These aids also include taking notes in class, carrying a grocery list to the supermarket, or jotting down dates on a planner.
[1] In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of how Theuth, the Egyptian god and inventor of writing, approached the king of Egypt, Themis, in order to offer the Egyptian people what he regarded as a branch of learning that would improve memory.
"[4] In 1920, Milman Parry, in his master's thesis, discovered that the stylistic quirks and bizarre repetition found in the Odyssey and the Iliad were evidence of the works' oral transmission.
[5] Walter Ong, priest, philosopher, and English professor, has found that people remember best when things are rhythmic and repeated.
[7] Also at this point in time, books were not bound with outward facing spines; they were quite heavy, and lacked indexes.
"The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent.
Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory.
"[13] Examples of electronic external memory aids:[12] What Socrates and Quintilian feared is still debated in modern-day society.
Thanks to the Internet and common search engines like Google, often referred to as humankind's collective memory, remembering seems to be less important than it once was.
Betsy Sparrow (Columbia), Jenny Liu (Wisconsin) and Daniel M. Wegner (Harvard) described the Google effect in July 2011 after having conducted four experiments.
Perhaps, the most important finding from their studies suggests that individuals have a tendency to forget information that they believe will be readily available to them in the future.
As such, it is not surprising that the importance of external memory aids is often underestimated, and that the belief in its purported negative effects is so widespread.
While the idea that externalized memory degrades the innate capacity of humans to remember is prevalent, it is also unsubstantiated.
Scientific investigations have failed to demonstrate any connection between technology usage and impaired memory.
Instead, each retelling in oral tradition is a reconstruction of a story using given structural principles, allowing for a great deal of variation over time.
"[19] His version of lifelogging includes wearing a SenseCam around his neck that captures everything he sees on a daily basis.
At any given moment, with the help of his custom developed search engine, Bell has access to anything he has seen, heard, or read in the past decade.
[20] Morris Villarroel, a professor of animal behavior at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, is another lifelogger.
[21] His version of lifelong includes a Narrative Clip camera strapped to his chest that shoots about 1,200 photos per day at 30-second intervals.
When asked about why he lifelogs, Villaroel responds, "It's nice for me that I have a whole series of photos, moments, that I can look back on, and maybe even share in the future.