Thanks for the memory

Last month I read Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, which is an account of his time spent hanging out with the "mental athletes" who compete in the World Memory Championships and similar contests.

The Observer review linked above describes the book as a

Dreary celebration of pointless trivia

(Or at least something along those lines, as I am typing the quote from memory!) This is a little unfair in my view as it is an interesting read, if not one of the literary greats.

It isn't a "how to" book, but it does have some practical exercises demonstrating the techniques used by the mental athletes.

The first one of these involves memorising a list of 15 random items on a to-do list (ranging from a jar of pickled garlic to a flesh tone catsuit - and no, it isn't my to-do list!). The technique basically involves visualising these items at a series of locations around a building that you know well... a memory palace which contains a series of loci in which each memory is lodged.

I certainly don't have a great memory (quite the reverse), but typing this post in a coffee shop a couple of months later I can still list out those 15 items without any difficulty at all.

I also remember a few long numbers which I converted into bizarre collections of words using the major system, which is another technique used in the book. As I can usually only remember about three phone numbers off by heart, the ability to remember a 12 digit number on first reading is impressive.

XKCD touched on this recently in a great strip about password strength. Memorising an outlandish phrase of a few words is much easier than learning a short string of random digits.

I haven't made a serious effort to practice the techniques, but even dabbling with them shows it is possible to remember a lot more stuff than you think. The things the mental athletes memorise in competition might be "pointless trivia", but surely there is a point in being able to recall important phone numbers when your iPhone battery dies?

Where this gets interesting (and worrying) is when I think about why it is that I hardly remember any phone numbers.

There is no great mystery here... I just don't need to because my iPhone remembers them for me (and the soon-to-be-defunct MobileMe distributes them through the cloud to all my devices). All I need to remember is the name of the person I need to speak to.

Generally I don't need to know the actual phone number any more than I need to recall the IP address for the web server which hosts this blog.

This externalisation of memory doesn't stop at phone numbers though.

Why bother remembering passwords when I can store them in 1Password?

Why bother remembering what I need to get done in the office today when I can use OmniFocus?

Why bother remembering anything when I have constant access to Google and Wikipedia?!

This externalisation of memory is present in legal know-how too. Hopefully lawyers aren't using Google and Wikipedi for this, but access to precedents and knowledge bases via an intranet or an external provider like PLC is pretty much universal these days.

Obviously a lot of legal knowledge is still remembered in the "old fashioned" way using a boring old brain, but especially in more peripheral areas which you only deal with occasionally it is easier than ever to simply look things up.

This has always been the case (even when it was law reports and text books in the library which were the reference source), but does the ease of access makes it less likely that you will commit things to memory?

Using a different example, has anyone else noticed how your sense of direction seems to atrophy when you use your Sat Nav to tell you a route when driving? Somehow the fact that there is a safety net seems to relieve the brain from the obligation to memorise the route.

Of course without the ability to externalise this legal knowledge we wouldn't have a legal system in the sense we recognise it. The ability to store and share knowledge beyond the limits of what can be communicated and passed down by an oral tradition is a prerequisite for this.

However, I wonder if this next step in the externalisation process will be quite as beneficial. Will the new generation of "digital natives" who enter the legal profession actually be able to remember any law... Or will it be a generation of Google Lawyers (in a very different sense from that used in my previous post)?