Alastair Roberts, with some very useful reflections on memory:

While many people think about memory as if it were primarily additive, with discrete fact after discrete fact being brought into and retained in our knowledge, memory, at least in my experience, is mostly about the connections between such facts. Memory is about creating meaningful clusters, chains, and networks of details in our knowledge. Having such larger structures and patterns in mind, we will be able to move smoothly between details in our knowledge and even recreate them when they have been partially forgotten.

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr offered a complementary perspective to what Roberts outlines here. While many assert that we should “offload” facts to computer databases in order to focus mental energy elsewhere, Carr disagreed. It is, Carr went on to suggest, the store of information that we’ve committed to long-term memory that allows for the sort of connection-making that Roberts commends. Memory is not merely a tool for recalling disparate factoids at whim; Google obviously is much better suited to the task of data-on-demand than any human mind. Rather, memory really is about the link between past and present—whether events or facts or what have you—that can only come to expression in the rational activity of a person. The fruit of memory is in digesting and internalizing what we’ve learned, and in being able to encounter new information with sound judgment and a certain creative receptivity. The internet, meanwhile, is, according to Carr, “a technology of forgetfulness.” It rewards forgetfulness and makes memory seem unnecessary—even unintelligible. We would do well in not forgetting how beneficial memory is as a human practice.