> Don't abandon pen and paper, don't regress human brain capacity. Socrates believed writing regressed human brain capacity, by serving as a crutch for memory

> Don't abandon pen and paper, don't regress human brain capacity. Socrates believed writing regressed human brain capacity, by serving as a crutch for memory and thus leading to atrophy. Maybe he had a point, because you don’t much hear about recitations of Illiad length works from memory these days. I don’t think it’s quite as simple as all that though, because I imagine using your memory mostly as an index rather than mostly as a data store has its own set of adaptions. However, the development of that kind of comprehensive organizing memory is by no means ensured by the modern environment.