"Maybe our memory is in our body as well as in our cranium. "

Here's one of my favorite quotes, which is on my blog:

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. W.B. Yeats

Now, from a wonderful post on The Times:

"How do actors memorise their lines?
Are their brains bigger than ours? In a public discussion held at New York’s Columbia University this month, the RSC’s Michael Boyd and Dr Oliver Sacks compared notes:

( I'm going to simply note my favorite quotes. Anyone who's interested should read and listen to the whole thing:)

MB:" And there was a further improvement when they were not only together on stage, but also together with an audience. Then they became absolutely pitch-perfect and word-perfect, with an urgent need to communicate. I think that says something about where we keep our memory. Maybe our memory is in our body as well as in our cranium."

MB: "It goes side by side with something I just came across. I was invited to the Royal Academy to talk about space, on a panel that included a neurologist. I was galvanised by his account of some research he’d done on London taxi drivers that examined their hippocampi - the part of the brain associated with memory. Not only were their hippocampi unusually enlarged after taking the Knowledge, and further enlarged after a year or so of actually doing it, it was again clear that these taxi drivers remembered places and destinations through the physical sense of turning left and turning right.

They could not remember where a street was unless they “physicalised” mentally the journey to that street. So this neurologist was interested in our sense of space being an important part of the process of how we remember."

OS: "I have written about a striking example of this with a musician and musicologist, Clive Wearing, who had his hippocampus systems wiped out by an encephalitis 20 years ago. He can’t remember anything much for more than seven seconds. But this man is able to conduct a choir, conduct an orchestra, play the piano or sing long, complex pieces of music. His abilities to perform musically are entirely spared. If you ask him in terms of knowledge, “Do you know such and such a Bach prelude and fugue?”, he will look blank or say no. But put his hands on the piano, sing the first note and he’s off.

And this sort of preservation of procedural memory may apply not only to music. I know an eminent actor who has also had damage to his hippocampi and has lost the memory of much of his past. But all of his acting skills, all his enormous repertoire, from Euripides to Beckett, is all there. So the sort of memory that is involved in acting involves much more of the brain than just the hippocampi."

MB: "There is definitely a moment for every creative artist when there is loss of self. It’s not even just creative artists. I think everyone can remember those moments when you are “in the zone”, when you’re not aware of what you’re doing, when you’re not consciously trying to recall what you should be doing, you are simply in the act of doing it."

MB: "There’s a valve in a brilliant actor that is “deficient”. They’re good at embodying emotion, but they’re not very good at shutting it out. I think that’s why there is something inherently unstable about the condition of being an actor that’s also creative. Brilliant actors who survive to have a career manage that “deficiency” extremely well and lead perfectly normal lives."

OS: "Let’s connect this with embodiment. I watched De Niro and Robin Williams when they were taking on characters from Awakenings [the 1990 film about his work]. In particular with De Niro, sometimes when we had dinner after a day’s filming, I would observe that his foot was turned inwards, or that he had some postures which belonged to Leonard L, the character he’d been portraying and embodying, and these fragments were still in him. I actually got a little frightened of the literalness of embodiment with him. Somehow he seemed to be becoming too much like Leonard L, and I feared Leonard L might be taking over.

On one occasion he asked me to advise him a little bit on how people with Parkinsonism might fall if they had no postural reflexes. And in the middle of my explanation, just as I said that such people might fall heavily backwards without warning, he fell heavily backwards - on me. And at that moment I thought: he’s not acting, he’s got it. He’s actually become Parkinsonian through acting it so well."

"Audience Q: You gave the example of when you sat around with your actors and tried to get them to remember their lines first, versus physically going through the motions. What’s the difference between a speech act and a physical embodied act?

MB: Speech is the most physically intimate act possible. It comes from the wet bits inside you. The air I’m using is coming from way down inside, even though I’ve got bad posture, and just the pure boring business of retrieving these lines is hard to do when you are not engaged in the entire act. I would say they are best unseparated.

OS: I imagine it’s similar with music in a way - although you have to learn the notes first, you then have to forget the notes to play the music. Otherwise you remain a virtuoso, and not a musician."