Build a Medieval Castle
A. Michel Guyot, owner and restorer of Saint Fargeau castle in France, first had the idea of building a 13th-century style fortress following the discovery that the 15th-century red bricks of his castle obscured the stone walls of a much older stronghold. His dream was to build a castle just as it would have been in the Middle Ages, an idea which some found mildly amusing and others dismissed as outright folly. However, Maryline Martin project director - was inspired by the exciting potential for the venture to regenerate the region. It took several months to bring together and mobilise all the various different partners: architects, archaeologists and financial backers. A site in the heart of Guédelon forest was found: a site which offered not only all the resources required for building a castle a stone quarry, an oak forest and a water supply - but in sufficient quantities to satisfy the demands of this gigantic site. The first team started work and on June 20th 1997 the first stone was laid.
B. Unlike any other present-day building site, Michel Guyot's purpose is clear, he warmly welcomes members of the public to participate. The workers' role is to demonstrate and explain, to a wide audience, the skills of our forefathers. Stone quarrying, the building of vaulted ceilings, the blacksmith's work and the raising of roof timbers are just some of the activities which visitors can witness during a visit to Guédelon. The workers are always on hand to talk about their craft and the progress of the castle. Each year 60,000 children visit Guédelon with their schools. The site is an excellent educational resource, bringing to life the history of the Middle Ages. Guided tours are tailored to the school curriculum and according to age groups: activity trails for primary school children and interactive guided tours for secondary school children. Pupils of all ages have the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of medieval stonemasons by taking part in a stonecarving workshop or discover the secrets of the medieval master-builders at the geometry workshop.
Workers in the Burgundy region of France are building a 13th century castle. They're not restoring an old castle. They're actually building a new old castle. See the builders are constructing it from scratch. The craftsmen have been working for nearly ten years now but they're not even halfway done yet. That's because they're using only medieval tools and techniques. The World's Gerry Hadden takes US to the site of what will be the Guedelon Castle. Another reason said by Jean Francois, a member of Guedelon stone cutter's guild, for eight hours a day he bangs on a 13th century chisel with a 13th century iron mallet.
D. The progress of construction has to give way to tourists side for their visits. The visitors from 2010, however unsightly they may be, are vital to the project. The initial funding came not from pillaging the local peasantry but from regional councils, the European Union and large companies. For the last 10 years, Guédelon, 100 miles southeast of Paris, has funded itself from its entrance fees. Last year it had a record 300,000 visitors, who paid almost €2.5m, making it the second most-visited site in Burgundy. The most-visited site was the Hospice de Beaune, a beautiful 15th-century almshouse built 600 years before, or, if you prefer, 200 years "after", Guédelon.
E. limestone is found in the construction of various local buildings, from the great and prestigious edifice of Ratilly castle to the more modest poyaudines houses. This stone contains 30-40% iron oxide; this can make it extremely hard to extract and dress. Having studied the block in order to determine and anticipate the natural fault lines of the stone, the quarrymen first carve a series of rectilinear holes into the block. Iron wedges are then hammered into this line of holes. The shockwaves produced by the quarrymen's sledgehammers cause the stone to split along a straight line. The highest quality blocks are dressed to produce lintels, voussoirs, corbels, ashlars etc. The medium quality blocks are roughly shaped by the stonecutters and used on the uncoursed curtain walls, and as facing stones on the castle's inner walls. There are water-filled clay pits in the forest. Clay is taken from these pits, cleaned and pugged. It is then shaped in wooden moulds to form bricks. After the bricks have been left to air-dry, they are fired in a woodfired kiln for about 12 hours, at roughly 1000°c.
F. The mortar is the "glue" used to bind the castle's stones. It is made up of precise doses of lime, sand and water. The people working there wear the tunics, skirts and headgear that they might have worn then, but they wear these over jeans and shoes with reinforced toes. They mix their mortar primarily as they would have done then, using sand they dig themselves, but they are not allowed to use the extremely effective hot lime from medieval days, because of its toxicity, and so they add a modem chemical ingredient instead, to achieve the same effect. Workers in the Mid Age obviously were unaware of it and some died earlier by inhaling toxic gas. And so, we met many wonderful people who do not pretend to be anything but modem human beings practicing an old technique and finding out what it would have felt like, as much as possible, to do it with only the resources of an older time.
G. We also learned that even if there is a straight lintel across a doorway, you will usually find an arch of stones built into the wall differently. Because of the physics of an arch, which channels the weight above it down into whatever is supporting it at each side instead of pressing down in the middle, this helps to take a lot of the weight off of the lintel itself, whether it is free standing or buried in the wall against the impact of warfare. The arch is the strongest element for spanning space in stone architecture. This is why, in ancient ruins, you will often find the entire wall missing, and the arched windows and doorways still standing, in beautiful patterns against the sky.
Smell and Memory: SMELLS LIKE YESTERDAY
Why does the scent of a fragrance or the mustiness of an old trunk trigger such powerful memories of childhood? New research has the answer, writes Alexandra Witze.
A. You probably pay more attention to a newspaper with your eyes than with your nose. But lift the paper to your nostrils and inhale. The smell of newsprint might carry you back to your childhood, when your parents perused the paper on Sunday mornings. Or maybe some other smell takes you back- the scent of your mother's perfume, the pungency of a driftwood campfire. Specific odours can spark a flood of reminiscences. Psychologists call it the "Proustian phenomeno" after French novelist Marcel Proust. Near the beginning of the masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, Proust's narrator dunks a madeleine cookie into a cup of tea and the scent and taste unleash a torrent of childhood memories for 3000 pages.
B. Now, this phenomenon is getting the scientific treatment. Neuroscientists Rachel Herz, a cognitive neuroscientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, have discovered, for instance, how sensory memories are shared across the brain, with different brain regions remembering the sights, smells, tastes and sounds of a particular experience. Meanwhile, psychologists have demonstrated that memories triggered by smells can be more emotional, as well as more detailed, than memories not related to smells. When you inhale, odour molecules set brain cells dancing within a region known as the imygdala (E ), a part of the brain that helps control emotion. In contrast, the other senses, such as taste or touch, get routed through other parts of the brain before reaching the amygdala. The direct link between odours and the amygdala may help explain the emotional potency of smells. ”There is this unique connection between the sense of smell and the part of the brain that processes emotion," says Rachel Herz.
C. But the links don't stop there. Like an octopus reaching its tentacles outward, the memory of smells affects other brain regions as well. In recent experiments, neuroscientists at University College London (UCL) asked 15 volunteers to look at pictures while smelling unrelated odours. For instance, the subjects might see a photo of a duck paired with the scent of a rose, and then be asked to create a story linking the two. Brain scans taken at the time revealed that the volunteers’brains were particularly active in a region known as the factory cortex, which is known to be involved in processing smells. Five minutes later, the volunteers were shown the duck photo again, but without the rose smell. And in their brains, the olfactory cortex lit up again, the scientists reported recently. The fact that the olfactory cortex became active in the absence of the odour suggests that people's sensory memory of events is spread across different brain regions. Imagine going on a seaside holiday, says UCL team leader, Jay Gottfried. The sight of the waves becomes stored in one area, whereas the crash of the surf goes elsewhere, and the smell of seaweed in yet another place. There could be advantages to having memories spread around the brain. "You can reawaken that memory from any one of the sensory triggers," says Gottfried. "Maybe the smell of the sun lotion, or a particular sound from that day, or the sight of a rock formation." Or - in the case of an early hunter and gatherer (out on a plain - the sight of a lion might be enough to trigger the urge to flee, rather than having to wait for the sound of its roar and the stench of its hide to kick in as well.
D. Remembered smells may also carry extra emotional baggage, says Herz. Her research suggests that memories triggered by odours are more emotional than memories triggered by other cues. In one recent study, Herz recruited five volunteers who had vivid memories associated with a particular perfume, such as opium for Women and Juniper Breeze from Bath and Body Works. She took images of the volunteers' brains as they sniffed that perfume and an unrelated perfume without knowing which was which. (They were also shown photos of each perfume bottle.) Smelling the specified perfume activated the volunteers brains the most, particularly in the amygdala, and in a region called the hippocampus which helps in memory formation. Herz published the work earlier this year in the journal Neuropsychologia.
E. But she couldn't be sure that the other senses wouldn't also elicit a strong response. So in another study Herz compared smells with sounds and pictures. She had 70 people describe an emotional memory involving three items - popcorn, fresh-cut grass and a campfire. Then they compared the items through sights, sounds and smells. For instance, a person might see a picture of a lawnmower, then sniff the scent of grass and finally listen to the lawnmower's sound. Memories triggered by smell were more evocative than memories triggered by either sights or sounds.
F. Odour-evoked memories may be not only more emotional, but more detailed as well. Working with colleague John Downes, psychologist Simon Chu of the University of Liverpool started researching odour and memory partly because of his grandmother's stories about Chinese culture. As generations gathered to share oral histories, they would pass a small pot of spice or incense around; later, when they wanted to remember the story in as much detail as possible, they would pass the same smell around again. "It's kind of fits with a lot of anecdotal evidence on how smells can be really good reminders of past experiences,” Chu says. And scientific research seems to bear out the anecdotes. In one experiment, Chu and Downes asked 42 volunteers to tell a life story, then tested to see whether odours such as coffee and cinnamon could help them remember more detail in the story. They could.
G. Despite such studies, not everyone is convinced that Proust can be scientifically analysed. In the June issue of Chemical Senses, Chu and Downes exchanged critiques with renowned perfumer and chemist J. Stephan Jellinek. Jellinek chided the Liverpool researchers for, among other things, presenting the smells and asking the volunteers to think of memories, rather than seeing what memories were spontaneously evoked by the odours. But there's only so much science can do to test a phenomenon that's inherently different for each person, Chu says. Meanwhile, Jellinek has also been collecting anecdotal accounts of Proustian experiences, hoping to find some common links between the experiences. "I think there is a case to be made that surprise may be a major aspect of the Proust phenomenon," he says. "That's why people are so struck by these memories." No one knows whether Proust ever experienced such a transcendental moment. But his notions of memory, written as fiction nearly a century ago, continue to inspire scientists of today.
Memory Decoding
Try this memory test: Study each face and compose a vivid image for the person's first and last name. Rose Leo, for example, could be a rosebud and a lion. Fill in the blanks on the next page. The Examinations School at Oxford University is an austere building of oak-paneled rooms, large Gothic windows, and looming portraits of eminent dukes and earls. It is where generations of Oxford students have tested their memory on final exams, and it is where, last August, 34 contestants gathered at the World Memory Championships to be examined in an entirely different manner.
A. In timed trials, contestants were challenged to look at and then recite a two-page poem, memorize rows of 40-digit numbers, recall the names of 110 people after looking at their photographs, and perform seven other feats of extraordinary retention. Some tests took just a few minutes; others lasted hours. In the 14 years since the World Memory Championships was founded, no one has memorized the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 30 seconds. That nice round number has become the four-minute mile of competitive memory, a benchmark that the world's best "mental athletes," as some of them like to be called, are closing in on. Most contestants claim to have just average memories, and scientific testing confirms that they're not just being modest. Their feats are based on tricks that capitalize on how the human brain encodes information. Anyone can learn them.
B. Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the monograph Superior Memory, recently teamed up with Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London to study eight people, including Karsten, who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championships. They wondered if the contestants' brains were different in some way. The researchers put the competitors and a group of control subjects into an MRI machine and asked them to perform several different memory tests while their brains were being scanned When it came to memorizing sequences of three-digit numbers, the difference between the memory contestants and the control subjects was, as expected, immense. However, when they were shown photographs of magnified snowflakes, images that the competitors had never tried to memorize before, the champions did no better than the control group. When the researchers analyzed the brain scans, they found that the memory champs were activating some brain regions that were different from those the control subjects were using. These regions, which included the right posterior hippocampus, are known to be involved in visual memory and spatial navigation.
C. It might seem odd that the memory contestants would use visual imagery and spatial navigation to remember numbers, but the activity makes sense when their techniques are revealed Cooke, a 23-year-old cognitive-science graduate student with a shoulder-length mop of curly hair, is a grand master of brain storage. He can memorize the order of 10 decks of playing cards in less than an hour or one deck of cards in less than a minute. He is closing in on the 30-second deck. In the Lamb and Flag, Cooke pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled it. He held up three cards—the 7 of spades, the queen of clubs, and the 10 of spades. He pointed at a fireplace and said, "Destiny's Child is whacking Franz Schubert with handbags." The next three cards were the king of hearts, the king of spades, and the jack of clubs.
D. How did he do it? Cooke has already memorized a specific person, verb, and object that he associates with each card in the deck. For example, for the 7 of spades, the person (or, in this case, persons) is always the singing group Destiny's Child, the action is surviving a storm, and the image is a dinghy. The queen of clubs is always his friend Henrietta, the action is thwacking with a handbag, and the image is of wardrobes filled with designer clothes. When Cooke commits a deck to memory, he does it three cards at a time. Every three-card group forms a single image of a person doing something to an object. The first card in the triplet becomes the person, the second the verb, the third the object. He then places those images along a specific familiar route, such as the one he took through the Lamb and Flag. In competitions, he uses an imaginary route that he has designed to be as smooth and downhill as possible. When it comes time to recall, Cooke takes a mental walk along his route and translates the images into cards. That's why the MRIs of the memory contestants showed activation in the brain areas associated with visual imagery and spatial navigation.
E. The more resonant the images are, the more difficult they are to forget. But even meaningful information is hard to remember when there's a lot of it. That's why competitive memorizers place their images along an imaginary route. That technique, known as the loci method, reportedly originated in 477 B.C. with the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was the sob survivor of a roof collapse that killed all the other guests at a royal banquet The bodies were mangled beyond recognition, but Simonides was able to reconstruct the guest list by closing his eyes and recalling each individual around the dinner table. What he had discovered was that our brains are exceptionally good at remembering images and spatial information. Evolutionary psychologists have offered an explanation: Presumably our ancestors found it important to recall where they found their last meal or the way back to the cave. After Simonides' discovery the loci method became popular across ancient Greece as a trick for memorizing speeches and texts. Aristotle wrote about it, and later a number of treatises on the art of memory were published in Rome. Before printed books, the art of memory was considered a staple of classical education, on a par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
F. The most famous of the naturals was the Russian journalist S. V. Shereshevski, who could recall tong lists of numbers memorized decades earlier, as well as poems, strings of nonsense syllables, and just about anything else he was asked to remember. "The capacity of his memory had no distinct limits," wrote Alexander Luria, the Russian psychologist who studied Shereshevski from the 1920s to the 1950s. Shereshevski also had synesthesia, a rare condition in which the senses become intertwined. For example, every number may be associated with a color or every word with a taste. Synesthetic reactions evoke a response in more areas of the brain, making memory easier.
G. K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish-born psychologist at Florida State University, thinks anyone can acquire Shereshevski's skills. He cites an experiment with s. R, an undergraduate who was paid to take a standard test of memory called the digit span for one hour a day, two or three days a week. When he started, he could hold, like most people, only about seven digits in his head at any given time (conveniently, the length of a phone number). Over two years, s. F. completed 250 hours of testing. By then, he had stretched his digit span from 7 to more than 80. The study of s. F. led Ericsson to believe that innately superior memory doesn't exist at all When he reviewed original case studies of naturals, he found that exceptional memorizers were using techniques —sometimes without realizing it and tots of practice. Often, exceptional memory was only for a single type of material, like digits. "If we took at some of these memory tasks, they're the kind of thing most people don't even waste one hour practicing, but if they wasted 50 hours, they'd be exceptional at it," Ericsson says. It would be remarkable, he adds, to find a "person who is exceptional across a number of tasks. I don't think that there's any compelling evidence that there are such people."