I know about 4 phone numbers by memory:
- My childhood home phone
- My childhood best friend’s home phone
- My cell phone
- My ex-wife’s cell phone
Two of those numbers no longer work, so if I ever go to jail there is only one person I can call. 😬
I know the IT Crowd emergency services phone number because it had a jingle.
0118 999 88199 9119 725… 3
I remember like 8 numbers, I only use one, my original home phone.
I called the only number I had memorized, and Hooked on Phonics hung up on me.
The faces of our fathers.
Been a bit guess it’s time for that series again.
The Dark Tower by Stephen King for those that aren’t familiar with it. It’s a lot more ‘weird’ than say what you’d expect from his horror novels. I think it’s probably closer to the old strange stories from magazines way back in the day. I think that’s a major reason I like it. Oh not to spoil much (it’s like 7 books this comes out in the 2nd or so so by page count the intro) Evidently I f’ed up the tags so didn’t work as a spoiler I’ll add spaces just in case.
::: small spoiler It’s a multiverse story which is way better than you may think, if you like that thing, I do and wish I realized a decade or two sooner :::
Your spoiler tag is broken. Spoilers don’t bother me, but you’re obviously trying to be thoughtful to others, so I thought I’d let you know. It should be formatted like this:
::: spoiler spoiler The text that spoils things. :::So it looks like this:
spoiler
The text that spoils things.
That is what I was attempting
I know, mine was broken at first, too, but I fixed it ha. Just letting you know. Cheers!
Appreciate the assistance!
I loved it as a kid but could never finish it as an adult.
Yes, that was the intent.
I will never forget about Dre
I continue to remember phone numbers and birthdays. No Google or Facebook for me and I’m waiting for the AI bubble to pop.
Edit: GPS, I thought you meant Google play services. I do use an offline map on my phone if I’m going to an unfamiliar area but I have no problem reading a map.
I’ve honestly been thinking about this a lot lately. I’m not proud of myself.
Stored phone numbers and GPS sre reliable though. I never remembered most numbers or birthdays anyway due to ADHD, so those being easily accessible was a benefit.
GPS directions also include construction and more accurate time estimates. I never learned alternate routes because remembering the ones I knew was enough effort and I still learn those. Going to new cities is way easier now!
Yeah it’s way worse than when we used a Rolodex to remember phone numbers, kept a map book in the dash, and took 20 minutes to transfer birthdays from last years calendar to this years.
I am about as anti-AI as one can get, but this is a bit silly.
Los Angeles Thomas Guide anyone?
No don’t you dare stop the circlejerk! /s
But seriously phone numbers were broken into chunks of three to four digits to even make them something we could remember. Is it so terrible my brain has more space to remember other things instead of strings of numbers?
They were also semi structured. All my school-friends started with the same first area code and first chunk. I just had to know where they lived and remember the last 4 digits.
Mobile Phone numbers were randomly generated, and unless a social group deliberately got sequential numbers because we all got our phones at the same time, there would be no way to associate numbers.
There are valid arguments for knowing how to use a paper map. We’re fortunate that GPS was opened up to the world, and we’ve flourished for it, but one very bad solar storm and it’s possible we’ll be back to paper for regional and farther navigation.
And the vast majority of people will have no problem using a road Atlas… Once they find out it exists. It won’t be the optimal route but getting from one cross street to another is very intuitive if you ever looked at the screen in Google maps.
Navigating a countryside or understanding topological maps is a lost cause but even back in the 80s like two weirdos knew how to do that.
Topo maps are still very popular in the outdoors communities even today.
Outdoors? Where is that?
It’s the big blue room with spotty internet access.
That place is scary, I try to avoid it.
Apparently, it’s where the grass is. Or so I’m told.
Well shit. If that’s where I can score some grass, I’m in! Or, out? I don’t know anymore.
Oh. They are incredibly popular and basically anyone who knows the word “mountaineer” brings one.
That said… actually try to watch any of those people use it. They’ll pretend they are but really they are relying on trails or were shown the area by an old. And most of the olds are just relying on knowing a few landmarks and how to use a compass rather than actually figuring out their location based on slope steepness and the like.
The old who taught me how to assist SAR/not need to call SAR always loves to give people a compass and ask them how to actually use one to get their bearings (even when it is just “that is The Nose” let alone “what ravine do you think we might be in on this map?”). Nine times out of ten, it is a debacle as they actively ignore everything but the needle and bezel. And this isn’t just the newbies. Even a lot of the people who have been in the area for 40 years basically only know how to navigate by landmarks and would be up a creek if they had to, let’s say, go overland in the event of an emergency/apocalypse. Once they leave their comfort zone they are as capable of navigating as a proverbial city slicker.
I’ve actually been taught how to take back bearings, triangulation etc, and would still remember how to do that, but there’s definitely some hopeless cases that have no idea how to do that.
Another skill I’ve noticed is missing is the ability to know where you are on a map based on a known point you’ve passed, and the time elapsed since then. People tend to overestimate how far they’ve traveled.
I mean, even that is kind of about treading known ground. Unless it is fairly straight going on very flat terrain, you are going to find your estimates fall apart REAL fast (… unless you are doing a forced military march where people are getting berated/whipped if their strides are too short or not with the rhythm of the cadence). Let alone any winding trails.
Its why, historically, one of the most valuable assets is a local who knows the terrain. Whether that is letting an army know about a really good place for an ambush or just helping to navigate even a bunch of fields in a valley, let alone mountainous terrain.
A gps is a paper map on the computer with the feature that shows your location on the map.
There’s nothing to learn. The gps voice prompt takes the place of the passenger who’s job it was to voice prompt you.
I don’t doubt they would be able to figure it out, but we must at least acknowledge it’s not plug-and-play. If one doesn’t know their way around, paper maps take some planning. The paper map won’t announce the next upcoming turn in 2 miles. It definitely takes some learning to use.
I was curious to see if someone has ever documented this experience and I was rewarded with this video: https://youtu.be/sr9hQ_tDLP0
A GPS is updated. A GPS can be zoomed in on. A GPS won’t get distracted and you miss a turn.
Plus people did drive places without it, and they’d have to remember directions and be able to orient themselves.
A car compass helps, but yeah, a GPS unit is a lot more convenient.
A gps is a paper map on the computer with the feature that shows your location on the map.
a gps is an planet covering realtime map pinpointing your location and destination, things a traditional map DOES NOT DO.
fuck mate a map only gives you orientation, you still have to know where north is for it to be any use.
There’s nothing to learn. The gps voice prompt takes the place of the passenger who’s job it was to voice prompt you.
a navigator… SAY THEIR FUCKING NAME, THEY WERE NAVIGATORS, IT WAS AN ENTIRE CAREER LOL
can’t tell if this is all satire and I’m overreacting but holy shit I’d love to see this generation do some orienteering.
Chill out dude, they’re talking about a road atlas here, not aviation or long distance trucking or whatever.
This is like getting angry about not calling them switchboard operators when they’re talking about the telephone book.
take a hike. get lost.
don’t understand how maps work, you’re in a tight spot.
you do you lol
Again, not what they were talking about.
Fly a plane. Get in the sights of a Messerschmitt 262 Schwalbe.
Don’t understand potential energy, you’re in a tight spot.
You do you lol
You looked at a map beforehand and saw what directions to go. The map book has an index in the back to find destinations.
You often wrote a note for yourself beforehand. Rt 40, take exit 17a, take 97 S exit, Rt onto Brookshire,
You didn’t need to know north.
I drove for decades before gps. No one taught me how to use a map. You bought one and it was obvious because it was the same as any text book with an index in the back.
You act like kids are stupid.
Honestly, I suspect a lot of that kind of mentality is just projecting by people who struggled with something and assume everyone will struggle as well. Or people who just have a need to feel superior to other people by trying to gatekeep something by pretending it’s super difficult to learn/do.
You didn’t need to know north.
lol how do you orient the map then?
I act like kids need experience and practice.
Are you confused as to which way to hold a book?
You don’t need to know North when reading a road map. It isn’t Boy Scouts where you have a terrain map and you are trying to orientate yourself to unlabeled terrain.
You have road intersections labeled in real life and on the map. You only need to know to travel along a road and turn right or left until you get to the next road at which point you again turn right or left until you reach your destination.
My friend’s 1990’s era Jaguar came with a navigation that worked like that. There was no map. It was a text display that displayed directions as turn by turn directions.
The Rolodex was only for less common phone numbers and most people had 10+ phone numbers memorized
You can use the map as a reference but people didn’t use it for drives around town as it is much harder to constantly being referencing a map compared to a gps. Even when people did use Mapquest they would do things like read 2.8 miles make a right on X St and then make a left in 0.2 miles on Y st and look at their odometer and hold the thought in their head that they are looking for X st
And while people did put birthdays on a calendar it meant that they had a paper calendar that they were regularly checking to see what is happening in the future instead of relying on constantly being told that something is happening which while that may sound trivial is a huge distinction in terms of mental processing.
Memory is a very important thing and as time has progressed we have added more and more crutches which help prevent people from forgetting, help the differently abled, and expand our capacity by orders of magnitude but that comes at the expense of a lack of using one’s memory and critical thinking.
What the long term consequences of that are is still up in the air. some preliminary studies have shown “brain rot” but they have had pretty terrible methods and nothing that I would treat as any sort of fact. I however don’t personally see a scenario where it’s positive in anyway and countless studies with the elderly have shown that having a less active mind leads to mental degradation
I feel like you’re really grasping at wanting this to be true, but I gotta tell you I lived through all of these things being common and none of what you’re asserting matches my reality.
The number of things that I have to actually remember hasn’t really changed in the last 40 years.
Do you still have a bunch of friends phone numbers from the last few years memorized? Do you have your local delivery place’s number memorized?
When you go on a road trip you still look at a map, route directions yourself, and develop a loose memory of it?
You can say off the top of your head which friends birthdays are on which days for the next 3 months?
It’s not an opinion that modern technology makes us not have to memorize information that’s just objective fact the debate is about whether relying on technology causes brain damage and that’s where research is still being done.
In the past 20 years really the only “new” thing we have to memorize are passwords which we still had before but they are at least more complicated now but even then many people repeat the same few passwords or use a password manager so they aren’t remembering 10 unique passwords
Using technology to remember things for us is literally one of the fundamental purposes of technology going back to the invention of the written word, manufacturable paper, printing press, computers, and now phones so I genuinely don’t see how you can say that since 1985 you don’t think people rely on technology for memory any more
Begging the question on all of these.
I never knew the number for my local pizza place, because I had a Rolodex and a phone book. If I needed to make a call I opened one of those two things. My modern phone contact book is just a better version of the same thing.
I use a gps to navigate routinely, because it gives me real time traffic alerts; after driving to any place a couple of times I can generally get there on my own, regardless of if I used GPS or a paper map to get there the first time.
I have never been able to remember birthdays. That’s why I have always, since I was a kid, had a calendar.
It is, in fact, definitely an opinion that we no longer need to remember anything because “tech”. Facts tend to be far less flexible.
If you didn’t have a bunch of those common phone numbers memorized then that is definitely a you thing. My whole friend group all knew each others phone numbers and it was actually important that you could memorize those phone numbers in case you had to call from someone elses house or a pay phone.
You even acknowledge that you use a gps for routine travel and think that is the same as developing a mental map?
Again literally the act of looking at a calendar to see future dates is more mentally demanding then relying on getting a reminder sent to you
Did you even read what I wrote? Do you have your entire oral history memorized? No because we have the ability to write it down that’s technology. Do you use password manager to autofill passwords? Do you get text message/app/email reminders of appointments? Do you neglect to memorize things because you can google them? You already said that you use gps for routine travel around town.
All of that involves using memory less, we don’t have enough tech to fully replace memory and probably never will. If you don’t believe me go 24 hours without using technology from the past 40 years for anything not explicitly required for work so no gps, no phone reminders, no google, no password managers then try and do normal things like go run a bunch of errands, cook a meal, pay bills, go shopping in person instead of online
If memory is so important to you than you really need to stop reading and writing. Before literacy was common everyone remembered everything. Knowledge was oral. People had fantastic memories because they had to.
“Report says that in the schools of the Druids they learn by heart a great number of verses, and therefore some persons remain twenty years under training. And they do not think it proper to commit these utterances to writing, although in almost all other matters, and in their public and private accounts, they make use of Greek letters. I believe that they have adopted the practice for two reasons — that they do not wish the rule to become common property, nor those who learn the rule to rely on writing and so neglect the cultivation of the memory; and, in fact, it does usually happen that the assistance of writing tends to relax the diligence of the student and the action of the memory.”
- Julius Caesar, Garlic War book 6.
Now my mind is filled with knowledge of current ly useful processes instead of facts that aren’t immediately useful. I know details of cooking, 3D printing, programming and home repair. Your brain is finite. It’s why your memories are deleted when you sleep.
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/sleeps-crucial-role-in-preserving-memory/
Are you deliberately misunderstanding what I am saying just to argue?
The Rolodex was only for less common phone numbers and most people had 10+ phone numbers memorized
You sure?
I remember my folks having written down the 10 most important numbers on a piece of cardboard on the phone.And if you were out and about and needed to call someone for help would you have been able to call multiple people from a pay phone?
Wait, people copied birthdays over each year? We just had one normal yearly calendar and one special birthday calendar that could be used for multiple years. I still use the birthday calendar which has accumulated more names of people I don’t speak to anymore or have died than actual living friends and relatives.
I mean, if no one has a cell phone almost everyone in your daily life only required 4 digits to remember. The first 6 numbers was the same for the whole town.
“Area codes” were a big deal, even Ludacris made a song about being so famous, he knew women from multiple geographic locations.
Maps were there in case of emergencies, nowadays people gps to the same office they’ve been driving to for a decade. But that’s more about random traffic conditions.
it reminds me of this:
Every newspaper there is also chock full of ads.
Don’t know why people think it’s a new thing. They were pretty intrusive for the time as well.
“Continued on page 9” is code for “people paid a lot of money for the ads on page 8”
I memorized my friend’s phone number. It’s because she’s a lawyer, and that seems like a good number to have memorized.
I still memorize phone numbers and directions.
In fact, I’ve increased the amount of things I memorize. In addition to the massive amount of usernames and passwords I have to keep in mind, I have credit card and bank routing and account numbers memorized so I can enter payment information on the fly.
Spell check is one of those.
Writing our own letters. That was actually a skillI miss writing good. /s
Me write pretty one day.
𝓞𝓷𝓮 𝓬𝓸𝓾𝓵𝓭 𝓼𝓽𝓪𝓻𝓽 𝓽𝓸𝓭𝓪𝔂.
Good idea to recognize, but bad examples.
The issue isn’t even using devices to replace cognitive functions. That’s anprim shit, I’m not gonna do 5 digit numbers on my head, imma use a calculator, especially if it’s something important or there are stakes to getting it wrong.
The issue more than anything is agency.
Thank you for this. Now I’m going to be thinking of this now :)
Man, I didn’t even memorize numbers other than my own house’s when cell phones were something only rich businessmen had. I used a phone book.
I memorize important numbers
I don’t use GPS after the first time going to a place and remember my routes
Facebook? what… ? people actually use that?
I won’t use AI…my information stays with me, in my mind when I need it. I can’t rely on others, I won’t rely on computers to be there when I need it and that most certainly applies to ai
I remember the routes, too, but you don’t have random road congestion or construction that sometimes necessitates alternative routes? It’s like having a psychic friend that tells you when the most direct route is fucked.
sure, but east is still easy. I don’t mind heavy traffic, or needing detours. I’m patient and hardly even in a rush. if I’m late for something, meh…
You are old school. As am I
I’m exactly like that, and 20 y/o. Though my body feels like 80.
It’s because of the burden of knowledge you’re carrying in your head. The choices you make…
I’m probably older than both of you. I use gps constantly even when I know the route. It’s safer to focus on the road than think about the route.
People didn’t use to memorize numbers. They used little private address books that you wrote your numbers in. Moving that text to a computer screen changed nothing for the majority of people.
I don’t use Facebook but I didn’t use Myspace either.
I don’t use AI but I have nothing against it. I used it once to write some code in VBscript which is a language that would be a complete waste of time to learn. It saved dozens of hours.
Ha I learned VBBasic back in the day self taught. I wrote thousands of lines of code. Then I learnt about loops :)
I let my Phone (and CarPlay) map my route for me; but I do like throwing a spanner in its workings by deliberately taking a wrong turn to explore.
Previously, I would do the same, but then I would have to pull over and spend 15 minutes browsing the Street Directly trying to figure out where I was before I was able to continue my journey.
Having a frictionless (and relatively) safe way of exploring has empowered me.
Who still uses Facebook?
People keeping up with organizations, family and friends who refuse to use stuff like Signal.
The trick is not to follow assholes, switch off news and patch it with Revanced.
