” There’s an old sort of myth out there, if you put something in your mind it shoves another piece of information out…. Not only is that not true, but actually the more information you put up there, you more you have that capacity of remembering” Joshua Foer, Author of Moonwalking With Einstein.
Foer asks relevant questions such as: Is the age of smart phones that keep all of the information readily available at our fingertips, are we easily forgetting those things we used to commit to memory.
Socrates worried back in that the advent and increased popularity of written books were going to damage out capacity to store information, as ideas, stories and history no longer had to be stored in our minds. Has there been a steady decrease in our capacity to remember with each technological breakthrough?
I recently visited a cousin who had moved to Atlanta about 3 months prior to me stay with them. His wife (I would like to make it clear here that his wife a highly intelligent woman) drove us out to take in a movie at t he local shopping mall. I didn’t pay much attention to the GPS when we were on our way, but I did on the way back home.
The shopping arena was about 10 miles from their home and most of that a straight shot on the expressway. She kept a gps navigator on for the entire drive, right up to the drive. When I inquired, she explained that she had used the gps since arriving to her new home that without it she still cannot remember the way to and from her favorite spots.
Foer explains how our mind capacity may be shrinking and why “
Once upon a time, the idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so strange a notion as it might seem to be today. People invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds.
Over the last few millennia, we’ve invented a series of technologies — from the alphabet to the printed book to the photograph to the iPhone — that have made it easier and easier for us to externalize our memories and essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.
These technologies have made our modern world possible, but they’ve also changed us. They’ve changed us culturally, and I would argue that they’ve changed us cognitively. Having little need to remember anymore, it sometimes seems as if we’ve forgotten how.”
Foer is a champion is a champion in the USA memory championship “One of the last places where you still find people passionate about the idea of a disciplined, cultivated memory is a strange contest held each spring in New York called the USA Memory Championship. Contestants compete to see who can memorize the most lines of poetry, the most names of strangers, even the most random digits in five minutes.”
Foer recently penned a bestseller called Moonwalking with Einstein, that is labeled to help the reader develop an stronger memory and get back some of that capacity we have lost over time.
