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The ability atrophied because it was not practiced because there was no need.
by mitxela 2mo ago
The ability atrophied because it was not practiced because there was no need.
- sodapopcan 2mo agoMaybe as per usual, I think we all mostly remembered so many numbers thanks to pattern recognition. I'm old enough to have had a rotary phone in the basement growing that I used less than the various other keypad phones in the house. Whenever I was dialing (literally) a newly learned number on the rotary phone, I to think of what it looked like on touchpad first. Although very quickly I'd get to know the rotary pattern as well. Of course, this is likely totally a regular memory device people would use. I've done no reading on this so, so if Socrates was wary of writing, was he also wary of pattern recognition or drawing as memory aids?
- alchemism 2mo agoBack in Socrates time, masters of rhetoric used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci to memorize long texts without reading or writing. Something was definitely lost as something was gained.
- HPsquared 2mo agoIt's not like we are born with a "phone number library" skill. It's a specific skill that's developed to meet a need. It's carved out of the grey matter, a little table for storing 7- or 9-digit numbers. But the grey matter is still available for other uses.