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Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don't have a c
by nwatson 9y ago
Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all.
(Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I've read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory.
So we're the first generation shifting cognitive burden of some kinds of memory (all those phone numbers) elsewhere. I welcome it. My wife hates it, but she likes the books. In a couple of generations it all will be irrelevant.
- jff 9y agoYou seem to be defending against a claim the study does not make. They're not saying "smartphones make us stupid because Google's in your pocket!" Rather, the study is saying that by having your phone on the desk or even in your pocket, you will exhibit decreased mental capacity because your brain is using some cognitive resources to monitor for notifications etc. This may be over-simplified but appears to be backed up by the general discussion on pages 10-11.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoI keep my phone on silent and turn off all vibrations. There's no way to notify me of anything until I look at it, but that's a feature.
- ckosidow 9y agoI do the same, though I wonder if a part of my brain is still itching to check if I have any notifications.
- ue_ 9y agoPerhaps there is a second side to it in that you'll be thinking about what the best time is to next check your phone. Granted it's a little far removed, but it's plausible. It stands for other commitments that run all the time too, though.
- mi100hael 9y agoI think there's a subtle difference between "monitoring for notifications" and actual notifications. Your phone might be on do-not-disturb mode, but that doesn't mean your brain isn't distracted wondering whether someone replied to your last message or returned your call from yesterday. Taking it out of your pocket and leaving it in another room or your car or wherever lessens the compulsion to frequently pull it out and check.
- majewsky 9y agoI noticed something similar during meditation: I had set up the stopwatch on my phone so that I did not have to wonder how many time had passed. It would just ring when 30 minutes had passed. However, when the phone was just lying next to me, I would compulsively check the time on the phone every few minutes. Only when I moved the phone to the other side of the room did I stop caring about the time passed (at least for the most part).
- jff 9y agoI do the same, although I spend far too much time on it despite such efforts. Totally blocking notifications from 90% of applications helps too.
- aggie 9y agoThat was what they had participants do in this study, and they still observed the effect.
- roselan 9y agoWhen you are used to notifications, you look for them even if you don't have your phone with you. It takes a while to detoxify yourself, and lose your "check reflex".
- svachalek 9y agoI suspect that actually having loud and obnoxious alerts would probably reduce the burden, because then you'd never worry you missed one.
- KGIII 9y agoI realize that I am not typical, but I seldom even have my phone turned on, and don't even take it with me very often. I was tethered to a phone for years. I am retired. I only take it if I am expecting to be idle. Then, I take it so I can browse while waiting. It feels kinda nice, frankly. I am not a technophobe. It's just nice to not be beholden to my phone.
- alsetmusic 9y agoThis reminds me of my experience giving up my wristwatch. I would glance at it frequently, but then didn't know the time because the behavior was strictly reflex. Finally, someone asked me for the time right after I did this and I had to look again because I hadn't internalized it. That was the day I removed my watch forever. Your comment about being beholden to your phone reminds me a a great quote that I recalled on that day: "Wearing a watch is like being handcuffed to time."
- copperx 9y ago> "Wearing a watch is like being handcuffed to time." I like the quote because that's how I feel when I look at any digital clock or watch. The millisecond accuracy of any NTP-aware device produces anxiety and is unnecessary. An analog watch, especially if it's a wind-up mechanical watch, which is by its nature slightly inaccurate, is much more comforting. I feel like an observer of time, and not a slave of it.
- icebraining 9y agoYou should get a fuzzy clock. A cute version of those are the Word Clocks.
- eeZah7Ux 9y agoA reliable clock produces anxiety over an unreliable one? Citation needed!
- copperx 9y ago
- copperx 9y agoAre you not married, or do not have children or old parents? I would not forgive myself for missing an emergency call because I was hoping to be more productive.
- capnrefsmmat 9y agoThe iOS Do Not Disturb feature allows you to set an exclusion for a chosen group of contacts, so you could allow calls from your spouse or parents while blocking everything else. I have it scheduled to turn on every night so I'm not disturbed by spam calls at 3AM, with a few family members excluded.
- brational 9y agosame - except my DND is set for midnight until 4pm. i still check the phone at lunch or when i get to work but i otherwise wont notice it unless it actually rings.
- sowbug 9y agoBefore ubiquitous mobile phones, most of those calls weren't considered emergencies.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoTotally this. The reduced costs to instant communication makes some people feel entitled to your attention at any random moment. It requires a strong and active pushback.
- eikenberry 9y agoSo then the title is misleading. It is not the presence of a smartphone, but over using the notification feature of the phone that causes the issue.
- BoysenberryPi 9y agoWhether or not the title is misleading you read a headline and decided to drop your 2 cents without actually reading the article. The title isnt at fault here
- eikenberry 9y agoWhat about that comment lead you to believe I didn't read the article.
- paublyrne 9y agoYour summary of the paper is incorrect.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 9y agoAnd yet it is. Writing inaccurate headlines is equivalent to intentionally lying to people - because most people who see a headline will not bother to click through, and will instead remember just the assertion from the headline.
- liberte82 9y agoAs a manager in IT I have to have my phone on 24x7 for escalations and I hate it. On the occurrences that I take a real vacation and can turn my phone off, something in my head flips and I can truly forget about it. When it is on, there is something subconscious that will not quite let go and I can feel it. I feel I would benefit greatly from being able to truly turn my phone off one day a week.
- icebraining 9y agoAre you really the only person it can be escalated to? What happens if you're sick, or your phone breaks, or whatever?
- liberte82 9y agoWould go up to the senior manager, or whoever else my team can get ahold of. During vacations I have another manager cover for me. There's always options, but it's expected that I be first point of contact.
- coldpie 9y agoI hope you get compensated well for this. I would not put up with those conditions.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 9y agoIn all seriousness, find some way out of this. The stress may well be cumulative, and it's insidious.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- euske 9y agoIt kinda reminds me of learned helplessness; just knowing that you're capable of changing the situation makes people perform better, even if they actually don't use that capability. It seems that there's something opposite happening here; just knowing that there's power keeps you thinking of using it.
- nwatson 9y agoApparently you're right, but I did hit a nerve and prompted some interesting discussion, and got by far the highest point-count for any HN comment I've made. Count me cynical, but my first and kind of unintentional foray into fake-news-land worked out well.
- trustyhank 9y agoThis is why smart watches are actually pretty great.
- weberc2 9y agoBooks serve the same function as memory, but they did it better. Smart phones don't serve (much less improve on) the function of "attention", so I'm confused by your analogy.
- shoshone 9y agoIts still about memory. Attention span is a measure of memory. Writing stands for the absence of something (a voice or community). Smartphones compensate for so many kinds of absence at once.
- watwut 9y agoYou can have good memory and low attention span. Other way round too.
- bigbugbag 9y agoAttention is not a measure of memory, on the contrary. Memories are a a measure of attention as if you don't pay attention you will hardly form a memory. smartphones are not what you say they are, without internet smartphones are close to tracking, privacy invasive, useless bricks. Something like computers with no arms and both knees broken.
- weberc2 9y agoSeems like you're mixing very-short-term memory (moment to moment) with very long-term memory. I'm not a neuroscientist, but my experience as a human suggests these are very different capabilities.
- avar 9y agoThe Greeks would make performances designed to be performed in front of a live audience. The comparison to today is not whether you can find someone who can recite a book on first reading, but someone who can recite a song the first time they hear it, or parts of a stand-up routine.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoThose bards trained to do that, though, right? You couldn't pull a random Greek in off the agora and have him memorize an epic poem at will.
- kellyjprice 9y agoI had heard that recitations of the Odyssey were more improvisational. If I remember the gist correctly, someone proposed that adjectives, for instance, were chosen to match the meter of a particular line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition
- wdewind 9y ago> But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. Socrates absolutely did. > for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Greek_Literature https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Gr....
- pm90 9y agoRight but there is so much more information of every kind today than what used to exist at the time of Socrates. Attempting to remember all that information would probably be infeasible.
- kornish 9y agoIn the same way that reciting Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing is infeasible, right? (poking fun, but only a bit)
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoThat's feasible. Barely, but feasible. Now try reciting the Library of Congress after one hearing. Or Wikipedia. That's a whole nother level of problem.
- copperx 9y agoI really doubt it's feasible to memorize it in a single hearing without paraphrasing. The human brain couldn't have been different a few millennia ago, and we know that the greeks used the same memorization techniques we use today (e.g., the memory palace, chunking, ...).
- diogenescynic 9y agoI seem to recall someone referring to this as "transactional memory" in that now more focus is spent on teaching ourselves the process to learn something, rather than memorizing the information itself. For example, I can Google a complex formula or obscure fact, rather than commit it to memory. Arguably this allows us to focus on other things, but I do agree it seems like it has dumbed down the average level of discourse.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoYou can still train yourself to be better at remembering things today, and supplement your digital memory (in your phone or online or whatnot) with better meat memory. It just comes down to recognizing how your brain works and applying that understanding to specific memorization tasks. Apply stories and mnomics to information you want to remember. Leverage your spatial memory by associating particular locations in a familiar place with a memory. Get into the habit of reviewing your situation at opportune times, i.e. when you get home or enter your car, and remember things you wanted to do there. A good approach to this makes it a lot easier to effectively apply your digital memory, and is also useful in situations where electronics are inappropriate (i.e. recognizing someone IRL).
- jorgenev 9y ago> Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing Is this a true fact, or just a story people keep repeating because it sounds interesting? If it were true... how would we know? Presumably you would cite sources from Ancient Greece where people reported that they knew bards who could memorize a whole story with one listen, but like, there are sources from Ancient Greece claiming to know of a woman who was so ugly that looking at her could turn a man to stone. We can kind of sanity check the claim by looking at modern peoples. Anthropologists have extensive experience with pre-literate peoples, and they do have fine memories --but not magical ones [1]. 1. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/indigenous-memory-code/7553976 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/in...
- knodi123 9y ago> If it were true... how would we know? If it were true, how would they know?!? It's like if my nephew came to my house and saw Star Wars, and then on the drive home with his mom, he told her the story and she (who never saw the movie) said "He recited the entire movie after one hearing!" No, what he did was remember most of the plot outline (imperfectly), and describe several scenes (imperfectly), and reproduce the gist, more or less, of some of the dialogue... He's not some incredible savant, he's just a normal person who paid attention to a story. I mean, sure, he "can recite the whole thing after one hearing", but in a pre-literate society, how would you even double-check? It would take someone else with total recall to verify that the bard had total recall. So you have to assume storytellers have perfect memory in order to demonstrate that a storyteller has perfect memory.
- lazyasciiart 9y agoNo. It would take one person who had memorized the story, over however much repetition, to tell the story and then listen to the other person repeat it back. It's more like, if your nephew came to your house and saw Star Wars and then told you the story, and you, having seen the movie multiple times, said "well, that's actually not a perfect retelling".
- theboywho 9y agoYou probably did not read the article, as it does not talk about smartphones being a substitute tool for some tasks we used to do using our brains. The study is about the attention efforts required by our need to always check our phones for new information, you can view it like our attention being prisonnier of our phones with no extra resources left for other activities.
- sxates 9y agoWithout any sort of recording or script, how would one verify that the retelling was accurate to the original?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vanderZwan 9y agoI'm kind of curious how one would measure whether you recited the odyssey in it's entirety after one hearing if you don't have a written reference and only have fallible human memory to rely on...
- jxramos 9y ago> shifting cognitive burden of some kinds of memory (all those phone numbers) elsewhere I recognized that my mind started to become a mental index of information at some point. This is to say that I hold memories of compressed information that I can expand with key search terms to hook onto the information I am actually seeking. One recent example was searching for "Milton Friedman Thalidamide FDA" because I knew it would snag an Uncommon Knowledge discussion I shared with a developers group recently.
- scriptkiddy 9y agoTo be fair, if you remember only the main events of any story, it's not difficult to recite it from memory. For instance, I've read the Lord of the Rings trilogy many times. I had no problem reciting the entirety of it to my grandmother after my first read through. You may think that a story recited this way would be shorter, but it's not difficult to improvise or embellish. The Odyssey has an extremely simple plot by today's standards. It's been quite a while since I've read the book, but I'm pretty sure I could skim through the cliff notes and tell a pretty compelling version of it.
- etherdeath 9y agoI agree, however, the introspection may be useful. Knowing about this effect may help those who have had a nagging suspicion this was the case.
- andrewl 9y agoI can't find the quote, but I remember Mark Twain describing his training as a Mississippi River pilot. The master pilot training him said something like "What was the water depth at So and So crossing at mid day three trips back?" When Twain said he didn't remember, the master said "You would, if you didn't read all the time."
- JoshMnem 9y ago> Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. They had amazing memories, but they couldn't memorize large works like that after just one hearing. There are techniques that allow one to remember information like that, but it still requires effort. Here are two great books on that subject: - The Art of Memory by Frances Yates (covers Greece, Rome, and Europe) - The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly (goes back further into prehistory) And two quick articles about memory feats in ancient Greece[1] and Rome[2]. [1] http://blog.artofmemory.com/simonides-of-ceos-81.html http://blog.artofmemory.com/simonides-of-ceos-81.html [2] http://blog.artofmemory.com/pliny-the-elder-on-memory-5824.html http://blog.artofmemory.com/pliny-the-elder-on-memory-5824.h...
- ninly 9y agoHaven't read the other one, but the Yates is great. Another indispensable book for historical context about the Classical transition from oral to literate culture (and its implications for memory, education, and Greek thought) is: - Preface to Plato, by Eric Havelock
- JoshMnem 9y agoThanks, I'll check that one out. The Memory Code is one of the best books I've read. Highly recommended.
- trentmb 9y agoThe podcast "Stuff To Blow Your Mind" just had an episode about "Extended Cognition" http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/extended-cognition.htm http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/extended-cogniti...
- afleck 9y ago> Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Epic recitation was probably not fixed until someone wrote it down. Different recitations of the same plot varied (and were expected to).
- andrepd 9y ago> Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. [citation needed]
- ssttoo 9y ago"[Mozart] heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere twice in performance, in the Sistine Chapel, and wrote it out from memory, thus producing the first unauthorized copy of this closely guarded property of the Vatican" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) How can anyone remember 10+ mins music piece for 9 voices is beyond me. Granted, Mozart had some music superpowers, but still...
- Splines 9y agoI would guess that if you're world class at some creative process you massively compress the amount of "raw" data you need to recreate something, just due to the sheer number of patterns you are aware of. For example, if I asked an advanced programmer to read a professional implementation of some basic data structures and algorithms, they could likely later recreate the exact same thing. Obviously they didn't memorize the file character by character, but a sensibly written implementation is going to have the same shape and form as something the expert has done hundreds of times.
- ssttoo 9y ago"[Mozart] heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere twice in performance, in the Sistine Chapel, and wrote it out from memory, thus producing the first unauthorized copy of this closely guarded property of the Vatican" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) How can anyone remember 10+ mins music piece for 9 voices is beyond me. Granted, Mozart had some music superpowers, but still...
- jlos 9y agoThe medium of communication profoundly shapes our minds and thought patterns: - Oral communication priorotizes memory (as mentioned) but also personal trust, since knowledge is always obtained directly from another person. Hence oral cultures tend to place high value on communal social structures. - written communication priorotizes rationality since all communication can be scrutinzed before and during reading. It also prioritizes individual assessment and independence. You could argue that the broad adoption of print as a medium of communication lead to individualism, the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, and the Reformation (i.e. the fundamental contributors to modern Western Civilization). There are obvious merits to digit communication, but the full effects on our minds and culture are not known. A blind belief in some salvific and inevitable march of progress is unwise. We may be trading immediacy, emotivism, and impulsivity for rationality and that should give us pause.
- holri 9y agoI just experienced a great boost in capacity for remembering because of massive piano playing / practicing by heart. It is a massive improvement of quality of live to remember things easily without dependency of external tools. I was surprised to remember the train, wagon and seat number by looking on the reservation just once without the training for example. This was never possible in the past, and I hated it.
- laurieg 9y agoMaybe I'm being simple but, if it's in pre-literate times, how do you know someone is telling exactly the same story? Couldn't they just tell a story with the same major plot points and fill in the details as they go?
- bogomipz 9y ago>"Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing." This is extremely unlikely. What the Bards could do was improvise on themes. And often that theme was ancient Troy. They would actually improvise to music in a well-known meter, not unlike a Jazz musician would. "Yet if Homer was strictly an oral poet, how could he keep such long works as the Iliad in his head? It would take days to recite all of the Iliad or the Odyssey! It is now thought that Homer worked some time between 725 and 675 B.C., when the alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians was just coming into use among the Greeks. It seems likely that writing helped Homer in collecting and composing."[1] [1] http://cerhas.uc.edu/troy/q402.html http://cerhas.uc.edu/troy/q402.html
- sametmax 9y agoI think knowledge you delegate is not as much important as the attention the device is stealing from you. Attention is precious, and our society gives it away like free candy. Anything with a screen magnify this, and this has important consequence on learning, social interactions, self growth, mood, hapiness and health.
- olavk 9y ago> Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing That sounds highly unlikely. Do you have a legitimate sources to back this up? Certainly bards had great memory and were able to recite whole epics (perhaps with a level of improvisation akin to "freestyling" in rap), but under what circumstances would they only hear an epic once?
- ihaveahadron 9y agoYea smartphones are the new books etc etc. Get over jt
- wodenokoto 9y agoWriting made it possible to check if somebody recited something accurately. Reciting a story accurately pre writing had a different meaning (not word for word)
- pnathan 9y agoThe bulk of the Old Testament was transmitted orally prior to being written down. It was a time of oral literature. https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Scripture-Literary-Authority/dp/083084032X/ https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Scripture-Literary-Authori... If one is up for reading a book written by a Christian, this book describes the world well.
- LostWanderer 9y agoI wonder if there is a link between life originating from the sea and the ability of using our hearing as the main sensory organ to detect other objects. And maybe we over relied on some senses and made an education system which relied on certain sense organs more than other senses. But talking about Smartphones,we may be coming to a full circle with Voice assisted AI is gaining ground. ----------------- I would suggest you to read The book 'A brave new world' By Aldous Huxley which predicted how the information overloaded numbness works in a beautiful way
- tbihl 9y agoPeople (mostly) don't complain about books because we fail to recognize the trade off, or else we accept it, but there are certainly useful places for memorization of large amounts of information. Not only is it more easily summoned when you need it, but it's more fully internalized. By comparison, I know almost nothing about the books on my bookshelf, despite having spent significant amounts of time reading each of them.