I came home from the health club the other night and said brightly to Partner, “I wrote a whole blog entry in my head when I was on the treadmill just now.”
He came back, just as brightly, with: “How are you going to print it out?”
Isn’t that cute?
His sarcasm aside, I do have a pretty good memory, and I keep a lot of stuff in my head. Over the past few years, however, I have been losing it, in every sense of the word. My memory for proper names has especially suffered. Partly I’m sure it’s because of advancing age. Partly, however, I think I’m losing my power of concentration.
It happens all the time, in lots of different situation: while watching TV, while reading, while at the movies, while in meetings. I’m able to concentrate for a few minutes, but then I begin to lose the thread of the conversation, and then I begin to wonder what else is going on. I have a perpetual sense that there might be something better, or more interesting, or at least less dull, somewhere else.
I am thinking about this because of an article in today’s Times about kids using e-readers and digital media to read books and access information online. A large number of kids say they’ve used e-media to read books; a majority, however, still like to read regular old hard-copy books.
Some parents are skeptical of this finding. They believe that e-media are, in a word, too easy. They are afraid that these media will reduce their children’s appetite for traditional reading and erode their ability to concentrate.
Remember what I was talking about before?
Every innovation in the world of media has come with the same warning label: THIS NEW THING WILL DESTROY YOUR MIND. Written books made memorization – learning by heart – less necessary. Calculators kept us from learning our multiplication tables. Computers make it unnecessary to think about anything, ever, at any time. (It’s been posited that the invention of writing was not necessarily looked upon as a good thing. Certainly it was kept away from the masses for a long time; reading and writing were specialized skills.)
I did a little unscientific survey today. First I asked a co-worker in her early twenties if she remembered learning things in school like multiplication tables, spelling-word lists, etc. Yes, she said, although she was a little fuzzy on the multiplication tables; she absolutely remembered memorizing lists of spelling words, though.
I then put the question to the Brain Trust, which is a group of co-workers around my own age, all of whom are mighty opinionated. Without exception, they all had vivid memories of learning math and spelling by rote, often accompanied by images of nuns with sticks in their hands.
The whole Brain Trust agreed that math skills are on the decline. We shared stories about cashiers who don’t quite understand why you’re giving them $2.02 when the total is actually $1.52, and other stories about kids who thought there were twenty-five minutes in a quarter of an hour.
Question: is this real? And, if so, did calculators and computers do it?
I’m not sure. I do know, however, that my laptop is not only a very useful gadget for writing this blog and keeping track of my finances; it’s also a message portal, an email conduit, a virtual telephone using Skype, and a handheld gaming device. How long can I really maintain my concentration on any one task, given that so many other wonderful time-wasting options are available?
I have lovely memories from years ago of settling back for hours at a time with a book and reading without interruption. I haven’t done that in a very long time.
Maybe concentration and memorization are overrated. When I took biology classes in college, the professor made all of the exams open-book, because, she said, “Life is open book.” I can tell you that it didn’t make the exams much easier. (I also have nightmarish visions of a doctor performing open-heart surgery with a textbook open in front of him, trying to figure out which artery is which.)
But, for whatever reason, I am definitely losing my memory, and my concentration.
And I used to be so proud of them both.
(Do go back and look at the Times article, though. There’s some interesting stuff in it. For one thing, 39% of the kids in the survey said that information they found on the Internet was “always correct.”
What’s the big deal about that? I know I always believe everything I see on the Internet.
Doesn’t everyone?)
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