Has the Moon Lost Her Memory?

I was not allowed to take notes in my high school Chemistry class. Take a moment to let that sink in.

If you are concerned about how I learned, comprehended, and studied without a real-time transcription of the lectures, well, I appreciate your concern. I was flooded by the very same concerns on the first day of class. But according to my teacher, students didn't listen when they were taking notes. You don't retain anything from the day's class. You just wait until the night before the exam and rely on learning from your notes.

Fast forward five years to my Psychology of Language course. Exams for the class were open-note, so to enhance efficiency and quality of note-taking, I used a laptop. Fast forward three months to my Computer Crash of 2008. I had attended every class meeting. I had recorded practically every word uttered by my professor (I pride myself in my WPM) and had enhanced my notes with voice recordings and hyperlinks clarifying or elaborating on various topics. It was all there. But without my computer, I had nothing.

I often used to receive "F's" for memorization in piano class (it's been long enough that I can write about it without trembling). If I close my eyes, I can still hear my piano teacher yelling The memory slips! in her thick Russian accent (so thick, that my brother and I argued for years about whether she was saying memory slips or memory sleeps).

I haven't had to memorize facts for a while. I remember having to memorize the 206 human bones, state and country capitals, vocabulary...but that was so long ago. Now it seems to be more about knowing where to find the information. And it's not just facts. Once we started video recording our dance rehearsals, I didn't even have to worry about missing a step when we were learning. I was comforted by the fact that I could always watch the recording when I got home. Committing steps to memory was no longer urgent.

American Scene writer Peter Suderman explains, "Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored." Computers are changing the way we deal with information. And that may not necessarily be a bad thing.

I have a horrible sense of direction. But that doesn't matter anymore. I don't need to memorize routes or learn street names. I'll always have my trusty GPS to tell me whether I need to continue for 2.8 miles or take the next right.

My grandfather has a phenomenal memory. He has the "elephant memory" my dad claims to have. He remembers the plot of every book he has ever read (and he's an avid reader). He remembers intricate details about current and historic events. He remembers important quotes and their owners. His memory is his search engine. Probably because there was no Google (fine, or Bing) when he was growing up for him to easily "look it up" when necessary. Two years ago when I was in Paris, he called me to give me directions to a quaint, hole-in-the-wall restaurant to which he had been once, twenty-five years ago. I can barely give you directions to the restaurant at which I ate last week.

Over the past couple years, I've begun to notice my increased negligence to commit facts to memory, or at least my increased negligence for the importance of committing facts to memory. It makes me worried for the future of the Human Memory (yes, I just extrapolated my own behavior to the human species at large). Nicholas Carr's The Shallows has gotten me thinking about the issue even more. He insists that biological memory is in a constant state of renewal whereas memory outsourced to computers is completely static. Basically, we can't just rely on computers. "To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation," he writes. Outsource memory, and culture withers."

This day in age, we need computers. Our lifestyles are built around them. But we shouldn't underestimate our own processing capabilities. Computers aren't going anywhere any time soon (hopefully). And neither is culture and the human brain (hopefully). In the coming years, it's going to be up to us to strike a healthy balance between the two.