Memorization

London cabbies have been an iconic fixture in any London street scene for decades. Now the black taxi cab and their extraordinary cabbies are the focal point of a new expedition into Alzheimer’s research.

Cabbies have an incredible knowledge of London streets that seems to confer some protection against Alzheimer’s Disease—this could be clinically relevant to struggling patients, or those seeking to mitigate their risks.

Since 1865 London cabbies have been required to pass a difficult test known as “the Knowledge” to prove that they can find 100,000 businesses and landmarks in a labyrinth of tens of thousands of streets.

The series of exams — which take three to four years to complete — have been hailed as possibly the most difficult memorization test in the world. To be fully licensed to drive anywhere in London, a cabbie needs to know how to plot routes without a GPS on about 26,000 streets spanning a six-mile radius from London’s center point.

But London cabbies’ skills are now being tested for a different reason: to determine whether their brains hold clues that might be applied to Alzheimer’s research. A project called Taxi Brains is underway at University College London to study the brains of London cabbies as they map out taxi routes while undergoing MRI scans. The hippocampus regions of taxi drivers’ brains — which play an important role in learning and memory — appear to grow larger the longer the drivers are on the job while the same region is known to shrink in people with Alzheimer’s.

Research lead, Prof. Hugo Spiers said, “Maybe there’s something very protective about working out your spatial knowledge on a daily basis, like these guys do. It may not necessarily be spatial, but just using your brain rather than Google Maps might actually help—in the same way that physical fitness is important.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God’s Word also confirms that Scripture memorization is crucial to our spiritual health. We must not use Google, smartphones, and the Internet as a crutch in “hiding God’s Word in our hearts” (Psa. 119:11).

Author Jen Wilkin writes:

I learned to cook with the most basic tools under the tutelage of my step-mother. Bacon was fried in a cast-iron skillet, turned with a fork. Pie crust was formed with a wire pastry cutter in a mixing bowl. Biscuits were cut using an empty can. Simple tools, employed faithfully, yielding all manner of goodness.

But as my interest in cooking grew, I moved on to more complicated tools that promised less work or mess. My kitchen brimmed with single-use utensils and fancy appliances, but the crispy bacon, flaky pie crusts, and warm biscuits of my early years did not improve. In many cases, they degraded, or the task of locating and employing the right implement dulled my interest.

It is possible to overcomplicate simple practices that yield good things. Just as with cooking, so with reading our Bibles. The availability of online commentaries, lexicons, interlinear Bibles, and searchable databases can make us forget basic, tried-and-true tools that serve us well. When it comes to Bible reading, avoid overcomplicating the recipe.

Consider recovering these five simple “utensils” that may have gotten lost in the drawer:

• Simple repetitive reading of a Book of the Bible without stopping to analyze it.
• Consult a map in the back of your Bible to draw you into the setting.
• Keep a Bible timeline to put events into historical perspective.
• Compare several English translations in hard-to-understand passages.
• Check an English dictionary for unfamiliar words.

In an interview, actor Anthony Hopkins said that when he gets a movie script, he reads through it between one hundred and two hundred times before production. He makes notes in the margins. He scribbles and doodles and imagines how it would look on stage or screen. By the time Hopkins is finished, that script is internalized. He knows his character. He knows his (and everyone else's) lines. He's able to improvise, and he's a personification of the script.

If a Hollywood actor reads a script a hundred times, why can't I read a book in the Bible a hundred times? Here's an example. Nancy selects the book of James and starts reading it over and over. James takes fewer than ten minutes to read. As Nancy got into the project and the days passed, she began to see how certain themes emerged and repeated in the book. She began to get a sense of the author's personality and convictions. Nancy became so familiar with this epistle she could think through it with her eyes closed, and she began looking at her everyday life through the practical lens of its contents.

Harriet Tubman was a spy who, even in moments of extreme danger, demonstrated nothing but raw, calm courage. Born into slavery in the 1820s, Harriet was nearly killed when her master hurled a metal object at her. She staged a daring escape in 1849, then spent years rescuing hundreds out of slavery and leading them to safety. Her code name was Moses, because she never lost a single escapee. During the Civil War, she became a secret agent for the Union Army, working behind enemy lines to scout out the territory. Despite a bounty on her head, she always managed to evade capture.

A devout follower of Christ, Tubman spent much time learning, memorizing, and meditating on various verses in the Bible, such as her beloved Isaiah 16:3: "Hide the fugitives, do not betray the refugees." As she pondered the passages, she turned them into prayers, and in prayer she learned to practice God's presence. "I prayed all the time," she told her biographer, "about my work, everywhere; I was always talking to the Lord. When I went to the horse trough to wash my face and took up the water in my hands, I said, 'Oh, Lord, wash me, make me clean.' When I took up the towel to wipe my face and hands, I cried, 'Oh, Lord, for Jesus' sake, wipe away all my sins!' When I took up the broom and began to sweep, I groaned, 'Oh, Lord, whatsoever sin there be in my heart, sweep it out, Lord, clear and clean.'"

Possible Preaching Angles: In this way, Harriet forged a personality of action and audacity. She built a mind-set that transcended her background and transformed her life. And we can do the same as we habitually hide God's Word in our hearts.

To explain how Scripture meditation goes beyond hearing, reading, studying, and even memorizing as a means of taking in God's Word, author Donald Whitney provides the analogy of a cup of tea:

In this analogy your mind is the cup of hot water and the tea bag represents your intake of Scripture. Hearing God's Word is like one dip of the tea bag into the cup. Some of the tea's flavor is absorbed by the water, but not as much as would occur with a more thorough soaking of the bag. Reading, studying, and memorizing God's Word are like additional plunges of the tea bag into the cup. The more frequently the tea enters the water, the more permeating its effect. Meditation, however, is like immersing the bag completely and letting it steep until all the rich tea flavor has been extracted and the hot water is thoroughly tinctured reddish brown. Meditation on Scripture is letting the Bible brew in the brain. Thus we might say that as the tea colors the water, meditation likewise "colors" our thinking. When we meditate on Scripture it colors our thinking about God, about God's ways and his world, and about ourselves.

Editor's Note: You could also try this with a simple prop—a real tea bag placed in hot water. Use a glass mug so your people can see the tea permeate and change the color of the water.

Gordon MacDonald writes:

In the fall of 1956, I began my final year at the Stony Brook School, then a boys' college preparatory school in New York. Among the required courses that last year was Senior Bible, taught by the school's headmaster, Dr. Frank E. Gaebelein, a man who required us to memorize 300 verses of Scripture over the course of that year. If he met a student on the pathway from the class room to the dining hall, he might say, "Gordon, give me John 13:34 please." He expected us to recite the verse from memory without faltering.

One of the passages he tasked us to memorize was Psalm 46. For days we memorized, recited, memorized, recited until the Psalm 46 was part of us. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble period. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea…."

In the spring of 1957, Senior Bible ended. We put our index cards away, graduated from Stony Brook, and went off to college. Occasionally, I returned to Psalm 46. As a pastor I preached on it a few times.

Then 56 years passed and my doctor called me. "Gordon, I have some difficult news for you. There's a tumor in the back of your head in the lining of the brain. It is not malignant, but it will have to come out." I have spent my whole life helping other people face doctor-call moments like these. Now it was my turn and the very first thing that began to surge through my mind was: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble period. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed…."

When I was a teenager, a brilliant and godly man pumped my friends and me full of Scripture. But now his effort is paying off. Thanks to Dr. Gaebelein and Psalm 46, I may be concerned and cautious, but I am not inclined to be fearful.

In her book Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus, Lois Tverberg retells the following story about a famous first century rabbi named Rabbi Akiva:

One day as Rabbi Akiva was shepherding his flocks, he noticed a tiny stream trickling down a hillside, dripping over a ledge on its way toward the river below. Below was a massive boulder. Surprisingly, the rock bore a deep impression. The drip, drip, drip of water over the centuries had hollowed away the stone. Akiva commented, "If mere water can do this to hard rock, how much more can God's Word carve a way into my heart of flesh?" Akiva realized that if the water had flowed over the rock all at once, the rock would have been unchanged. It was the slow but steady impact of each small droplet, year after year, that completely reformed the stone.

Lois Tverberg comments:

When I first started studying the Bible's Hebraic context, I wanted one commentary that would teach me everything, one class that would explain it all. If I could learn all the "right answers" in one marathon event, all the better. I find now that God likes to reveal truth over many years, as I study alongside others. I realize now that big "splashes" aren't usually God's way of doing things. Instead, through the slow drip of study and prayer, day after day, year after year, he shapes us into what he wants us to be.

Scripture memorization can be a powerful practice that not only helps you to remember a truth but also to understand it better.

This idea draws support from an article in the journal Science about the effectiveness of different methods of studying for schoolwork. The article reported on research performed by Jeffrey D. Karpicke and Janell R. Blunt of Purdue University, which compared the effectiveness of several methods of learning.

New York Times author Pam Belluck describes one of the experiments in the study:

The students were divided into four groups. One did nothing more than read the text for five minutes. Another studied the passage in four consecutive five-minute sessions.

A third group engaged in "concept mapping," in which, with the passage in front of them, they arranged information from the passage into a kind of diagram, writing details and ideas in hand-drawn bubbles and linking the bubbles in an organized way.

The final group took a "retrieval practice" test. Without the passage in front of them, they wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test.

A week later all four groups were given a short-answer test that assessed their ability to recall facts and draw logical conclusions based on the facts.

The students who learned the material best were those in the final group, who took a retrieval practice test following their reading. These students outperformed the second best study method by roughly 50 percent in their ability to recall information one week later.

The lead author of the research, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University, offered an explanation for why this method of study could be so effective. "I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge. I think that we're tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval."

In other words, when we try to remember something, it can help us understand it. It can force us to think further about what we learned, to "reconstruct our knowledge," as Karpicke said, and to organize the material in our minds.

For those who are motivated to understand the Bible, memorizing and then meditating on the Bible can be a powerful way to grow in understanding and to renew the mind. Each time we attempt to repeat a Bible verse in the process of memorization, it is a retrieval test that helps clarify the truth of God's Word in our minds.

One final thought from the Times article offers hope to those who become discouraged when trying to memorize material, because when they try to recall a Bible verse they keep getting it wrong. Belluck, the author of the N. Y. Times article, wrote, "The Purdue study supports findings of a recent spate of research showing learning benefits from testing, including benefits when students get questions wrong."

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you [that] you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.

—C. S. Lewis

Timothy Larsen, Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, reflects on the importance—and difficulty in today's age—of Scripture memorization:

A few particularly rewarding, compact, and potent [biblical] texts are worthy of not only deep reading but even memorization. This is the most counterintuitive of practices for my students. Why memorize a text that you can access electronically any time you wish? This attitude indicates a failure to grasp the way in which a text can permanently inhabit one's inner life. Ask yourself: If you were stranded, what resources would you have by heart to sustain you? Who are you without Google?

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy was able to address a shocked nation promptly and off-the-cuff, quoting Aeschylus from memory: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." I wonder which of today's public figures have such rich and resonant resources within them.

Increasingly, therefore, I am trying intentionally to practice two countercultural habits: first, reading long, substantive books; and second, memorizing short but weighty texts.

Used by permission

Most of us would agree that singing worship songs in our gatherings is important. But do we realize just how important those songs are to our growth as believers? In a New York Times article entitled "In One Ear and Out the Other," Natalie Angier examines the limited power of human memory. She points out that while we can't quite seem to remember the birthday of a loved one, we can't quite forget every word of the Gilligan's Island theme song. Why is that? It seems that if you add a little music to something, it's more likely to be remembered. That's how the brain is wired to work. Angier writes:

Though scientists used to believe that short- and long-term memories were stored in different parts of the brain, they have discovered that what really distinguishes the lasting from the transient is how strongly the memory is engraved in the brain…. The deeper the memory, the more readily and robustly an ensemble of like-minded neurons will fire.

This process, of memory formation by neuronal entrainment, helps explain why some of life's offerings weasel in easily and then refuse to be spiked. Music, for example. "The brain has a strong propensity to organize information and perception in patterns, and music plays into that inclination," said Michael Thaut, a professor of music and neuroscience at Colorado State University. …

A simple melody with a simple rhythm and repetition can be a tremendous mnemonic device. "It would be a virtually impossible task for young children to memorize a sequence of 26 separate letters if you just gave it to them as a string of information," Dr. Thaut said. But when the alphabet is set to the tune of the ABC song with its four melodic phrases, preschoolers can learn it with ease.

In other words, the hymns or choruses we sing—which combine Scriptural truths with moving melodies—teach us things that won't easily be forgotten. That should probably give us pause—pause to reflect on the value of what we have in the hymnals tucked away in our pews; pause to revisit what is being projected on the screens that line the front of our worship auditoriums; pause to remember that God has given us a powerful tool in music and its potent relationship to human memory.

It was a small adjustment that could make a big difference. Sure, it was against NASCAR rules, but almost everyone else was doing it. So crew chief Tim Shutt crawled under the No. 20 car of Mike McLaughlin, who races on the NASCAR Busch circuit.

"Joe [Gibbs, team owner] is adamant that we don't cheat," says Shutt, a relatively new believer who encountered Christ at a Christian retreat for participants in the racing industry. "Most teams figure that as long as you get away with it, it's not cheating."

"I said to Mike that morning in practice, 'If we're no good in practice, I'll put this piece—the illegal piece—on. Probably 30 other teams are doing it." I was justifying it.

"I got up under the car, I got halfway through putting it on, and that verse, 'Seek ye first the kingdom of God,' came flashing in red in front of me, and whoa, that was it. I said, 'I'm leaving this up to you, God.'" Shutt didn't put the piece on the car.

McLaughlin won the race. It was Talladega, one of the biggest races of 2001.

"When we won, the first thing that came to my mind was that verse," Tim says. "God wanted to show himself to me."