Years ago, an actor named John Basinger managed to learn one of the great works of the poet John Milton by the letter. How do i do it? Could we get something similar?
In 1993, the actor John Basinger set out to learn the poet John Milton's masterpiece: 'Paradise lost', a collection of poems of more than 500 pages from the Cátedra publishing house.
It took 9 years to learn it by heart and in 2001 he recited it. As it was so extensive, he had to divide his "exhibition" into 3 days. reciting it continuously would have taken 24 hours.
How did you get it?
John basinger
Every day he devoted an hour of study to memorize 7 verses. According to the magazine Memory it is roughly the amount of information our short-term memory can retain.
The funny thing about it is that learned the verses while walking on a treadmill And then I would go over them while lifting weights. He was not only exercising his mind, he was also exercising his body 🙂
This great retentive capacity caught the attention of a psychologist named John Seamon and he contacted the actor to ask if he could investigate his case. John Basinger's response was very striking: I've been waiting for years for a call from someone like you.
What was your great secret to memorizing this great collection of more than 500 pages?
We have counted the method, that is, how he memorized it and how long it took but now we are going to know the key that allowed this actor to recite this collection of poems from memory and without any failure.
John Basinger told Wesleyan University researchers that he didn't just memorize words. John Basinger told them the following:
The real challenge was not just memorizing it, but get to know him deeply enough to really tell Milton's story ».
He wasn't just memorizing words. He endowed them with a meaning and interpreted all the verses together; it endowed them with meaning.
The researchers made contact with John when he was already 74 years old, therefore, his memory was no longer as fit as in 2001. However, and despite the passage of time he was still able to recite the poems with a success rate of 88%. Percentage that increased to 98% if he was helped with the first verses.
The funny thing is that his memory did not fail in the middle of the book or at the end. They say that we remember better what we studied at the beginning. In John's case, this data was irrelevant.
The conclusions of the study carried out on John Basinger
The first and obvious conclusion is that John Basinger had a prodigious memory. The second is that 10 years of study (at the rate of one hour a day) are enough to become an expert in anything: chess, aeronautics or, as in John's case, an expert in memorizing texts.
However, the great key to everything and, the researchers also pointed out, was that the actor endowed all the verses with meaning. He did not repeat words like a parrot. He ended up understanding the collection of poems as a whole in which each verse was related to the others.
He recited the poems but he really listened to them. I wanted to understand them, I wanted to understand the great work of Milton.
The researchers also noted in their conclusions that John Basinger spun one poem from the next, like someone learning a song. The book was part of a whole. He also endowed his recital with gestures and you could see how he got excited in certain passages.
Another key was that he exercised while learning the poems. It is well proven that exercise oxygenates the brain and promotes memorization.
A curiosity that John Basinger told the researchers
John Basinger visualized in his mind "Paradise Lost" like a great cathedral by which he was advancing through it as he was reciting the poems.
These cognitive fictional spaces were already used by classics such as Cicero.