Decline of Memory

Your memory is remarkable, but it's likely worse than that of previous generations. And even today, kids store less information in their heads than their parents.

My pseudoneurophsychology degree allows me to fabricate the following plausible sequence of events, describing how over history our need to memorise has declined markedly.

In prehistoric times, when humans had spoken language but hadn't invented writing, stories had to be committed to memory. Sitting around campfires in the evening, people would tell each other tales of their ancestors, myths of their origins and lessons of life. Significant events from previous generations were passed down orally and such was the accuracy of the retelling, they could last many thousands of years in nearly unchanged form. This was largely due to the repetition - stories would be repeated so many times night after night that they were burnt into the memory and not easily forgotten. Ancestral memories of events such as mass migration, tribal conflicts, volcanic eruptions and other disasters have been pass down in stories to the current day.

Eventually written language spread around the tribes and civilisations, but still the common people had to use their memory. With growing literacy, it was possible to commit to paper some ideas and stories. It was no longer necessary to memorise recipes and family stories. But without photography, how could we recognise the faces of our relatives or famous people? We weren't sketching everyone we met, so memory was all we had to go on. And although going on holiday was less common in earlier centuries before mass transportation facilitated easy travel, it still occurred. And without a camera, the grand cities and vistas seen needed to be remembered in our heads. It's curious to imagine the complete absence of tourists snapping photos in front of tourist icons such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Big Ben.  

Moving forward to the twentieth century we reach the era of photography, sound reproduction, the mass media and print. Schoolkids still learned masses of facts by rote, memorising their times tables and the years of significant battles, and when the kings and queens reigned. But gradually over decades towards the turn of the millenium, aides memoire were becoming more prominent. Calculators were allowed into maths lessons and exams; open book exams were more common and the learning of facts was frowned upon - instead applied knowledge was the key. No longer were poems memorised for English literature studies, instead students might be asked to comment on an advertisement or the lyrics of a pop song. Mobile phones and other electronic devices now stored more and more factoids for us. If we want to know something, in seconds we could google an answer. Only ten or fifteen years ago we'd have needed to visit a library and spent time researching books or journals, or perhaps a set of encyclopaedia at home.

Today these electronic repositories are an extension of our brains. Why bother memorising a phone number or someone's birthday when you can just store it in a device. Why bother learning directions when our sat nav will tell us? Why learn a recipe by heart if we can read it off an iPad?

Thus our memories are withering with lack of use. And when civilisation collapses, we'll all be stuffed.

Thus ends today's plausible but unscientific ramble.