Memory saves our minds from machines
Teaching children times tables by rote is a vote of confidence in analogue humanity and its values
Iowe my university degree to Derren Brown. He did nothing elaborate: no hypnotism, no cold reading, no baroque system of horse racing bets. It’s just that one of his books contains a very good explanation of the 2,500-year-old memory technique that let me remember the exact year in which Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy was first printed (1592 – duh).
The Method of Loci, described by Cicero, attributed to Simonides and used by Sherlock Holmes, is better known today as a “memory palace”. The idea is to associate a string of facts with striking images embedded in a location you know very well. When you walk through that place again in your mind, you will recall the facts – meeting English kings in your old school, or the hospital ward where you spent so many nights being treated for that childhood disease.
There are also blunter ways. This spring, thousands of English primary school pupils will take a new fiveminute times tables test, which ministers hope will make us a nation of spontaneous multipliers. Teachers’ unions object to what they see as a return to joyless rote learning.
This fear is not unfounded. Everybody fetishises the education of their youth, and the average British voter entered school in the mid-1970s. Let’s not elevate our prejudices about what learning should look like above the actual demands of our times.
But one might also say: who needs this stuff in 2018? Everyone has Google! Everyone has a calculator! We live in mathematical abundance beyond the dreams of Al-khwarizmi! Philosophers call it the “extended mind”: our minds exist outside our heads, in our notebooks and calendars, and a post-it note can be just as much part of our memory as a flipped bit in the temporal lobe. So let us be cyborgs, our will interpenetrated by the internet, drawing fluidly and gladly from the global hive mind.
Hey, I’m a cyborg and proud. Delete my cloud of documents and you might as well drive a railway spike through my head. But there are strong reasons why kids should learn to do without, even those who disdain the neovictorian approach to schooling.
Consider first what is lost. Research suggests that people who use their phones to remember hard things end up relying on them for easy things, too. People who think information will be saved to a disc don’t bother to save it to their brains. We recall less when distracted or multitasking, which we always are now. American millennials are more likely to forget what day it is than over-55s.
Similar “cognitive offloading” has been happening for centuries, possibly since the invention of writing, and usually we gain more from it than we lose. Still, digital technology is more pervasive and developing faster than any historical equivalent. And then there is the matter of autonomy.
We will never be truly independent of the systems that enable us to think in the first place – culture, language, social structure, or indeed times tables. We couldn’t live without them if we tried. Yet subordinating ourselves completely to digital ones carries huge risks. These systems are proprietary, their workings jealously guarded by private companies. They are bigger than empires and also quicker, so their failure modes are too. If relying on algorithmically-maintained digital services was leading us into collective ruin, would we notice before it was too late? Is it already?
Any process of reckoning that can be held and computed in your head, in the gnat’s wingspan of working memory, is therefore a vote of confidence in analogue humanity and its values.
It is a declaration that if a computer reaches a conclusion, we can check it; that not every problem is too complex for humans; that sometimes you can bake your own bread. And maths is incidentally a gateway to the programming knowledge that lets people master computers on a more practical and serious level.
Times tables, poetry by heart, doing sums with your eyes closed: I don’t seriously mind what specific things you can do without technology, since we’ll always depend on it somewhat. What matters is the basic logic of reserving some capabilities to our meat brains. Kids need to internalise the idea that their values and their desires can shape their use of technology rather than being determined by it. They need to think of computers as their tools, not their gods.