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there was a lot of social pressure and dignity for being one of the people who could recite oral history
it would provide you a status, so people would take that shit seriously and there would be privlage attached to it
so in short, if you had a good memory for that kind of shit, you would excell at it and get the privlage of not having to do dangerous things
And memory is a skill you can practice. If you spent four years studying and practicing barding instead of going to college, I bet you would be pretty good at it too!
Often multiple times per cooking session too.
If you take the last one and throw the package in the trash, you’re definitely going to have to take it out of the trash to re-read the instructions at least twice.
Are you spying on me? I feel like you just wrote my biography.
The sacred texts!
TBF, there are a lot more things we need to learn and memorize today than back then. The odyssey could literally be like one of two things of media or entertainment in a persons life back then.
TBF, there are a lot more things we need to learn and memorize today than back then.
I sincerely doubt this. They didn’t have easy ways to take notes, they had to memorize everything. Day-to-day living was more complex then, not less.
That meme of pushing one thing into your head and losing another is not real. The more we exercise our memory, the better it gets.
How many phone numbers do you have memorized?
The entire field of chemistry, most of mathematics, the majority of history, etc didn’t exist yet. Depending on the region anatomy and physiology could be illegal. We didn’t have to know traffic laws, the vast majority didn’t need to know how to read and write. There were probably like 20 animals and insects total that an average person had ever even heard of.
Phone numbers? Only 8, but I have friends who could recite the entire story of the TV show Big Bang Theory start to finish.
TBH if you told me your name and shook my hand I probably wouldn’t remember it tomorrow because I have other priorities on my mind. Finite memory allocation memes aside it’s more of an issue of what we consider important in a more complicated and ever changing world.
Never mind the fact that lorekeeper was an actual job back then - so you’d have people who’s entire livelihood/societal role was remembering these stories.
Books are the original technology that atrophied brains thousands of years before LLM’s.
People remember things that are important to them, and are used often. I still remember five phone numbers from when I was a kid--my own, and friends-- even though I haven’t used them since then. I used them many times per week then, though.
Today, we carry around a “little black book” of numbers in our pocket along with our computer-phone. No one remembers birthdays, anniversaries, store hours, or even how to get to the doctor’s office, because we’ve off-loaded all of that to our computer-phones. It’s no wonder most people feel panic when they realize they’ve left their phone at home, or the battery dies because they didn’t charge it. That really should be worrisome, but everyone does it now, and it’s normal. It’s normal that no one bothers to remember anything they can find on their phone. What would you do without your phone for a week?
Since Hal can just look on the back of the box he has in his hand for the directions, he has no motivation to attempt to memorize them. He could memorize them, he just hasn’t made the effort, since it’s not important.
I can understand this. I unintentionally have all the lyrics for numerous NOFX albums memorized and when my kids were young, I had the entirety of dialogue from Frozen unintentionally memorized and could recite it on demand. I guess it’s similar as it was their entertainment along with history.
I think they used rhythm and rhyme to help. Anyone remember what’s on that one McDonald’s burger with the song?
Why do I hate you now?
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Not exactly a thrilling tale worth retelling on that box of corn dogs, is there? I feel like between stories worth committing to memory and people whose job was to retain and retell stories for a living, whether your average dude could commit a story to memory was irrelevant.
A lot of the information (or stories or both) used song to make it easier to pass down.
A corn dog sea shanty might be the cure to what ails ‘ya.
To be fair, I’ve not memorised too many cooking instructions, but I can quote about half of “Monty Python’s Holy Grail” with reasonable accuracy, or tell you in great detail a number of stories of “what me and my friends got up to” when I was younger, or give you plot summaries and occasional quotes from half of the episodes of Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Star Trek TNG etc, and lyrics to hundreds of songs from the 1980s and 1990s… and I’m not exactly particularly talented in that area. It’s not a massive stretch to think someone could fairly easily memorise and story-tell one fairly long book.
Dude, came here to say the same thing about the same movie! I’ve been able to pretty much recite Holy Grail (as you say, with “reasonable accuracy”) since college. I can hear three notes from some random song I last heard a decade ago and can probably still name it. But I was in my 30s before I felt comfortable throwing away the Kraft mac and cheese box before I was finished making it.
Y’all know that oral history usually mutates some over time. It’s not like perfect preservation of history. The same thing that makes all of us re-read directions or recall something wrong has been a part of humanity forever.
Not to say oral history and tradition isn’t important and that we should dismiss it out of hand but we should stop pretending that people are infallible and nothing changed in stories spoken for generations.
