Abstract
Two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca used a charming metaphor to describe the way memory shapes intellect. ‘We should imitate bees’, he wrote; ‘we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it is apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state’.1 As his metaphor makes clear, Seneca viewed memory not as a mere container but as a crucible. Memory was more than the sum of things remembered. It was something newly made, the essence, even, of a singular self.
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Notes
Translated by Ann Moss in Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (New York: Clarendon Press, 1996), 12. Originally published in Seneca 1920.
Clive Thompson, ‘Your Outboard Brain Knows AH’, Wired 15(10) (2007).
Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner, ‘Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips’, Science 333(6043) (2011), 776.
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© 2016 Nicholas Carr
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Carr, N. (2016). Misled by Metaphor. In: Groes, S. (eds) Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_8
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