I will begin by acknowledging that this is a topic which I first began to think about in earnest following a talk given by Mark Turin at the University of Washington. In his talk, Mark brought up the difficulty he had remembering words he had heard only once while he was doing field work in Nepal. In a typical session, walking in a field with a native speaker, his consultant would say, “We call this flower [word],” and he would respond, “Could you repeat that?” One time, out of exasperation at this common refrain, his consultant responded, “Can’t you just remember things?”
Mark found that actually he could not, unless he was paying strict attention and it was said multiple times. This is not, in turns out, the normal human response. You have to be raised in a culture of forgetfulness to have this particular mental flaw, and he had to learn from scratch how to remember properly.
I immediately recognized myself in this story. Although my field work has not been as removed from the familiar comforts of a western developed nation as Mark’s work in Nepal, I have had almost the exact same exchange with consultants. Learning how to use memory is probably the hardest component of field work. Far harder than learning the language itself is the task of remembering a handful of words, still more one or two or seven sentences verbatim, to write down and analyze later. It may be surprising to hear that this is harder than the language learning, but it is true in my experience. Let me explain why I think this is.
One of my favorite parables is the invention of writing, from Plato’s Phaedrus. If you are not familiar with it, it goes like this. Plato says that Socrates heard this story from an Egyptian. (Whenever Plato thinks he has something profound to say, he says he heard it from an Egyptian – or perhaps he really did and there is some great Egyptian philosopher whose wisdom has mostly become lost to time.) The Egyptian god of learning and knowledge, Thoth, approached the king of all Egypt to show him his inventions. When he showed him the invention of writing, he called it a device for remembering and for wisdom. You can now make marks on papyrus, and thereby remember what you intended, and with great precision.
The king said, “You are very clever, Thoth. But you have not created a device for remembering, but for forgetting. For once the people commit a thing to writing, it will be outside of them. The writing will remember for them, and there will not be any memory within the person. They will appear wise, but they will be forgetful and foolish instead.”
Plato committed this story to writing, so there is some sense in which he did not quite believe that wisdom was totally lost to the invention of writing. There is something nevertheless correct here about tools: When we use a device to do something on our behalf, we are at risk of atrophying in ourselves our own capacity to do it.
In Plato’s time, he saw writing as a threat to memory, for it was remembering on our behalf. But writing was difficult – only the upper classes were literate – and paper was expensive. One of the many interesting things about Ancient Greek society was the relatively high literacy rate of its governing classes, coupled with a strong commitment to oral tradition. The reasoning for maintaining this dual system can be seen in Plato’s parable. The Greeks were not the only ones to do this: Hindu monks worked very hard to pass down the vedas, with word-for-word fidelity, through oral chanting alone.
In the modern day, we use the tool of writing far more and with greater ease than any ancient civilization. And in our age it is not only the base technology of writing that cultivates forgetfulness. Far worse for our memories than long-hand writing, we have devices that allow us to write with great speed, and which may then search through a large amount of text for the particular thing we might be looking for, outsourcing even more of our memory to some server out there on the internet. No mere hazard to precision of memory, this is a system which threatens to atrophy that entire faculty. Memory has been rendered (if you so choose) obsolete. This atrophy is not even necessarily noticeable until you are in an environment where memory is needed again. Language learning in general is such a case, but linguistic field work even more so.
The assault that connected devices organize against our minds is not just in the realm of memory but also attention. In the normal environment, one cannot immediately satisfy every question that enters into one’s mind. It is only by carrying around phones, which may at any time query an unimaginable number of databases, that we have become able to train ourselves to follow every interrupting train of thought, rather than attending to the matter at hand and being in the moment. This is not unrelated to the assault on memory, for truly being able to remember a thing spoken requires careful attention: it requires our full presence in the moment with our interlocutor. Our normal human capacities of memory and attention, as a result of our technologies and their use, have become weaker. Like many vices, this happens subtly and one piece at a time, until we arrive in a moment where our disability has been laid bare.
While I do not want to compare myself to Plato (he was much wiser than I am and a better writer), I have committed a similar irony to his. I have critiqued the ease of writing with a keyboard, and of the use of internet technologies… using my keyboard and putting it on the internet. And I will not take the easy way out and say, “Ah, but it is in how we use the technology, not the technology itself.” I think it is the technology itself. Information technologies are net negatives for us in a way that is not true of writing. Writing enables linear thought and rigorous attention to logical arguments in a way that is difficult to do in speech. (It is not, I think, coincidence that higher math only arises in cultures that have writing.) Whatever detriment it may have on memory, writing itself does not attack attention: books and long-form writing encourage greater attention to a single task, and hone attentive discipline. The upsides of information technology are far less and the downsides far greater than writing. I will not allow myself the comfort that the danger is in their use: these modern technologies are bad for our brains, in profound and largely inescapable ways.
I do not really have an answer here. I have not recovered my human faculties of memory and attention since becoming aware of this problem. My mind is dumber and less focused than it was before these technologies penetrated my everyday life. Perhaps the best approach is through another metaphor, and to understand the modern technologies as somewhat like a demon: They have been conjured into the world, through a series of dark incantations and spells, and are powerful and can be set to perform certain tasks. But the demon has to be bound up tightly with rules and strict discipline, or it may escape its chains and devour you. I have found a few important tools for keeping this technological demon bound up, and to begin recovering my own capacities for memory and attention:
- Leave social media. (I have not succeeded here yet.)
- If you cannot leave social media (like a drug addict who cannot go cold turkey), remove it from your phone. The compulsion to check Facebook or Twitter or what-have-you will no longer be in your pocket. Visit at a certain time (or times) each day. Avoid spontaneous social media as much as possible.
- Also set up times for email: the urge to check at random intervals to see if something has happened erodes focus.
- Make an effort to spend time in an oral-only environment, with friends, with language learning (in the latter case it may be with film or television), and commit to not writing anything down. If you want to remember something, you must remember it. It will be hard at first and you will be forgetful. But over time you can regain your memory.
- Read long-form writing. This means lengthy articles in the newspaper if you must, but it is much better to read books. Fiction if it holds your attention, but non-fiction and complex argumentation as you regain your focus. Keep yourself in the environment of the book for at least thirty minutes. It can be less if it is a foreign language you are learning, but make an effort to increase it with time.
- Stop looking things up through the internet if you don’t know them. Before you hit that search button, ask: Is this something I really need to know? Can I figure it out through clues for myself? Every time you satisfy an ultimately-trivial itch of curiosity by going to Google, you train yourself to rely on the external world for memory, and continue the erosion of your own internal capacity. If it is something you can’t quite remember, sit with it until you do. Move on to something else, and it may come to you. Leave the search box be.
All of these strategies will degrade with time if you go back to looking things up on your phone or computer all the time. Much like the practice of meditation, there is no use beating yourself up for failure here: Simply go back to the practice. This is a practice I am trying (not with the greatest success so far) to embody myself. As I make progress, I will try to give updates on what has and has not worked for me.
Tools – like writing, or like information technology – come with an inherent danger. We are a species defined by tool use: Perhaps instead of homo sapiens we should be called homo ferrum or homo vasum, for the tools we make use of to ease our lives. The danger with any tool is that it may replace something that used to be within ourselves. I am not so interested in replicating the virtues of a human being in something inhuman: memory, ability to learn, a moral capacity. I am much more interested in increasing human virtues within the being of a person. The experiences I have had with language have been a stark demonstration of how I have lost many of these capacities, capacities which are part of my human inheritance, and replaced them with a set of tools. I aim to reclaim them.