There was a time where humans had to remember everything and, what’s more, had to store those memories in their flimsy brains. Remembering things, like, say, where game congregates to drink (and be killed by your arrow) or which snake is the one that might kill you and end your genetic line, is beneficial in the grand scheme of evolutionary selection and so, better memories survived over time and generations and here we are with great natural information storage centers. Memory aids decision-making aids survival. If your particular genetic line was terrible at remembering, you would not be here to read this.

Humans have been finding ways of sharing memory tasks basically since humans have been humans: cave drawings, folk traditions, many varied and complicated systems for dealing with numbers. All took some of the burden off of individually remembering things. Then came writing, the information Big Bang: systems of symbols of limited quantity that could be stored physically and could represent an infinite amount of facts and ideas. The earliest example is thought to be the Dispilio Tablet, circa 5260. And then thousands of years later came the printing press, writing democratized.

Of course, from the perspective of memory — not just collective memory, but individual memory — the internet is a force like no other. Think of the instant URL recall of Chrome or Google Instant, but also snapshotting the world every half hour via Instagram and, in terms of those facts an ideas, all available from a smart-phone with a few clicks. The future is shedding the burden of memory. A study last year from Columbia demonstrated this pretty easily, that computers are becoming the new information banks for humans and that humans are adapting to this new reality very, very fast. Amazingly, that study found that participants were better able to remember the file folder location of a trivia answer than the actual answer.

So what? If we don’t need memory anymore and we have this great external storage mechanism not subject to the same errors of personal memory, maybe it’s good riddance. Perhaps our brains are just getting better at something else, like a computer unburdened by hard-drive tasks. But, no. Memory is more than recall. We all know this without actually knowing it. (Memory, like most of the brain, is still fairly enigmatic.)

The human brain does something wonderful with memories — it connects them. But it’s a sort of connection beyond connection. It’s a vast system of near-infinite and continually updated cross-referencing and value reassigning. It’s all the spiders within 100 miles of you working on one web, perpetually restarting it, erasing strands or double and tripling back on strands, and using only the finest spider silk on this one particular strand because maybe it’s your childhood dog or the last time your saw your mom. Which is not just recall. Pulling a memory from the brain doesn’t work like pulling a memory from a computer; it’s like pulling a small bit of prey from the largest, most dense web constructed. A memory served via computer is like pulling a coin from cold, empty space.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

Connections:

• Power in This Weird Grey Box: William Gibson’s First Technology Memory
• Psychedelics Make Us Human: An Interview with the Mind-Bending Techno-Ecologic Scholar Richard Doyle
• Cocaine Makes Your Brain Age and Die Really Fast