In early Greece, Homer was a writer that one memorized and orally transmitted. One learned how to remember, Homer wrote to facilitate that process. Thus the intellect was challenged by memory. Any important Athenian, Spartan, Corinthian, would be able to quote Homer in ringing tones. It was like songs in the early 60s, one knew every word of a Dylan song, or the like. The words were the words of a song but also the words of a culture.
Also back in the 60s students learned penmanship. Namely how to hold a pen and how to write. Today we see students holding some writing instrument as if they were about to chip away at a stone block. Hand writing and note taking are no longer practiced. I look back on college note books from the 60s and see neat well written pages, just as a 144th century student at Oxford may have done. Enter computers, laptops, iPads and smart phones and at best one has scratch ephemera.
Next I think of maps. For years I had paper maps. I still do. They lay out the entire scope of what I am entering upon. I can see alternatives. Unlike say Google maps which lays out what it thinks is the way to go, I never really follow that. In NYC, before its collapse, I could take side streets, alleys, and a multiple set of paths because I had learned the neural net of NYCs pathways. I knew the least time rout at any time of day. I had studied maps and thus had alternative paths. I made the decision, not Google.
Nature has an interesting article on these topics:
Adrian Ward had been driving confidently around Austin, Texas, for nine years — until last November, when he started getting lost. Ward’s phone had been acting up, and Apple maps had stopped working. Suddenly, Ward couldn’t even find his way to the home of a good friend, making him realize how much he’d relied on the technology in the past. “I just instinctively put on the map and do what it says,” he says Ward’s experience echoes a common complaint: that the Internet is undermining our memory. This fear has shown up in several surveys over the past few years, and even led one software firm to coin the term ‘digital amnesia’ for the experience of forgetting information because you know a digital device has stored it instead. Last year, Oxford University Press announced that its word of the year was ‘brain rot’ — the deterioration of someone’s mental state caused by consuming trivial online content. What you’ll see out there is all kinds of dire predictions about digital amnesia, and ‘we’re gonna lose our memory because we don’t use it anymore’,” says Daniel Schacter, who studies memory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The use of any computer system to learn something always has failure modes. Take anatomy. In First Year Med School there is a semester of anatomy. A team gets a cadaver and then dissembles it manually to understand where what is. I saw the cranial nerves. All of them from start to finish. In the process I saw the muscles they were attached to, the tissues they passed through. The network became ingrained in my head so even today I can lay out the network. I accomplished this by doing the work at hand. One could not accomplish this in some computer simulation.
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