Subject:
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Re: Reading in steep decline?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 8 Jul 2004 18:43:58 GMT
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Viewed:
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690 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:
> There's a well-known notion that the rise of printing led to a decline in human
> memory. Often we hear that people could recite thousand-line epics after a
> single hearing, and that this amazing skill vanished with the advent of
> text-based information storage.
>
> Bollocks (if I may borrow an idiom from across the pond)!
>
> I'd love to see the objective analysis documenting such widespread and
> phenomenal memory without resorting to anecdotes or eyewitness accounts. I
> simply don't buy it.
The way I heard it was, around 1450 or so, a learned scientist did a study on
the phenomenon, which supported the claim, but since he was not really happy
with the results, his method of "publishing" was to ask his son to memorise the
whole thing to recite to leaders on demand. However, his son, who had been
wasting his life reading Forum articles and other youth timewasters, failed to
memorise it accurately, so the definitive study was lost for all time.
Or something like that.
You want objective documentation about a phenomenon that predates documentation?
Riiiiight!
(I'm KIDDING!)
> Reading seems almost certain to shape cognitive development in much the same way
> that language itself changes the development of the brain. I expect that the
> loss of reading as a skill or exercise will indeed result in a change in the way
> the brain develops and/or functions. Perhaps we'll lose one skill, but we'll
> likely gain others in trade.
Now THAT part I agree with.
++Lar
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Reading in steep decline?
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| (...) I expect that reading will always (well, for a good long while yet) be a needed skill, because at some level it will be necessary simply to read the label, directions, caption, or whatever on something that doesn't support the direct-meat (...) (20 years ago, 8-Jul-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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