The Google-Brain and the Future of Memory

by JL Wall

Working to reframe the question of whether Google makes us Stoopid, Peter Suderman (not without his own hesitations, I should add) ends his post over at The Scene:

Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored — resulting in what David Brooks called “the outsourced brain.” We won’t become books, we’ll become their indexes and reference guides, permanently holding on to rather little deep knowledge, preferring instead to know what’s known, by ourselves and others, and where that knowledge is stored.

While I like being able to rattle off statistics about baseball teams that played before I was born, maybe it is a better thing that I can’t do that for any team since the entry into my life of, well, the internet – more space for other things. I’m not quite as concerned about this in terms of statistics and data as I am with – what did you expect? – the experience of story and literature.

The experience, yes – even after the fact, even while merely remembering the encounter. Literature, story, poetry – whatever you choose to call it/them – are (or ought to be) experientially timeless. To have listened to Homer recited as he must once have been, to give oneself wholly to the music of an orchestra, to sit reading Keats (silently or aloud), to immerse oneself in say, the worlds of Dostoevsky (or even, I’d say, of a Clancy or Crichton – as far as this particular point is concerned, there is no necessary limit to “high” literature) is to experience time in a way removed from that of our day-to-day lives. When we say that we “lose ourselves” in a book, or a piece of music, or a work of art, this, partly, is what we mean – it is what has occurred when, reading, one looks up and suddenly realizes – realizes! – that one is, in fact, sitting on the living room sofa, holding a book in their hands.

But the experience and the meaning cannot be divorced, at least not wholly. We cannot, as Virginia Woolf declared, ever truly and fully know the Greeks because we cannot know what we have to know them through – their poetry, their music, their performance – as they knew them.

There are two ways to encounter a work: directly, in that initial experience of reading or listening or observing; and later, indirectly, through memory and consideration and reflection. To learn from a work – for a work to affect you and for you to be affected by the work – both are necessary. Somehow, it is less the direct than the indirect that I would say is at risk of being lost on account of the Googlized index-memory – though the encounter, too is certainly threatened by the fact that we are now (or so we’re told, and have witnessed) increasingly likely to index rather than remember. It becomes harder to achieve that atemporality of the encounter with art if our attention spans are severed and shortened. Giving oneself over to a work is, in its own way, a skill, and must be practiced and honed to be kept sharp. If I go too long without reading a long piece – especially a work of fiction – it can take me several days to remember how to (this is one of the reasons why I’ve forced myself to carve out time to read something as often as possible that has nothing to do with school, and nothing to do with the world of the internet).

But my concern is more for the indirect, as I said earlier. That is, for the memory, the recollection, the other angle(s) from which one looks at something in order to see what is there. For example: the difference between thinking of Book 22 of the Iliadand knowing that it contains the death of Hektor, and thinking of Book 22 of the Iliadand recalling the death of Hektor. Or, to zoom out, of thinking of the Iliadand knowing only: Akhilles, Hektor, Agamemnon, Helen, Paris, war, fate, glory; or thinking of the Iliad and seeing all of those (and more), but in (something of, at least) the complex web of their relationships and interactions in all its glory.

The knowing – the memory – of a work is not re-experiencing the encounter. The encounter is outside of time; the memory places it within time and so is able to examine it. The index has two dimensions to the memory’s three: when you hold it up and tilt it, you may still be able to notice something new in the way the light hits it, but it becomes far more difficult.

There is good and bad in the way that Google (to use it as shorthand for all that is new) makes us think differently – the access to information that we otherwise might not have been able to remember is certainly good, as is the freedom to spend more time on those things which are of greater importance to ourselves. But the danger is in the loss of depth of consideration: of Buber’s Du; of the delight of Oakeshott’s Poetical Mode; of Heschel’s allusive timelessness.

Filed under: media/culture, science/tech