Memory is irrelevant

About the previous entry: Actually I do get irritable and frustrated when marking those compositions, but since they’re for the Exams Authority, I get paid, which makes the whole thing much easier to swallow. I see crappy writing all the time, but there are excellent ones too. One well-written compo out of fifty is enough to lift my spirits.

I read a very interesting article in the April issue of Discover, which is about the World Memory Championship. It is what it sounds – to compete for the title of the Person with the Best Memory.
 
What interests me is not the competition itself – although it seems pretty fascinating, like someone managing to memorize the order of a completely random deck of playing cards (that’s 52 cards) in 32.13 seconds, and someone else capable of memorizing the first 31811 digits of pi. What’s interesting is the statement: "PalmPilots track schedules, cell phones store phone numbers, and Internet searches turn up a bonanza of information."
 
I feel that my memory is getting worse and worse. Now I know what’s responsible: technology.
 
Before the age of cell phones, I used to memorize at least 20 to 30 phone numbers. And now? Around 5 maybe. Who needs to remember the phone numbers when a cell phone can store hundreds of them?
 
With PDAs we can afford to be absent-minded. We can schedule as many things as we like, and never worry about forgetting them because we can set our beloved ‘secretary’ to remind us as often as we like – a week in advance, 3 hours, 15 minutes, whenever.
 
With the fully mature Internet, all the skills that we need are searching skills, not memorization skills. Forget what a word means, where a restaurant is, the complete lyrics of Chet Lam’s songs? No problem, just go online, and start googling or yahooing. In fact, it looks like our education needs to add one more generic skill for our students in addition to things like leadership, social and critical thinking skills – Internet skills.
 
And all these make the current exam system as invalid as traditional IQ tests on assessing intelligence.  People with excellent studying skills and memory no longer make any difference in society.  We need adaptive people who can pick up new skills all the time. We need proactive people who are always aware of the latest social trends and paradigms.  In the future, flexible and progressive people rule. Either keep up with the times, or get buried by the times.

P.S. I’m still on OD holidays, in the sense that I’ve been reading very few ODs. So, I’m sorry if I’m not responding to you. But… this gives me more time to write my own OD! It feels so liberating!