Reading Josh Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein and like how this video sums it up mindmap style. Been trying to identify the soundtrack for days. Sounded like something from Caleb Sampson music for Errol Morris documentary Fast Cheap And Out Of Control, then thought maybe Michael Nyman. It is, of course, Preparation for the Last TV Fake by Yann Tiersen from Goodbye Lenin.
Not really. Wired magazine reminds us that "humans have been relying on “transactive memory” ever since the invention of language". The lead researcher Mary Sparrow admits:
It seems that much more scary in some ways, the idea that we are locating everything that we learn outside of ourselves. Does that have any impact on out ability to remember things in general? I don't think that is the case.
...over the last thirty millennia since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we've gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids - a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. (p18)
Foer says in the interview below:
It's an old story. 2,500 years ago, Socrates was up in arms about this new invention called writing. And he said that once people start taking things out of their minds and putting them down on papyrus people are going to become forgetful, the culture is headed down this terrible, treacherous slope."
