The Memory Code: how oral cultures memorise so much information
The Memory Code: how oral cultures memorise so much information
Ancient Celtic bards were famous for the sheer quantity of information they could memorise. This included thousands of songs, stories, chants and poems that could take hours to recite in full.
Tassel Bradshaw (Gwion Gwion) figures wearing ornate costumes
Ancient Celtic bards were famous for the sheer quantity of information they could memorise. This included thousands of songs, stories, chants and poems that could take hours to recite in full.
Today we are pretty spoiled. Practically the whole of human knowledge is conveniently available at our fingertips. Why worry about memorising something when we can simply Google it?
The answer seems pretty evident when we go into a panic after losing our smartphones!
Long before the ancient Celts, Aboriginal Australians were recording vast scores of knowledge to memory and passing it to successive generations.
Aboriginal people demonstrate that their oral traditions are not only highly detailed and complex, but they can survive – accurately – for thousands, even tens of thousands, of years.
More:
http://www.heritagedaily.com/2016/09/the-memory-code-how-oral-cultures-memorise-so-much-information/112762
= new reply since forum marked as read
us remember things.
I do believe that when reading and writing became more common, the older generation complained bitterly (as older generations always do) that the younger generation wouldn't be memorizing as much any more.
Well, memorizing is nice. I actually memorize poems that I like just because I want to, which makes me quite odd in this day and age. But I also like it a LOT that I can go on line and find all sorts of things that I don't have to memorize. I also live in a world where many print editions of lots of things are out there.
Oh, and I'll recommend "The Swerve" which is about the rediscovery of a specific lost ancient work, found by an itinerant Italian, who translated the latin into modern (as of then) Italian and brought an amazing lost text ("De Rerum Natura"
back into common knowledge. Okay, so most of you have not ever read "The Swerve" or "De Rerum Natura", but trust me, your understanding of things depends on both of those. However, your life is not immeasurably impoverished because you've read neither one, but it would be greatly improved were you to read either of them.
My point is, that it's possible to be a complete human without having read any one specific work of literature. Or, as in the case of the OP, having memorized any of them.
