Today’s topic is Memory.
Memory is an interesting thing. The more I am educated, the more fascinating the concept of memory becomes to me. There are many ways that you can remember things. I was going to try to set down a few examples of how people remember data, but that is difficult to do.
I would like to say that most people think of memory as a set of concrete facts or statements that we can make about the world that we have stored away in our brain. These can range from things as simple as ‘one plus one equals two’ to more abstract concepts like ideologies and philosophies. I would say that this is largely what I think about memory too.
The way people use memory today largely involves briefly storing data in their minds for the short term. Especially in the educational world, people gather knowledge for a semester, then discard it at the end unless they have to take the next part of the course the next semester. This is referred to as “cramming.” We stuff information into heads in a sort of hurried refrigeration. We do not usually take the care to preserve the knowledge we take in, like carefully canning or deep freezing the information. The difference between the two is largely learning strategy, whether you take the time to learn stuff or just try to pass a class. That is a different story, though.
In the past, people were much better at retaining the data that they came across. They had stronger memories, and much of that was due to the lack of modern conveniences. However, they still were able to produce many knowledgeable people who were well versed in many fields.
In the past, knowledge was passed on by word of mouth. This is what we call “oral tradition.” I may speak of this more some other time. Often, people in the past would listen to a speech that some other person gave and be able to come back and quote back the speech quite accurately (thanks Ben Crosby, I know you don’t have to cite blogs, but the Lit major in me would kill me if I didn’t). This is a fascinating concept. Most of the time, when we go to hear someone like Obama give a speech, we will come back and say, “Oh, he talked about health care, and he said such and such.” We then will summarize in maybe four minutes a twenty minute speech. We are so good at condensing information these days. Largely, being able to summarize a speech is an important thing. You need to be able to take away the key ideas so that you do not walk away without learning anything. However, these guys from the past used to be able to give the whole speech to the next guy in much the same way as you would be able to if you captured in on a cellular phone and posted it to your blog.
That brings me to my next point. We often use technology as a replacement for memory. Yes, a replacement. That is critically important to understand. Now, I will concede that technology can help you remember stuff better, such as recording a lecture to listen to again later. However, setting up a Google calendar is not helping you remember anything. It is remembering things for you, and with our lazy human minds, we tend to let these calendars remember everything for us. Calendars are useful tools. I need them just as much as anybody. I would like you to consider for a moment what it was like before paper was widespread, or even literacy was widespread. How then would you remember your mother’s birthday or when your buddy’s party is? You would have to rely completely on your own memory. That is what the old school guys did.
Now this sort of memorization extends far beyond speeches and dates. It applied to any sort of information you could store as knowledge. People who are considered experts today still carry out knowledge like this. On the flip side, people can also be considered experts without all this information committed to memory, meaning that if they had no Internet access and no library access (meaning all books), if they were completely on their own, they would be much more ignorant people.
The reason I bring this up is that I am studying rhetoric right now, and there are five canons of rhetoric, meaning five things that you have to address and master to do well rhetorically. The fourth of these five is Memory. In the rhetorical sense, Memory means that mastery of the material that you will be presenting on. Displaying this mastery would mean that you can immediately provide information to support your statements or answer the questions of those you are speaking to without having to “look up” data. It is all in your head. Now, it is allowed to not know everything, but I know that I tend to struggle with this so much. Whenever I am in a deep conversation with someone, I often feel like I do not know what the answer is but I know where to find it. Most of the time, it is information that I have come across before but failed to commit to my memory. I know that this problem is becoming more and more common these days. I know that I am still young, and that when I am older I will be “wiser” because I will have committed to mind more of the lessons of life. Yet I know I have passed up many lessons because leaving the knowledge in a book or on the Internet was easier.
My next point is that we are all experts if we have access to the Internet. That is really how we act. We read about something on Wikipedia, and we act like we have a doctorate in that field. Ok, I am exaggerating. The truth is that internet has become a sort of hive mind for us. We all have our own little access to it, access that is become more mobile every day. So many of my friends will have questions about some piece of obscure information, then whip out their smart phones and remember it. I am too young to remember the day when you had to remember things. Books have always been too inconvenient to carry, so I do not blame them for our loss of memory skill. I think they may have contributed slightly, but not nearly on the scale as the Internet.
I wish I could go in more depth on this topic of the Internet, but I am not expert. I would like to say, though, that people tend to “research” more than “memorize.” I say that “research” is not a bad thing, but it is looking to find the answer to one question then move on to the next. Many times it does not save the answer unless it is somehow involved in the next question. “Research” lets us go back and re-research the topic if we cannot remember the answer. True memorization, true learning would have us remember the answers to our past questions. However, we are but mortal and finite and far from perfect. It is allowed to forget things. I just think that we are getting lazy and forgetting things on purpose. I would even say that we may be not learning altogether on purpose because the information will always be right there.
And so another important part of High Culture has died.
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