Is AI Breaking My Brain?

The Athenian Herald

Hekatombaion · Year of Callias · c. 370 BCE

Writing Will Make Us Forgetful, Warns Philosopher

A growing chorus of thinkers fears that the spread of written letters across Greece is corroding the very faculty it claims to enhance. Citing the ancient Egyptian myth of Theuth and Thamus, the philosopher Socrates has argued that what looks like a gift to memory is in fact its undoing.

“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.”
— Socrates, as recorded by Plato, Phaedrus, c. 370 BCE

The argument runs that letters are an “elixir of reminding, not of memory” — a way of looking up what one has not bothered to learn. Critics worry students of rhetoric will appear wise without truly being so, mistaking the ability to retrieve a written passage for the deep understanding that comes from holding ideas in the mind.

Some have begun calling for stricter oral training in the academies. Defenders of the new written form counter that it preserves wisdom across generations and frees the mind for higher reasoning. Others note that even Socrates himself, who refused to commit his teachings to text, may yet be remembered only because his student Plato wrote them down.

The dispute is unlikely to settle soon. As more scribes set their styluses to wax and more pupils learn their letters, the question hangs over the academies of Athens: are we becoming wiser, or merely better-equipped to seem so?

The Sponheim Chronicle

Anno Domini MCDXCII

Printing Press Threatens the Discipline of the Scholarly Mind

The Abbot of Sponheim has issued a stinging defence of hand-copied manuscripts against the rising tide of printed books, warning that the new mechanical press will breed laziness, decay, and the collapse of true learning.

“No one should think or say: ‘Why do I have to wear myself out writing by hand, when the art of printing has brought so many books to light?’ … Whoever says this is trying to conceal his own sloth.”
— Johannes Trithemius, De Laude Scriptorum, 1492

Trithemius concedes that printed books are useful, but insists that the labour of copying is itself spiritually and intellectually formative — that to write out a text is to absorb it in a way reading never can. Critics fear a generation of scholars who own a thousand books but have truly read none, whose libraries grow as their understanding shrinks.

The Strand

A Study in Scarlet · Beeton’s Christmas Annual · 1887

Detective’s Shocking Claim: A Wise Man Forgets on Purpose

The new consulting detective Mr Sherlock Holmes has scandalised London’s educated classes by declaring he refuses to learn whether the Earth orbits the Sun, on the grounds that the fact is useless to his work. He recommends, in effect, deliberate ignorance.

“A man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose… for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.”
— Sherlock Holmes, in A. Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 1887

As encyclopaedias, gazetteers and reference works proliferate on every middle-class bookshelf, Mr Holmes’s view is that the modern mind has been freed to specialise — to keep only what is needed and look up the rest. Defenders of classical education are appalled, arguing that a generation raised to consult books rather than carry knowledge in their heads will be hollow, fragile, and unable to think when the books are not at hand.

The New York Times

Personal Computers column · 1986

Father’s Warning: Calculators Will Hollow Out a Child’s Mind

Concerned parent and Times columnist Erik Sandberg-Diment has refused to buy his daughter a calculator, fearing it will destroy her mathematical intuition before she has had a chance to develop it.

“Without the practice of mentally solving problems, it is difficult to know if the calculator’s answer is correct.”
— Erik Sandberg-Diment, paraphrased from his 1986 New York Times column

As calculators are mandated in classrooms across America, sceptics warn of a generation that can produce answers but cannot tell whether those answers are sensible. Parents fear their children will become dependent on a machine they don’t understand, vulnerable to error and incapable of independent verification.

Scientific Reports / Nature

April 2020

GPS Use Linked to Decline in the Brain’s Memory Centre

A new study has found that habitual reliance on satellite navigation is associated with measurable decline in spatial memory, raising alarm about a technology that has, in two decades, replaced map-reading for most of the developed world.

“Greater GPS use since initial testing was associated with a steeper decline in hippocampal-dependent spatial memory.”
— Dahmani & Bohbot, Scientific Reports, 2020

When sat-nav devices entered cars in the late 1990s, critics dismissed concerns about lost wayfinding skill as nostalgia. Twenty years on, neuroscientists are tracking real, structural change in the brains of habitual users. The skill of reading a landscape, once universal, is becoming rare.