The Memory Palace and children's books

Our brief discussion on Tuesday about memory palaces brought to mind two of my favorite childhood books that combine spacial associations and repetition. The Napping House, by Audrey Wood, is about people and animals napping on a bed. Bears in the Night, by Stan and Jan Berenstain, is about seven bear siblings that sneak out of the house at night and go on an adventure.

The Napping House begins with a grandmother sleeping on a bed. A boy climbs on top of her to sleep, then a dog, cat, mouse, and finally a flea. Each person or animal becomes gradually smaller until the barely visible flea flies on top and wakes everyone up. Each page tells what is already on the bed, in addition to what just climbed on top. For each new napping thing on the bed, there is a specific adjective that accompanies it and reappears on each page with it. This and the fact that each thing gets smaller and smaller as they get higher and higher on the bed helps children to remember what comes next.

Bears in the Night remains to this day my favorite childhood story because I first learned to read from it. The bears sneak out their window at night, climb down the side of the house, go across the lawn and over the bridge, through the woods and up a hill, until they get scared by an owl in a nearby tree and retrace their path back into bed. Each page consists of what has previously been said about their path, in addition to their next movement. This was my favorite book as a child, and my parents read it to me so much that I eventually memorized it. I then began to associate the words that were said with what was written on the page, and thus began to read. What made this book so easy to memorize was the pictures that describes the ad-on on each page. I have even clearer memories of the vines on the side of the house, the brick bridge with the stream underneath, and the bug-eyed owl in the tree than I have of the exact words. Remembering the path that the bears took - where they were going - helped me to memorize the simple statements that were made about that path.

The use of spacial awareness in both these books acts as a sort of memory palace within each story. Remembering a path one takes or where one is sandwiched between other things helps us to remember the order that things occur.