[ExI] Attention Spans Decreasing?

[Dan Ust]

I would like to point to another seeming phenomenon that might be related. This is if memorization. I've read oral cultures -- meaning ones that are preliterate -- have members whose members are better at memorizing things like stories, speeches, and epic poetry. Granted, there seems to be some exaggeration here -- meaning it might be that the memorization here is not verbatim though it's still impressive. 

In literate cultures, this seems to decline and the explanation trotted out is literate people lose the ability because they can rely on texts. Let's say this is true. (My reason to doubt this is that most people in preliterate societies were not bards charged with reciting epics and most people in literate societies are not bookworms. And the overlap -- those thousands of years between the invention of the text until today -- seems wide and varied. (Most people today don't read many books -- even in highly literate societies. The usual factoid -- again, I'm skeptical even of this -- is the average person doesn't seem to do much reading after school, especially if it's not job-related.)

Now, allowing it's true -- there's a decline in memorization as cultures become more literate, so? Why is this a problem, especially given the technology of writing to store information? It's similar to changes in digestion once a species learns to cook. Sure, it loses something but the gain might be equal or greater than the loss -- depending on one's vantage post. And it hardly seems right to default to privileging one point in this evolution -- say, preliterate era for its supposed feats of memory or the pre-fire era for fears of digestive robustness or the pre-Twitter age for supposedly everyone have incredible attention spans. (On the last, what was everyone a decade or two ago able to encompass all of Proust in mind -- until the web, etc. took off and made us all poster children for ADHD?

Regards,

Dan
 My latest story is available at:
http://www.amazon.com/Medeas-Gift-Dan-Ust-ebook/dp/B00GHX2M1O/
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