Dude did have a point. Moving a large part of our memories outside of our skulls did change things quite a bit, just as leveraging the indexing and retrieval ca

Dude did have a point. Moving a large part of our memories outside of our skulls did change things quite a bit, just as leveraging the indexing and retrieval capabilities of computers (and systems of computers) has done more recently. We remember different things, and the way in which we remember those things is also different. It's not that we've lost the abilities of our ancestors; it's more that we've gotten out of the habit of using them. How many hundreds of songs do you have stored in your head? Imagine living in a world where your "textbooks" and "user manuals" are written to have similar rhyme, alliteration and rhythm, and are only passed orally. People did live in that world (many still do), and when that world ends, and none of the kids today can recite, for instance, Inside Macintosh - they have to use some sort of grimoire or codex instead - it's easy to see that as a loss. It's harder to see it as a lever.