{"id":13267,"date":"2020-08-25T23:31:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T03:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=13267"},"modified":"2020-08-31T12:20:49","modified_gmt":"2020-08-31T16:20:49","slug":"history-of-print-moonwalking-with-einstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/history-of-print-moonwalking-with-einstein\/","title":{"rendered":"The History of Print: What Does it Mean for Memory?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is the history of print, and how does it relate to memory? Did books evolve to help humans with things they couldn’t remember?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history of print emerged in fairly recent human history. Prior to the written word, humans relied on memory to share stories and ideas. The history of print changed how humans relied on memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history of print and memory are intertwined. Read more about it below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

A History of Print and Memory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It took a long time for humans to learn how our memories work and how to supplement them with external memory aids. How did the history of print change the way we view memory? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In early human history, there was no alphabet, no paper, no writing system\u2014the only way to retain things was memory.<\/strong> Everything was communicated orally, often through poetry or song, because as we learned in Chapter 1, the brain is better at remembering things with structure. When reciting very structured poetry that includes constraints such as imagery, meter, and alliteration, if you forget a word, there are so few options for what it can be that it comes back to you quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oral communication, by nature, morphs over time.<\/strong> If an easier-to-remember turn of phrase comes up, that\u2019s the version that\u2019s passed on. Unimportant details or tangents fall away. At least until the history of print. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, critics think that the Odyssey <\/em>and Iliad<\/em> are collections of songs that were shared orally and only written down later. Both works contain mnemonic devices<\/a> such as repetition, and almost every part of the two poems fits into some sort of pattern. For example, Aphrodite is always referred to as \u201claughing Aphrodite,\u201d regardless of her emotional state, and the events of both works are predictable and formulaic\u2014rivals, shields, and armies come up again and again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poetry didn\u2019t become art until it was replaced as the primary method of transmitting information.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Timeline of Books<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Over time, communication and its requirement for memory changed. Here\u2019s a timeline:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5th Century BC<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In the 5th Century BC, the memory arts were widely known and memory was as integral to a classical education as grammar.<\/strong> Before the history of books, having a good memory was a desirable character trait because it meant you had absorbed and understood information, and if you had a good memory, you were seen as a genius. (Allegedly, the memory arts were invented by poet Simonides of Ceos when a banquet hall collapsed in Thessaly. Simonides had visualized the hall and remembered exactly who had been at the dinner and where they\u2019d been sitting. He was able to lead family members to the exact places their loved ones were buried.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing first started to appear in 5th Century BC, but reading and writing still required heavy use of memory.<\/strong> Greek texts were written on scrolls that could be up to sixty feet long. The text was written in scripto continua<\/em>, which means that there were no spaces, punctuation, or lowercase letters. When text broke across a line, there was no hyphen\u2014it just ran on. It looked something like this: THISISREALLYREALLYHARDTOREADREADINGWASADIFFERENTBEASTINFIFTHCENTURYBC<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, the easiest way to parse scripto continua<\/em> was to read it aloud, and to do that fluently, you had to have some idea in advance of what it said\u2014you had to have previously read it and remembered it. <\/em><\/strong>(In fact, Scripto continua<\/em> is a lot like speech. Speech doesn\u2019t use spaces\u2014when we\u2019re talking, we don\u2019t differentiate between words. This is why it\u2019s hard for computers to recognize speech.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Additionally, if you didn\u2019t already know a text, you had to read a scroll from beginning to end to learn from it. There were no navigational aids such as chapter divisions or indexes. You couldn\u2019t find a particular piece of information in the middle without reading the whole thing unless you already knew where to look for it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the history of books, literacy had its critics. Some people, such as Socrates, thought that all reading could do was remind you of what you already knew. It was nothing more than a cue and it could be dangerous\u2014if you could keep information on a page instead of in your head, people would become ignorant and immoral shells. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

400 BC<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The parchment codex (similar to a modern book, with bound pages) had almost fully replaced scrolls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

200 BC<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In 200 BC, basic punctuation appeared. However, this punctuation was simply dots at the top, middle, or bottom of a line that signified how long a reader should pause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

86-82 BC<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Most of the techniques of classical memory training (which are still the basis for memory training today) appear in a book called Rhetorica ad Herennium<\/em>, or Ad Herennium<\/em>, which was written sometime between 86 and 82 BC. The author is unknown. For a while, people thought it was written by Cicero, but in Cicero\u2019s writing, he said that the arts of memory were so basic and well known that they didn\u2019t need to be written down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ad Herennium<\/em> speaks of two elements of memory:<\/p>\n\n\n\n