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An Education Shouldn’t Be Stored Entirely In Your Devices
How learning, memory, and recall were crucially enhanced by cultural brain training in past times
Lost and found knowledge
Did you know people used to memorize almost everything they knew that connected them to others, and the past? Ask someone who is seventy to tell you their childhood phone number, or even their childhood neighbor’s phone number.
Put simply, repetition reinforces memory.
Now try to recite all of those numbers that you have memorized.
Today we keep our lives in our phones.
But, through most of history, we knew things from the fire-lit stories, music, and dance told within our group. This way of life is not just lost to us because it’s now in digital form, it is also lost to us because real form — marked by sensation, and realized by place, senses, sky, and animated reality — is more impressed upon our brains than non-sensual information stored in devices.
With computers, we can accumulate billions of bits of information and knowledge. We then store it digitally, but at a certain loss culturally. There is obvious use to collected storage, especially with AI, but many instructors also notice the…