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The Memory Code

The traditional Aboriginal memory technique that unlocks the secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and ancient monuments the world over

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Lynne Kelly has discovered that a powerful memory technique used by the ancients can unlock the secrets of the Neolithic stone circles of Britain and Europe, the ancient Pueblo buildings in New Mexico and other prehistoric stone monuments across the world. We can still use the memory code today to train our own memories.

In the past, the elders had encyclopaedic memories. They could name all the animals and plants across the landscape, and the stars in the sky too. Yet most of us struggle to memorise more than a short poem.

Using traditional Aboriginal Australian songlines as the key, Lynne Kelly has identified the powerful memory technique used by indigenous people around the world. She has discovered that this ancient memory technique is the secret behind the great stone monuments like Stonehenge, which have for so long puzzled archaeologists.

The stone circles across Britain and northern Europe, the elaborate stone houses of New Mexico, the huge animal shapes at Nasca in Peru, and the statues of Easter Island all serve as the most effective memory system ever invented by humans. They allowed people in non-literate cultures to memorise the vast amounts of practical information they needed to survive.

In her fascinating book The Memory Code, Lynne Kelly shows us how we can use this ancient technique to train our memories today.

'She takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the past and around the world and into the minds of people who would not need to publish a book like this. They already knew it.' - Iain Davidson, Emeritus Professor, University of New England 

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 12, 2016
      In this intriguing, if not entirely persuasive, book, Australian science writer Kelly (Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies) links many prehistoric sites of monumental architecture to the need of preliterate cultures to memorize vast numbers of important facts. She begins by examining the techniques currently or recently in use that allow memory keepers among the Australian Aboriginal people, Navajo, Dogon, and others to retain information on hundreds of animal and plant species as well as culturally significant topics such as genealogies and customs. This is accomplished through the technique that the Greeks referred to as “the method of loci,” encoding knowledge to physical or mental spaces. Kelly describes her own use of these techniques, but not in enough detail for her work to truly be useful as a primer. She devotes the bulk of the book’s second half to linking such specific monumental sites as Stonehenge to her idea that a wide range of these sites were used by their creators as memory-encoding spaces. Kelly’s arguments are plausible—and persuasive where links exist between current cultures and predecessors, such as the Pueblo and the Ancestral Puebloans of Chaco Canyon—but her certitude is troublesome, and the conclusion that “the method of loci is the universal driver” is not supported by this work.

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  • English

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