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Are we losing our ability to remember?

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Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#151

Post by hyperbovine »

jp57 wrote: post #144
asdff wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many parallels between Brave New World and our current world. It's honestly disturbing. The class divide between rich and poor is in there. The intellectual divide between knowledge workers and laborers is in there. The dopamine consumption cycle that stymies creative thought of the masses is in there. The willful ignorance of there being any problems at all is in there. That book is disturbingly prophetic. It's h…

It's almost as if these things have always existed.

And yet not.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#152

Post by kmtrowbr »

Wistar wrote: post #150
scotthtaylor wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree with you (nicely put btw) — what I find disconcerting is the fact that it's happening so quick, i.e. I notice myself evolving and changing over weeks/months and becoming increasingly reliant upon the external data stores. Pretty crazy we can adapt that quick!

Related: I have definitely lost my once lifelong habit of reading at least a book a week. It's down to about a book a year. Reading was such a big part of who I am and yet I now struggle to read a book. I keep buying them, however, I suppose in the hopes I can convince (shame?) myself to read by sheer volume of what I have bought and haven't read.

Set time aside: for example when eating breakfast, or before bed. Use a timer, set it to at least 20 minutes. Each minute you read per day, equals about 1 book per year. So if you read 20 minutes per day, you will read 20 books per year.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#153

Post by pmoriarty »

Liquix wrote: post #91
sixdimensional wrote: post #61

I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”. Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains. We evolve with technology, and it evolves with…

Doug Engelbart, a pioneer of the personal computer, would love your point about computers being extensions of our brains. His mission (in the 1950s!) was to find a way to 'augment human intellect' through technology, much like the biologist augments their eyesight through the microscope. The mind blowing part is that they didn't have anything to go off (or XEROX to copy) - imagine conceptualizing the personal compute…

You might enjoy reading E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops"[1][2][3], which in 1909 predicted something like the internet, internet addiction and withdrawal, chat rooms, video conferencing, online learning, widespread international air travel.

[1] - The story in written form - http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html

[2] - An audio recording - https://librivox.org/the-machine-stops-by-e-m-forster/

[3] - Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#154

Post by dorchadas »

asdff wrote: post #133
allenu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think we consume more information that we need. I think we also tend to overvalue getting that information and retaining it. The HN crowd is biased towards analysis and information, but just look at the abundance of note-taking systems posted. I used to store as much info as I could somewhere (a personal wiki) but over the years I realized there's just too much there and most of it I never need, and if I do ne…

The fetishism with notetaking is rampant, both on here and online. People make good money writing articles about the latest notetaking app and serving ads. Personally, I've never needed to crack open an old notebook after the relevant project has passed. I have a stack of them from college at my parent's house and they are simply collecting dust. Even if I had everything digital I would never feel the need to go back…

> The act of taking notes with a pen and paper, to synthesize thoughts into symbols and sentence structures, is far more meaningful than looking at the note again imo.

Absolutely this. I'm working on teaching myself abstract math with help from a friend on Discord who has his PhD and is willing to check my proofs and such, and just the act of writing things down helps so much. Especially linear algebra, where I kept losing track of all the summations and what stood for what while I was just reading. Writing down the stuff, and adding my own annotations to the steps explicitly elucidating why a step was possible, did more for me than ever reading back over them did, though I do admit sometimes it helped if it was a fresh concept; but oftentimes, it was just the act of writing that did it for me.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#155

Post by michannne »

spicymaki wrote: post #32

I feel that in general we are consuming a lot more information than we really need. I am not sure the human brain was evolved to handle a large amount of information that does not have any physical references. I find myself not only forgetting myriad facts and figures, but also mixing up information or having false memories. Many of my memories have nothing to anchor on. I think the trend today is to prime the brain…

Humans spent thousands of years telling stories orally, we didnt even have a written language for much of our existence, yet our memories have been working pretty well these past few millenia

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#156

Post by titzer »

Knowledge enormous makes a god of me.

Names, grey deeds, dire events, rebellions,

Majesties, sovereign voices, agonies,

Creations and destroyings all at once

Pour into the wide hollows of my brain

and deify me,

as if some blithe wine or bright elixir

Peerless I had drunk,

and so became immortal.

- Keats, from memory.

edit: Ok, I had to double check and I made a mistake!

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#157

Post by Schiendelman »

Buttons840 wrote: post #140
sixdimensional wrote: post #61

I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”. Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains. We evolve with technology, and it evolves with…

"Are we losing our ability to walk?" Yeah. Kinda. Not really. I bet people had to walk more before cars though.

Ability, perhaps not. But cars and car oriented planning are leading directly to obesity and heart disease. There’s a reason New Yorkers aren’t as fat as Ohioans.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#158

Post by sizzle »

sixdimensional wrote: post #61

I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”. Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains. We evolve with technology, and it evolves with…

You just described the field of "distributed cognition"

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#159

Post by sidpatil »

ohduran wrote: post #121
pessimizer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that the most terrifying thing in the book 1984 (and the most relevant to the pending future) was that people weren't allowed tools to write anything down, they had to use the "speakwrite," which would monitor the user and refuse to write things that weren't allowed to be written. Orwell wasn't prescient enough to imagine the type-remember, where you kept your entire perception of the world on machin…

I always thought that Brave New World was more prescient than 1984: you won't be forbid to write, we'll instead give you something more fun and distracting to do instead.

Huxley wrote a letter to Orwell arguing the same.

http://www.openculture.com/2018/08/aldous-huxley-george-orwe...

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#160

Post by rramadass »

asdff wrote: post #133
allenu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think we consume more information that we need. I think we also tend to overvalue getting that information and retaining it. The HN crowd is biased towards analysis and information, but just look at the abundance of note-taking systems posted. I used to store as much info as I could somewhere (a personal wiki) but over the years I realized there's just too much there and most of it I never need, and if I do ne…

The fetishism with notetaking is rampant, both on here and online. People make good money writing articles about the latest notetaking app and serving ads. Personally, I've never needed to crack open an old notebook after the relevant project has passed. I have a stack of them from college at my parent's house and they are simply collecting dust. Even if I had everything digital I would never feel the need to go back…

>The act of taking notes with a pen and paper, to synthesize thoughts into symbols and sentence structures, is far more meaningful

Well Put!

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