What we did in the days before Google....

Youngsters today find this a hard concept to grasp, but it was not so very long ago that people actually knew stuff - rather than just relying on being able to look everything up online at the drop of a hat.

In those days of yore when we had to depend on our own minds.... well, for one thing, I think we were more self-aware about the gradations of our 'knowledge': did we feel really sure about something, or at least reasonably confident, or were we more in the realms of 'hunch'?

And if we realised we didn't 'know' something.....

We'd try to remember.

Or we'd seek to infer an answer from scraps of relevant information we could assemble in our leaky old heads.

If we didn't have much to go on, we might speculate.

Or simply make a wild guess.

Indeed, we might just bullshit - conjuring some vaguely plausible-seeming (or not!) answer out of the ether, and trying to persuade people we knew what we were talking about.  [I would be particularly sad if this art were becoming lost to us: it is not only, at times, hugely entertaining - for both speaker and listener - but it is uncanny how often it inadvertently stumbles upon a truth.]

So much inventiveness is being discarded now that the knee-jerk response to any and every discovered lacuna in our knowledge is to dive into a search engine. Inventiveness, and mental acuity more generally is withering. Google is making us stupid (and if you haven't read this linked article yet, you really should).

The terrible danger, I believe, of 'offboarding' the human memory (as the tech geeks rapturously characterise this process) is that it will restrict our scope of thought, particularly in the more creative spheres of human activity. Creativity is born of memory: it arises from unconsciously forging connections and perceiving patterns within the things that we know, the things that we carry in our minds with us all the time. The less we carry, the less we have to work with.

You may dismiss this fear as exaggerated, but as I've been working closely with teenagers over the past few years, I have become shocked and appalled to discover how little they know any more - even about that which is most intimate to them. Many now keep lists (online, and/or on a digital device) of their favourite books or favourite films; and they struggle to remember much about the story of one of these, let alone its title (or the author/director), without consulting this list. The phenomenon is most marked in relation to music: kids today seem to be unable to name any of their favourite songs without looking at their playlist.

If we abandon the need to remember, we lose the ability to learn... But I worry that the new generation not only doesn't know very much, or seek to acquire - and memorise - much new knowledge; it is even losing the ability to make things up.