Lost Art of Memory

Joshua Foer, (brother of author Jonathan Foer - Extremely Loud,etc) has been featured on a broadcast on ABC as part of his lecture "The End of Remembering". Its interesting that the Foers are Jewish and both brothers feature memory strongly in their books. Memory is an inherent part in being Jewish with large pieces of scripture memorised in childhood, and the Jewish faith is heavily memory reliant with its strong sense of cultural history, remembered events and oral tradition. I recently picked up Joshua Foer's book "Moonwalking with Einstein" about his recent foray into the World Memory Championships and I've flicked through the first few pages while it sits waiting in a pile of "waiting to be read" beside my bed.


His lecture discusses the implications of a society that is shifting its memory base from where we relied onto internal organic memory to one where we now rely on storage outside the brain on devices. The extent to which we’ve delegated the workings of memory to Google prompts a scary question about our culture. “What we’ve gained is indisputable. But what have we traded away? What does it mean that we’ve lost our memory?” It’s a sensational question and Foer proves our memories have the potential to remain mostly constant, and there isn’t actually a dramatic difference in mental capacity between memory champions and everyone else. There is also an excellent interview with Joshua Foer on the Amazon.com site, but the 16 minute interview on the changing state of memory from the ABC site is downloadable as an MP3 and is well worth a listen - http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2011/3194440.htm.

Burn brightly, Pete