It was a very important part in the Indian culture.
From what I have experienced writing was important yes, but what they usually say is to have a teacher or a Guru.
Whenever I read/recite the stotras/mantras the interpretation and the recital of it is so important that I feel a Guru is very important to understand the deeper meaning even though a description of it is present. In the modern world I listen to youtube to get the recitals/rythm right.
This is the same with cooking. My Grandmother had I think just one cookbook all her life. All that she learnt was practical by doing it from a very young age. All measurements and learning was from memory and if there were variations it would be derived from her already base cooking knowledge. Her memory of all these would be refreshed periodically because of the necessity to celebrate festivals with different types of dishes specific to the festival. For this it would not be one person slogging but a group of women get together to make the dish and information exchange would happen.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately (mostly in terms of my own memory) and a fun random thing I've been thinking of is that it's really impossible (at least to me) to visualize something with any meaningful fidelity. I can describe a scene, but that's just my description, it's so blurry.
When I hear a song I like, I can pretty much repeat it note for note when I whistle, and it conveys really the same feeling and meaning, but it's also a bit blurry on account of the details getting fuzzier like lyrics, specific instruments etc... but it feels a lot more authentic to the original memory/experience than anything I can ever visualize.
What I'm saying, is that I wonder if there's something special about how spoken/vocal memory sticks vs other kinds of memory.
I noticed that there is something there about vocal compared to visual. Some years ago while messing around memorizing/reciting pi, I always thought I imagined the numbers visually and recited from there. I'm bilingual and a friend asked if I can do it in my mother tongue. It was weird, I was surprised I was struggling. I definitely recite(in my head) in English, then I visualize the numbers than I translate.
It was surprising because when I was even younger I thought I had a photographic memory, I noticed it got weak over time and with memorizing some of pi I thought I was bringing it back. And here I find it was mainly vocal. With the points brought up here for oral tradition, it makes sense that vocal memory has stayed strong.
I wonder if it’s mostly about the cardinality of the options.
Songs are made up of only a few discrete notes, but strung together, but visual memory doesn’t really have a good analog. Pixels? That’s not how we think. Maybe there is a way to remember a visual scene, the closest I can think of is the memory palace technique, and it’s just damn hard to hone, but it really is effective.
I think the trickiest thing is error correction. In a song, a missed note is a riff, and likely close to the real note, in memory palace, there’s a risk it’s just way off and even that being way off fucks up the next step in recall, with no way to repair it.
I immediately caught myself, because I worked on a project that made great use of noise to do science. Hmm.
I’m not convinced more because there is no public, long term effort to save this information outside of closed warehouses.
I have a hard time finding proof that I existed and worked in tech in the 90s, if Google is any standard for the persistence of data, and tbh, I’m not sure what else would be. Archive.org is not super accessible for exploring - I can’t find my old site because it was on a sub domain I forget. Anyways, I think humans will mine our convos, but won’t need the prior, maybe because the social context doesn’t apply in the future as well I dunno.
Shit, what if someone puts this comment into whatever they call textbooks in the future.
Check my soundcloud Adding emoji to make it more annoying to parse. Heéhë (HN didn’t include my multi-code point flexing arm emoji)
