In Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, there’s a mention of how Socrates disapproved of writing things down because he thought it would ruin people’s ability to memorize things. At least I think there something about it in that book… but I can’t find either “Socrates” or “memory” in the index, so maybe I’ve forgotten the true source of that information. This in itself is perhaps an illustration of the point of this post. I didn’t write down a note about the Socrates story, and since I didn’t, I can’t remember where I found it.

I at least didn’t make it up, according to this site. I might also have read about it in Moonwalking With Einstein:The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, a fascinating book about memory and the people who train themselves to accomplish extreme feats like recalling thousands of digits of pi, or the exact sequence of a deck of cards after flipping through it quickly once.

A friend of mine is always saying I’m a freak because I remember so many things– I can tell all sorts of stories about random things that have happened to me from the age of 3 on, can remember where certain college classmates I was never even friendly with went to high school, and can name actors whose movies I’ve never seen when someone else can’t come up with the name. I seem to be particularly good at a certain kind of visual recall, especially for faces– I’ve been known to recognize someone I met once, a decade earlier.

But this same friend who marvels at my memory is amazed that I can’t keep a grocery list in my head or remember to go to appointments if I don’t have them written down in my planner and in my electronic calendar, with an alarm. Though she can’t remember names or faces or childhood stories the way I can, she has no trouble keeping track of her shopping and to-do lists mentally. She’s the person who used to use a Filofax (featured in this post: Filofax Winchester from the Late 1980s) but now doesn’t really use a notebook or paper planner at all. She puts some appointments in her phone calendar, but might not bother if it’s a dinner with a friend a couple of days later. If I don’t write those dinners down, I’ll forget and plan something else!

So obviously different people have different kinds of memory skills. But might our habits of writing things down also have an impact? When I go back through my old notebooks, I sometimes find descriptions of things I don’t remember, or at least hadn’t thought about in years. Did the act of writing them down somehow tell my brain “don’t worry, this is backed up elsewhere, you can delete.” And on the flip side, all those childhood stories, casts of movies, and people I only met once are generally things I have never written about in a notebook.

Age is definitely a factor– there are things I know I used to remember and now don’t, like names of certain teachers and classmates. When I was younger, it never really occurred to me to keep a record of such things in case I forgot them later. Most of us who keep diaries and journals probably aren’t usually doing it for the purposes of reinforcing our memory– often it’s more about just processing feelings and understanding them better by articulating them in writing. I’m reminded of the Field Notes slogan “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”

Or it’s just a ritual– the lady who kept a diary for 90 years probably didn’t do it just so she’d remember exactly what happened every day of her life. Though that kind of record-keeping can be handy sometimes– I’ve referred back to my own diaries to answer random questions like “when did I last eat red meat,” which I’d never be able to do with my brain alone. In recent years I’ve become more conscious of trying to add notes about current events and politics to my journaling. The world seems like it is changing very fast, and maybe someday I’ll want to remember how I felt about it at the time, without my memories being colored by hindsight.

Back to The Notebook, the final chapter is about the idea of the “extended mind,” where certain kinds of thought are only made possible by external tools beyond the brain itself. Allen describes the example of a man named Otto who has Alzheimer’s disease. He writes all new information he learns in a notebook, and refers to that notebook when he needs old information:

So long as one trusts the information stored in the notebook, relies upon it, and uses it, there is — philosophically speaking– no meaningful difference between the notebook and the mind. Therefore Otto’s mind has expanded to include his notebook, and your notebook– if you use it as Otto does– may become a part of yours.

I’d love to know how others feel about this. Has using a planner made you less able to remember what you need to do just using your brain? Do you keep a journal or log of your life to be able to remember the past? Do you consider your notebooks a part of your mind?

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