In ‘Proust and the Squid’, Maryanne Wolf talks about just that, how external reading and writing skills behave as a kind of storage area for brain contents. I can’t remember the exact passage (I guess because I have it written down in a book at home) but she talks about how we don’t write things down to remember them, but so that it’s okay for us to forget them. She goes into an analysis of a few cultures and their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to writing, reading, and memory. Very related and a good read. It follows along a bit with Plato’s Phaedrus, the story of Socrates’ objection to the written word.
I think it’s interesting the way what you have memorized, exactly, seems to change based on where you are or what you are doing. I’m sure most of us without eidetic memories have experienced the sudden loss of some memorized bit of information, only to remember it with ease a few hours later.
Memories of certain friends seem completely solid and close when you are around them but utter inaccessible otherwise, never entering into your day to day thought processes. I often wonder if this is even a brain-wide effect, with different tools in the toolbox other than just memory being triggered or non-triggered based on your environment. It would be strange if some environments caused tools in your brain to trigger that increased your skill at a task, tools that would go forgotten at another time. I think I ran into an example of that the other Friday. I got my arm stuck past the elbow in a narrow metal slat, reaching for something in a warehouse after hours. Legs off the ground, lacking leverage and totally unable to free myself, I struggled for a while then just sat around thinking, trying to figure out what to do. After half an hour, I realized I could spit on my arm to get it lubricated up and slip it out of the slat—some gross struggling and a couple minutes later I was free, if really bruised up. I feel like I would have come across that solution faster if my worries weren’t tending toward being stuck all weekend in the warehouse.
In ‘Proust and the Squid’, Maryanne Wolf talks about just that, how external reading and writing skills behave as a kind of storage area for brain contents. I can’t remember the exact passage (I guess because I have it written down in a book at home) but she talks about how we don’t write things down to remember them, but so that it’s okay for us to forget them. She goes into an analysis of a few cultures and their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to writing, reading, and memory. Very related and a good read. It follows along a bit with Plato’s Phaedrus, the story of Socrates’ objection to the written word.
I think it’s interesting the way what you have memorized, exactly, seems to change based on where you are or what you are doing. I’m sure most of us without eidetic memories have experienced the sudden loss of some memorized bit of information, only to remember it with ease a few hours later.
Memories of certain friends seem completely solid and close when you are around them but utter inaccessible otherwise, never entering into your day to day thought processes. I often wonder if this is even a brain-wide effect, with different tools in the toolbox other than just memory being triggered or non-triggered based on your environment. It would be strange if some environments caused tools in your brain to trigger that increased your skill at a task, tools that would go forgotten at another time. I think I ran into an example of that the other Friday. I got my arm stuck past the elbow in a narrow metal slat, reaching for something in a warehouse after hours. Legs off the ground, lacking leverage and totally unable to free myself, I struggled for a while then just sat around thinking, trying to figure out what to do. After half an hour, I realized I could spit on my arm to get it lubricated up and slip it out of the slat—some gross struggling and a couple minutes later I was free, if really bruised up. I feel like I would have come across that solution faster if my worries weren’t tending toward being stuck all weekend in the warehouse.