Among the various threats that modern tech poses to culture and mankind, there is a grave threat against human intelligence–in particular, human memory. Every technological development is opposed to a certain skill. The development of motorized vehicles, for example, meant that the training, driving, and caring for horses was no longer a common ability. Likewise, technology poses a similar threat to memory. 

In her book the Art of Memory Frances Yates informs us that from Antiquity until the Renaissance, memory was a well practiced skill used to recollect events, stories, and speeches. Between then and now, the progress of technology has made the art of memory an anachronism. Who needs to go to school? Google provides mountains of knowledge, accessible at a moment’s notice. Who needs to know the way to work? GPS’s are used even for routes as repetitive as the daily commute. Who now passes the time recollecting tales of old? The entertainment industry has created enough content to fill the mightiest hole. The more data technology stores in a harddrive, the less knowledge we need hold within ourselves. 

From a purely pragmatic point of view, technology may seem the superior strategy. Tech does not make mistakes, forget important details, or invent new ones–all errors which the human memory is prone to make. The practical observation, however, overlooks memory’s greatest strength. Whereas technology records data verbatim, memory may improve upon the bare facts by imbuing them with meaning. 

In order to show this, it is first necessary to explain how events are connected to meaning and therefore to the mind and memory. Events have meaning. The employee who is always late for work, a child receiving a gift, or a coronation ceremony demonstrate this point vividly. In each example, the event contains meaning that exceeds the physical description. The visible is a sign pointing toward the invisible. The employee’s tardiness reflects his disinterested attitude toward work, the gift represents the affection for the child, and the crown shows headship over the nation. Merely physical descriptions are misleading because they neglect the significance of what happened.  Therefore a healthy re-telling of an event will ignore certain details in favor of ones that support the meaning or significance of an event. Not every detail is equal to one another simply because they are all equally true, but a good story-teller must sort the heap of facts into the keep and the discard piles.

Events do not always stand on their own. Several related events strung together with a beginning, middle and end is a story, and for the whole structure of the story to be grasped, a proper arrangement of the events is necessary. Event A comes before Event B because it is the cause of event B, or perhaps certain details are withheld to increase suspense. A well arranged story may at times even sacrifice the chronological order of events in order to promote the message of the whole story. 

One good example of this is the Creation story in Genesis 2, where Adam (man) is created before the animals. Whether or not this is the true chronological order of events, Genesis 2 does hold forth a worthwhile reality: man’s authority over creation since he is first in the order of animals. In the Creation narrative earlier in Genesis , however, God makes man last in the order of creation: this time, man is the summit and most perfect of the animals. Although the narratives chronologically contradict one another, they do not formally contradict one another in meaning. In any case, it has been shown how arrangement contributes to the meaning of a story.

To summarize, a purely physical description of a thing is devoid of meaning, and in order for something to become meaningful, it needs to undergo a metamorphosis. Details must be either scrapped or preserved in the scrapbook. Events need arrangement into the proper order that promotes a certain idea. These mutations of the raw material may occur consciously, but frequently they occur unconsciously in the memory. Memory is frequently working in the background adapting items in the memory in order to resolve disparities and arrange items in the clearest possible manner. Have we all not experienced this? Have we all not thought a certain way only to leave and reconsider it hours later with an entirely new understanding? And recollected the same issue again after a night’s sleep with a third new opinion? Or have not traumatic memories failed to resolve after hours of conscious effort, yet resolve through an unconscious breakthrough months later? When a man stores things in his memory, he cannot expect to return and find them the same as before as if stored in a bank vault. Rather he should expect them to have undergone a transformation, and if he has a well-trained memory, he may expect to find that they have transformed into something rich and strange but good.

And now when we return and compare memory to the artificial methods of recording information and knowledge, we see that what was technology’s greatest benefit is a great weakness. Technology is static and morose whereas the memory is fluid and vital. Once written down on a piece of paper or encoded on a machine, the knowledge recorded has no opportunity to adapt and make itself more meaningful or relevant. Meanwhile, this power is memory’s greatest strength and one of man’s greatest tools for understanding the world. 

Technology has its place (books especially have been a technology that has advanced human knowledge), but it should not come at the cost of memory. Left to itself, memory becomes dormant, a useless appendage. Sadly, it is becoming harder and harder to practice the art of memory in a world that has outsourced our natural faculties to technology. Unless modernity steps beyond what is convenient and comfortable, we risk losing an important part of ourselves. We can prevent this by ensuring that recollection is frequently exercised and consciously committing things we hold dear to memory.