…He wrote that . . ….

Lisa, no need to apologize for slowness. I’m probably the slowest blogger on the net. Here I am answering you two months later. The historical context you provide is fascinating and very well put. Interesting that you think the skill of “looking something up” should be emphasized in any literate society, not just digital ones. I wish someone had stressed that during my education (you just sorta pick it up). Your point about what you do being more important than what you know is well taken.

My comment is that writing itself has played the largest role in eradicating human memory. Pre-literate society, and even pre-literate people in our society, have amazing memories. One example I give my students is the ability to memorize an hours-long poem like Beowulf in the first hearing, around a campfire, while drinking. Once you learn to write, you can afford to forget. I don’t have to remember what I want to buy at the store, so long as I bring a written list. There is little in life we must, to survive, burn into our long-term memory. The “look it up on your cell phone” phenomenon is just an extension of looking it up in the encyclopedia at your host’s house when you go to play poker.

Learning how to look something up is the skill to promote in literate environments, not memorization. History students come to me “knowing” nothing, because they do not remember the many fact crammed into their heads in classes emphasizing memorization of historical facts. The fact themselves can be found not only on the internet, but in their textbook. My role is to teach them how to use those facts to interpret and analyze the human condition.

The affective domain you mention is of great concern to me, however. If people only look up facts to “be right”, rather than to use them productively, there are moral considerations as well as considerations for learning.

Lisa

“Perhaps when stripped of our memories, we will become…”

I think that when augmented by the internet or global access to memory, we will no longer require that *explicit* recall of facts to be successful inhabitants of this world. However, every fact we consume becomes integrated into our non-explicit memories (I’m sure there is a better “industry” term for this) that are what allows us to thin-slide the world.

So my point is : we’re never going to be these master thin slicers using an *immediate* set of filters, as I think our filters are based on the sum of all memories that have flowed through them.

A great possible research agenda would be to try to determine how these filters assign weights to each memory incorporated into them, and how we could influence that to modify (not necessarily improve) our decision making. I could see advertisers loving this.

jonZor, I agree that the powerlaw of change is bearing down on us fast, and no one knows where its direction lies. As far as whether it’s a good thing, whether we sacrifice wisdom, I think the inevitability of it makes this a moot point. Just as we unlearned hunting and gathering to make room for farming, we are now unlearning industrialization to make room for something else. Good or bad, its something new and unavoidable. Better to understand it than fight it.

I equate this memory loss to our forebears’ loss of the intimate knowledge of hunting and gathering (how to catch a gazelle, which berries and which mushrooms to eat) when they started farming and our more recent forebears’ loss of crop knowledge and animal husbandry when they started working in factories (hehe, I even just looked up hubandry, cause I couldn’t remember if I was using it correctly). The difference bwteen those cases and the present “rewiring” is that for our forebears, it happened over millennia in the case of the agricultural revolution, and over decades and centuries in the case of the industrial revolution. Nowadays, it will happen within our lifetime, and many of us, and certainly our children, will have to adapt to it on a very short timescale. Are our minds meant to adapt that fast? And how long before the next “shift”? A few more decades?

Now, I actually think that this death of memory is a bad thing, in the same sort of way that a GPS system is a poor substitute for our waning direction sense. I think the greatest loss in all this is our loss of understanding that comes with having to figure something out. I can GPS my directions to someone’s house or a store, but I am not improving my understanding of the layout of my city. Likewise, I can google hannibal (the last thing I googled for no apparent reason) and find out that he was a Carthaginian general who rode elephants over the Alps in an attempt to sack Rome, but I know nothing of the geopolitical situation of the Mediteranean at the time. Finding information in the old-school way involved a process of reading and understanding, of developing wisdom, learning “the mistakes of the past.” Essentially, insta-knowledge removes that step, so we have vast knowledge, with no wisdom. And “a little bit of knowledge is a little bit dangerous,…”

I have noticed a shift in my own memory from rote fact to a more contextual style of recollection. I may not remember Bob’s phone number, but I do remember where I met Bob, what we talked about, and that I enjoyed his company and that our wives got along well.

I think memory is adaptive. We will allocate less mental resources to holding on to facts and phone numbers now that we have easy access through devices and search engines. We become filters for information rather than storage units.