Author: JLfromNH

Sorry to be a bit late on this posting. I was laid up early this month with a flu like bug (nasal congestion,chills, aches, fever, general over all blah). Much better now though.

Then a few weekends ago my computer which I got about 7 and half years ago began having issues. It was clear it was time for a new computer. So I got a new desktop unit (already have the monitor,etc) so I have been spending the past week discovering the byzantine software known as Windows 10.

I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here when I say this is the most Rube Goldbergish bit of software that Microsoft has yet come up with. The initial booting up and configuring took so long I nearly lapsed into a coma waiting.

Then the grueling process of creating a password and pin number. Seriously? A pin number? Well…..ok. Then a whole series of options that Microsoft recommended but for which I mostly had no use for. Each time I deselected the option, the font would change to a red color and plaintively warn me of the dire consequences of not keeping that option.

Window 10: But if you dont use this, you won’t be able to use thus and so for this and that.

Me: I don’t even have a this and that,so why would I want to do thus and so?

And so forth. A trial copy of Office 365 proved so cumbersome to try and activate, that I found myself saying Many Bad Words, which would have sent my late mother running for the Lifebuoy soap. I finally gave up in disgust and downloaded Open Office instead. I was intending to do that anyway but Microsoft induced me to do it a lot faster.

So my spare time is being spent on a learning curve fit for Albert Einstein. The folks at Microsoft would do well to take a page from Henry David Thoreau: “Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!!!!”

I recently finished reading a non-fiction book titled The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly. She begins her work with an observation about traditional non-literate cultures. While preparing to do research for a natural history book about animal behavior and indigenous stories, she became aware of the vast amount of memorized information possessed by native Australians. Their capacity to recall detailed knowledge about local animals including not just their identification but their behavior, favored living areas, and value to the local humans far dwarfed any knowledge she was able to get out of a book. Coupled with plant lore, the lay of the land, locations of vital watering holes, beliefs, customs, even genealogies, it was clear indigenous Australians must have some way of recalling and preserving this information without the advantage of books.

What they use are songlines, sung narratives tied to physical locations, weaving back and forth across the landscape, with rituals being performed at specific locations using dancing and singing to encode the information associated with that area and make it more memorable. Dr Kelly noted that the songlines were used in a fashion similar to that of the memory palaces used by ancient Greek orators to memorize their speeches.

This in turn led her to wonder if other early cultures also used similar methods to preserve oral wisdom. Could the ancient ruins of Stonehenge, the Carnac Megaliths, the Nasca Lines or even the giant stone heads on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) actually be complex memory spaces used by the peoples who built them? Her subsequent book The Memory Code explores this possibility, carefully examining the archeological evidence of the various sites. Her work is by far the most lucid explanation of why these impressive sites exist and why Neolithic people spent so much time and effort constructing them.

Forget space aliens or refugees from non-existent Atlantis, the reality behind these impressive works is much more mundane and yet at the same time more marvelous. The idea that early people were unsophisticated savages is blown out of the water by the revelation that they in fact possessed a rich body of knowledge which they had built up over thousands maybe even tens of thousands of years. Megalithic monuments like Stonehenge were raised as a way to organize this vast body of wisdom and create memory spaces to preserve this knowledge with as much fidelity as possible.

The ruins of Gobekli Tepe, thought by some to be the world’s first temple, date back to 11,000 years ago. Its elegant design with numerous carvings show that people of the time were already well practiced at creating memory spaces. Dr. Kelly speculates that Gobekli was built as the first large scale memory space. But it is more likely there were earlier ones, either not yet identified or perhaps plowed under by the last incursion of glaciers.

Dr. Kelly points out that many people holding onto their traditions still used memory spaces well within historical times and in some instances even today. The Songlines of the Australians, kivas used by Pueblo people, lukasa memory boards used by the Luba people in central Africa, and the Inkan khipu used by the Inkan Empire all show how widespread the practice is, even in the face of the literacy we take for granted.

Singing and dancing were critical ingredients in the creation of many memory spaces. Recent archeological work at British and European megaliths show signs of large ditches where Dr. Kelly speculates that ceremonies were conducted, taking advantage of the unusual acoustics the ditch would create. Music is as old as the human species itself and possibly even older. Some tantalizing evidence seems to suggest it served as a social glue that bonded human groups together, and ensured their survival even during the hardest times.

Coupled with the need to preserve knowledge, music and dancing became literally hard-wired into our brains. Is it any wonder teenagers insist on listening to music while they do homework? Is it really any surprise our brains are so vulnerable to earworms?

The Memory Code is well worth a read on a snowy winter evening for delving into these mysteries and coming away with a heightened respect for our far from simple ancestors.