Some of the texts young monks memorize are up to thirty pages long, with hundreds of pages of commentary. "We'd start with twenty lines we'd memorize in the morning, then repeat several times during the day with the text as a prompt. Then at night we'd recite the lines in the dark, completely from memory. The next day we'd add another twenty lines, and recite all forty-until we could recite the entire text."
Smart practice maven.Anders Ericsson has taught a similar tal ent to American college students, who by dint of sheer persistence learned to repeat back correctly up to 102 random digits (that level of digit recall took four hundred hours of focused practice). As Ericsson found, a keen attention lets learners find smarter ways to perform-whether at the keyboard or in the maze of the mind.
"When it comes to this application of attention," Jinpa con fided, "it takes some doggedness. You need persistence even though it may be boring."
Such remarkable memorization seems to expand the capacity of working memory, where for a few seconds we store whatever we are paying attention to as we pass it on to long-term memory. But that seeming increase is not a true stretching of what we can hold in attention at any one moment. The secret is chunking-a form of smart practice.
"While His Holiness speaks," Jinpa told me, "I know the gist of what he's 'saying, and most of the time I know the particular text he's talking about. I make a shorthand note for the key points,though I rarely consult the notes when I speak." That shorthand indicates chunking.
As Herbert Simon, the late Nobel laureate and professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, told me some years ago, "Every expert has acquired something like this memory ability" within her specialty. "Memory is like an index; experts have approximately 50,000 chunks of familiar units of information they recognize. For a physician, many of those chunks are symptoms."