Today we address the question: Is the decline of natural memory a bad thing?
I say no, because memorizing stuff like the Ancient Rhetoricians did would be impossible.
Back then, it was possible to read everything that was out there and remember it. These days, you couldn’t read everything that was written today, let alone everything written ever.
So, today, we do rely on artificial and external memory storage, depending on our natural memory for only necessary day to day things such as driving, instinctual reactions and very distinct memories. Things like telephone numbers, books, and our Angry Birds high score are all stored externally. Artificial memory comes into play when we enact things such as mnemonics and summaries in order to temporarily memorize something.
Things to be permanently memorized that are forever necessary are written down to be remembered.
The Ancients would also perform their speeches this way, going strictly from memory using a more spatial system of memorization rather than the linear memorization we use today. Their speeches were different every time they were given, but still had the same basic points because the house or other object the used for key points was the same every time.
Today, our speeches will be pretty close to the same every time they are given because they are written in full first. If they are memorized, they are memorized from a previously written thing, called secondary oration.
Because we think so linearly today, I think it would be really hard to go back to the way things were in the Ancient times, unless someone was brought up to think that way.
I don’t think the loss of natural memory is necessarily a bad thing, simply because the amount of information out there today would be impossible to remember.
On the other hand, I don’t even have my parents’ cell phone numbers memorized, which might be a bad thing.
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