[derleth]

Memory will seriously save you when you're out of reach of your reference material, so why rely on flammable, fragile, heavy paper? Don't you see how mechanical people who rely on books are, always sticking their notes in their mechanisms to read words off wood pulp instead of pulling them out of their memories? How much better it would be if we abandoned print and went back to the simpler, better time of rote memorization!

Or is that maybe not what the human mind is best used for? Maybe, humans are best at being creative, and our tools help us at that task by freeing us of tedium and ignorance of simple facts.

True, some people misuse GPS technology by driving their cars into lakes. Some people misuse book technology by taking Von Däniken seriously. I'm not seeing a big difference between the two, moral or otherwise.

[Simucal]

I know that your post was sarcastic and that you were illustrating a point (and I agree with you). It is interesting, however, that Plato actually argued the same thing that you outlined in your post!

"for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves." [1]

[1] - http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Gre....

[NotOscarWilde]

The interplay of memory and skill is something that interests me a lot, even though I claim no expertise in the field.

Historical evidence implies that it is true that the people who are able to leverage the tools at their disposal (be that actual tools like cell phones or just applying recent scientific breakthroughs) tend to do well in their life.

On the other hand, we have the idea that the mind is a muscle and it works best if we train it hard. In this mindset, we see objects as crutches that are best to be avoided in order to improve the mind as efficiently as possible.

I and people around me tend to focus on the first paradigm, leaving the second one unexplored.

One of the reasons may be that it is still largely philosophical: if you wanted to improve your memory, what would you do? There are books on people that use tricks to remember large digits and other chunks of data (the brother of Jonathan Safran, Joshua Foer, wrote one).

However, most of us believe that this is not the same type of memorization that can enable us to do pattern matching in our memories faster (which is what mathematicians need the most, being able to see parallels to math they've done before).

And even if we had a trick to pattern-match faster, in order to raise it from the level of "it was described in popular literature, but has no scientific basis" like mind maps and such, we would have to conduct very large studies to verify its validity, which is something that is not done at all in this area.

As a side remark, this is the same problem I have with nootropics. What works and what doesn't? For memorization and focus, it seems ADD medicine works somewhat. For Paul Erdös it was amphetamines which boosted his creativity -- is that better for us mathematicians? And what do these drugs do with us in the long term? Almost all evidence is anecdotal, and I'm not willing to risk my health to be a smarter scientist.

[Dewie]

> On the other hand, we have the idea that the mind is a muscle and it works best if we train it hard. In this mindset, we see objects as crutches that are best to be avoided in order to improve the mind as efficiently as possible.

Those crutches frees up time to let one work on other muscles; muscles that might not have any known crutches (like practicing reading maps instead of practicing navigating by the stars some centuries ago).

[oinksoft]

In my experience, it's vastly more likely that a mobile device loses reception, power, etc. than it is that my paper suddenly goes up in flames. I'd probably have bigger problems to deal with if that were to happen. Paper relies on any old light source and can be preserved for a terribly long time (Dead Sea Scrolls) in the right conditions. It can be torn and soaked and retain its message, being such a reliable medium.