Introducing Mr. Roy G. Biv.
We’ve reached a moment in the digitization of human affairs when memory, for the first time, takes the form of a question: what is it I need to remember in order to be happy?
That might seem like an impossible question to answer, especially right now, at the outset. So I’ll come back to it. For now, let’s talk about mnemonics. Specifically, let’s talk about a guy named Roy G. Biv. Most people know about Roy G. Biv. His name (or, rather, the acronym ROYGBIV) is a mnemonic for remembering the order of the colors in a rainbow. This isn’t a vital piece of information for anyone—including, I suspect, scientists who create lasers—but the mnemonic’s a fantastic success. It’s so good that people continue to believe “indigo” is a sovereign, independent color, very distinct from “blue,” for no other reason than its ongoing status as a part of ROYGBIV.
At this point you’re probably thinking, “He’s also going to make a joke about calling the color purple ‘violet.’” But I’m not. It’s no laughing matter. The reason “indigo” and “violet” became canonical parts of the rainbow are related to the mysterious inner workings of ROYGBIV.
The phrase starts with a name and a middle initial: “Roy G.” What kind of name is it? It’s avuncular, old-fashioned, and a bit goofy. It’s slightly distinctive, I guess; it sounds like a name somebody wrote inside a baseball cap using a Bic pen. But it’s not magical on its own. The trick is the last name: “Biv.” Mister—Biv. This picnic bench is hereby dedicated to the memory of our beloved father, Roy. Gee. Biiivvvvvv.
It's a mess. It's like somebody took Roy's original last name, stuck a switchblade into it, and let out all the air. It dies in your chest, goes flat on your tongue, like a housefly slowly drowning in beer. It’s like a sneeze, a snore, or something incompetent being attempted on a kazoo. The surprise of it, after the normalness of “Roy G,” is what makes it sizzle. “ROYGBIV” exists at the intersection of Dadaism and Norman Rockwell, and that’s ultimately most of the reason we love and remember it. It’s also beautiful to be able to picture, all at once, the tawny order of visible light. The rainbow, like most things worth remembering, isn’t fungible—and it’s my view that the problem of modern memory is precisely the difficulty we have distinguishing what is fungible from everything that isn’t. But, in the case of the rainbow, the order of its gradated stripes is a poem. It resonates in sync with a million half-remembered, dappled hours. The joy you feel untangling that acronym sparks true.
The perfection of ROYGBIV raises a lot of onrushing secondary questions. To me, the biggest questions are these: first, are mnemonics more helpful than one thinks? Second, what’s the value of knowing the rainbow’s colors in order? I think, if you’re honest, that the second question will bother you more than the first. Everyone likes mnemonics, at least in theory; they seem like useful tools, and we sometimes even feel bad if we can’t master them and generate a few ourselves. But I suspect most people don’t think it’s important to memorize the colors of the rainbow, for reasons that have very little to do with rainbow. Our impatience with ROYGBIV is a consequence of the way we handle data now. Data-handling makes us miserable; and, as suggested above, the art of recollecting is also a drama about our happiness. This drama unfolds in “mind palaces,” where memory turns out to be everything real palaces, themselves, once symbolized. A refuge. A lifestyle. A statement of intent.
You Can Always Tell A “Great Book”: They Are The Optional Ones.
If you know about Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, then you know that it’s one of those books most people want to know about and then not read. Knowing the summary of it—average journalist guy learns amazing techniques, ends up winning obscure memory competition, completing his own Horatio Alger story—generally produces two reactions:
—Oh, thank goodness. They’ve solved the memory problem. Anyone can improve their memory. This one guy did it. He wrote a whole book about memory, and he wasn’t anybody special. I could remember things better, too, if I had time for crazy parlor tricks.
—Wait, didn’t we already read this book? It was called The Game, and it was about picking women up, right? Lonely journalist learns special tricks, sees a profound side to them, and is never lonely again. (Or it was called The Biggest Bluff, about a journalist who learns special poker tricks… or… etc.)
Let’s investigate this a little further, though. It’s not really fair to ignore everything Foer accomplished on the grounds that it’s frightening to us, yet that’s exactly why we do ignore it. We’re afraid of what remembering means. Calling his transformation a “parlor trick” is an act of disguised aggression. Foer invites that aggression by winning contests that recreate, symbolically, the exact kinds of data dumps we non-competitors also collide with, all the time, much to our detriment.
There are two problems with the data we encounter (and “fail” to remember) most frequently in our lives. The first is that it’s meant to be stored in a digital database accessed through a variety of portals (employee, consumer, etc.) with different permissions and interfaces. Most of the ways human beings interface with these databases are biased, severely, in favor of the database. Here are five examples:
-A phone company prints your account number on your monthly statement, including two badly placed dashes (“01-90943213-22”). You, then, have to find this random number in order to make changes to your account. A customer service agent can probably also find your account using your name, Social Security Number, and/or telephone number. So why don’t they?
a. Because numbers are easier to program into computerized voice systems (automated switchboards).
b. Because a string of numbers is easier for an agent to recognize, on a static-y phone line, and to input correctly on their first attempt.
c. To buffer incoming calls by giving the caller something time-consuming to do (i.e., finding their account number).
d. To discourage people from making major account changes in the first place.
e. Because whoever programmed the database led with the unique numerical identifier, and attached all the real-world information to that. The interface is just blindly following suit.
f. In other words, the company makes you think and speak like a computer (“My account number is 01-90943213-22”), not because it’s good for you, but because it’s better for them, and you don’t have any choice in the matter. They’re intentionally delaying you, by minutes or even days, simply by wielding your unique identifier. Of course you dream of having a computer-like memory that could eliminate these obstacles. Of course you resent the very idea of acquiring such a memory.
—You get a shipping confirmation email. When you open it, you see a link to your tracking information, but no tracking number. The link works. There is tracking information, but no tracking number there, either.
—A customer service exchange generates a random, ad hoc email alias. It’s specific to your query, rather than giving you an agent’s permanent corporate address. (This way, you can’t bother that specific employee with future crises, or disrupt the company’s queue processing.) So, okay, the dispute ends up being named “zen-1334266.req@packagedirect.com.” Great. Now I dare you to find that email thread, again, after archiving it. That’s the only email Package Direct has ever sent you—right?
—Every two-step authorization code you have ever received that was a) sent to a different device than the one you were using, or b) sent to a different app, or c) that couldn’t be copy/pasted for some other reason (for example, because it’s embedded in an email graphic).
Quick! Stop everything you’re doing, look at a different screen, open an app, remember six digits. Input them over here. (Please note: these numbers will only remain valid for 15 minutes.)
—This is my personal favorite: mixing numbers and real language in order to name an app or operating system. Apple, for example, is currently on its 17th version of its “iOS” operating system, which runs on iPhones. iOS has a number, but no codename. The current MacOS 14, meanwhile, is codenamed “Sonoma.” It follows in the footsteps of “Ventura,” “Monterey,” and “Big Sur.”
Those codenames are awful. They’re all places in California, but they don’t relate to each other in any way. For instance, “Sonoma” is a county; “Big Sur” is a town. Sonoma, Big Sur, and Monterey are all in Northern California, but sandwiched in there is Ventura, a county and city far to the South.
Obviously, Apple has tried to automate things so you don’t have to remember what system’s running on your phone; all you have to do is update your iPhone when you’re prompted to do so. That works okay unless you’re searching for online help with your devices. Then, even on Apple’s own help pages, you’re either stuck scurrying for more numbers (“Am I running at least iOS 14?”) or paging through Wikipedia to figure out if an app developed for MacOS Yosemite (which is not a county, or a city, but a national park) will work on your laptop.
This is only a glimpse of all the different numbers we have to store, recite, forget, and retrieve, over and over, in the course of daily life. So Problem #1 is this: the numbers that get assigned to us, which we use to identify and authorize everything we do, were never intended to be congenial to us. They’re friendly to machines.
Problem #2 is the need, on all our parts, to baffle hackers, malware, and automated cyberattacks. Our memories and workflows are constantly disrupted by authentication codes, CAPTCHA tests, and anonymizers (like the ones, described above, that hide an agent’s real email ID from you when she replies to your customer service inquiry). Even if you could remember all your debit card numbers, credit card numbers, account numbers, usernames, and passwords, you’d still be processing junk data all the time. Since this kind of data only resides in our “short-term” memory, it’s largely biodegradable from our brain’s point-of-view, but it still constitutes an exhausting drain on our “working memory,” which has a very limited scope.
Such disposable, fungible data is precisely what Foer stores in his “mind palace” in order to win contests. The things he’s assigned to learn are randomized, totally unfamiliar, and reset before every new contest. Meanwhile, in a normal person’s long-term memory, only familiar, meaningful, stable facts manage to thrive. Performers (including Foer) aren’t restoring an ancient, mnemonic superpower to its rightful place when they rattle off random sequences correctly; they’re doing The Binary Dance, aka Little Man & The Big Computer. And they do it very well.
But because Foer’s system for remembering the suit and number of a playing card (or other “strings,” like the last names of strangers) must work independently of the way our memories really evolved, just to function, it’s not all that useful. If you adapt yourself to the machine, and try to “remember everything” by learning to mentally arrange sequences of things within familiar “mental” landscapes, you won’t be a single step closer to remembering your wedding anniversary one week before it occurs.
Anyone interested in “good” and “bad” memory owes Foer thanks. He can help us overcome our fears about “running out of hard drive space.” He even points the way towards a grander theory of memory than any we currently possess. The greatest laws of the universe apply just as much to “parlor tricks” as they do to rocket flights, after all. I’ll unveil some of these laws in the next installment of “How To Improve Your Memory.”