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Nicholas Carr explains many different examples(wayfinding, maps, memory, etc) in his book “The Shallows”. There’s also that book “Moonwalking with Einstein” by
by thenerdhead 4y ago
Nicholas Carr explains many different examples(wayfinding, maps, memory, etc) in his book “The Shallows”.
There’s also that book “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer where the author becomes a memory champion by embodying themselves in the competition space having never practiced it prior.
While we can put blame on technology for hurting our abilities to further form certain skills, it has also allowed us to learn skills we would’ve never been able to learn in our lifetimes.
The brain is plastic and will reshape as needed. If you moderate your tech usage, you may start to notice your attention and memory to improve gradually from doing nothing but that. The mode we put our brain in from over-consuming has its purpose. It’s to scan information and process it quickly. Not to store it for long term purposes.
But the real test is to try this for yourself. I’ve been experimenting with this over the last 5 years and have found this to be true for me.
One time I was even found in Montreal with no phone which meant no maps, no way to understand French, and I had to quickly develop all these skills in a week to get by. It’s not the end of the world by any means. Life finds a way.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gopher_space 4y agoThe other way to look at it is that there was a sixty year span when memorizing many seven to ten digit numbers was important to us, and so that's exactly what we did. I didn't lose the ability to memorize entire books like my grandfather did, I'm just not isolated for months on end in winter like he was. It's also not the babe-attracting party trick it apparently used to be.
- WorldMaker 4y agoAs I recall even Carl Sagan commented on it at depth (and how it was good thing). For as long as people have existed we've built tools to remember things for us so we can remember other things better/learn other skills. It was a "complaint" about paper, that writing things down softened our memory skills. (People would lament about the lost traditions of storytellers that had to memorize entire stories and pass them down orally.) It didn't soften our species' memory skills, it externalized memories we didn't need in long term storage so that we could learn other things. We ended up with more stories, and arguably, better stories from paper. Just like paper, modern systems externalize memories so we can focus on other stuff. That's a feature, not a bug. Knowing we've externalized those memories we move on with our brains and use the graymatter for other activities. That's also a feature, not a bug.
- mateo1 4y agoPaper is tangible, permanent and owned by you. Digital "memories" are rented, volatile and owned by someone else.