… the amount of culture to be transmitted orally was beyond the capacity of a small group to achieve even in a long lifetime … Priests by progressive degrees of abstraction & symbolisation … were able to turn the written record into a device for preserving & transmitting ideas & feelings & emotions that had never taken any visible or material form … the development of symbolic methods of storage immensely increased the capacity of the city as container … this condensation & storage, for the purpose enlarging the boundaries of the community in time & space is one of the singular functions performed by the city … "The city" as Emerson observed, "lives by remembering" - Lewis Mumford: The City in History
Anthony Blunt was the worlds expert on Poussin. He carried the details of Poussin pictures in his head because the then available methods of reproduction were primitive - in particular there were few ways of making coloured copies. According to Brian Sewell, Blunt was devastated when, having managed to curate the worlds first exhibition of Poussin (at the Royal Academy?) he realised, on seeing two particular works together in the same room for the first time, that one of them could not be by Poussin - his memory checker was at fault
Training the memory was an important part of education in ancient times. Written sources were scarce or non-existent or hard to come by - memory was the only way of being able to check eg Bible quotations. Even in my own lifetime learning by heart - especially of poetry - was an important skill. Dorothy L Sayers - via Lord Peter Wimsey - made great play of this kind of quotation, & she was not the only one. When did The Times crossword stop regarding quotation as a legitimate form of clueing?
One of my university lecturers comforted me in my inability to remember a statistical formula by pointing out that I need only remember which page of the textbook it was on
My memory has in fact always worked like this, more than as a complete Book of Verse or whatever; I remember that there is a poem about Daffodils & it is on a right hand page somewhere in the middle of the book, which I then need to consult to remind myself of the details of the poem. Or I may remember that Wordsworth wrote a poem about daffodils & use appropriate reference works to track this down
With the arrival of the internet we now are all potential citizens of the virtual city & there are even more ways of checking memory at the click of a button
The computer analogy is useful. We may think that our memories have deteriorated because of our general inability to learn to remember chunks of text. But looked at the other way our capacity for memory has increased exponentially by using a form of compression - we need only remember the keyword to locate & therefore remember - or rather remind ourselves - of the poem
Implications for education? Eg doctors, reputed to learn more new words than an undergraduate learning Russian. Particularly difficult to learn this vocabulary in these days when they have not learned Latin & Greek at school & are therefore unable to make the etymological connections. But why do they need such a large & specialised verbal vocabulary? Now any doctor can have an easily available 'picture book' in which to look up the detailed anatomy of eg the groin to check the specific bit of muscle which may be causing the problem without ever giving it a name. Without such pictures precise recollection of the technical name for that muscle may be, literally, vital
What effect has been made on our brains/memories by the vast number of pictures we all now see - in colour - on a daily basis? (TV, film, magazines) Have they simply replaced our own 'film' of the world around us which we might otherwise be seeing, noting & remembering? Is there any difference arising from the fact that the pictures we see are in 2-dimensions, while the real world is in 3 dimensions? Is this just another form of compression? Do we store our 'real world' pictures in our own version of compression to 2 dimensions? Do we store copies of 2-dimensional photographs together with a code for converting them back to 3 dimensions? Or do we only ever 'see' 2 dimensions with our eyes? Which are somehow converted to 3 by our brain?
