simpli- fying it, is considered to be our creative area and is the one that manages space. Here the images are cataloged along with a whole range of additional information: tactile, sound, taste, spatial, tem- poral, etc. And it is due to this information "overload" that we remember more than just a word or a street name: the images acti- vate a real mental representation of reality. "Loci" in Latin means "places." Cicero, in order to remember his long prayer with- out needing notes, translated the key points of the prayer into images. Today, what is also called Journey Method or Roman Room, is considered a method of memory enhancement and a technique of storing information even when topics are unrelated to each other, and the imagina- tive technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans was first described by Frances A. Yates (1966) in his book The Art of Memory. What we all do with photos is often the reverse, though the principle is the same: pictures spark a rush of memories within us. In fact, if we go to Rome after seeing a picture of the Colosseum, we will hardly be able to remember that photo- graph: we will replace it with what we have seen, with all of its emotional, as well as infor- mative, excess. Because the emotions we turn into feelings will fill up with meaningful images that, however beautiful they might be, can never replace what we saw with our senses or what we hold in our hearts. BARBARA MINAFRA

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