No immediate cite, but I grabbed up a high school social studies textbook recently where a Muslim scholar from some West African culture, possibly Mali, was lamenting how poor learners Europeans were precisely because they relied too much on books (these days, probably multimedia, too) and not enough on training their memories to recall what they saw and heard: that in his estimation the human voice was superior in disseminating information that could be retained later.
Some learning and retention models, such as this one, which I was taught in college as dogma, seem to bear that out: audio/visual teaching, while low at 20%, is still double the retention of simple silent reading, which is 10%.
The old adage, “Beware reading! You could lose your memory!” doesn’t seem so far fetched.*
Have there been studies to refute or support this observation?
(*) Okay, okay. This “old adage” came from a panel in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Happy?
IMO, losing memory is not at all the same as losing intelligence. Certainly literacy promotes loss of memory, because you don’t need it. I don’t need to memorize phone numbers if I can look them up, I don’t need to memorize long epic poems if I can read them. In much the same way I don’t need to memorize multipication tables if I have a calculator.
But this has nothing to do with lack of intelligence or being a bad learner.
I’m not sure how accurate that is. Good recall, verbalizing witticisms, quoting people, recalling numbers, making unusual connections between disparate subjects, being visually, perceptive, having high linguistic intelligence, possessing logical-mathematical intelligence, being visually perceptive, are all heavily dependent on how good your memory is-- and for testing purposes, that is used as ameasure of your intelligence.
I’ve observed for years that I can vastly improve my students’ math scores later in school by having them rote memorize their single digit math and subtraction drills and times tables while they’re in kindergarten. The same with improving reading scores and their having mastered sight word recognition. Seems to me the more you struggle with math ad reading later in life, the more it points to key reading and math skills that weren’t ingrained early in life.
