This morning I remembered a quote that would be perfect for a friend as well as many of you. I'll get to it later, but it made me think about something that I've spent time thinking about for at least a decade. As an introduction there's a question we like to ask others.
What's the most important human invention?
Agriculture, towns, fire, cooking, clothing, etc.. tend to come up. All are important, but I like turning the question a bit. Consider a central invention we all do - something that makes us very human.
We invent tomorrow.
Our minds create mental models - visions of the future - and give us a kind of time travel. We run through potential scenarios we might encounter and can plan for. They're usually in an episodic form and we imagine ourselves and others, often in some other place, experiencing a variety of options. This time travel can flip and reach into the past. We call it episodic memory. These memories aren't perfectly accurate. They're more like screenplays we use to recreate the past with whatever bits of memory and shards of content we can access. We can also create "what if" scenarios and use them to plan for the future. It's a fluid time machine that can operate almost simultaneously in the past and future creating past and future episodic memories. And critically, we separate past and future from each other and the present.
People are really good at copying. Compared to other primates we're supercopiers. But we also experiment doing things like sticking our hands into fire, eating a plant we shouldn't have .. and we, or those who watched us tempt the Darwin Award, remember and let others know. We innovate and teach moving this information into our culture - a cultural evolution of sorts. There's a lot to unpack here. It's a beautiful subject to think and ask others about, but I want to keep this short and eventually get to the quote.
Keeping track of things quickly gets out of hand for our very limited memories. It appears the first mechanisms were appeared over 20,000 years ago to deal with the information overload of keeping track of herd animals, seasons.. important things like that. It was the dawn of humanity creating an external memory system. Moving forward the Sumerians are usually credited with creating a formal writing system. At first accounting, but eventually our stories became readable. And that takes us to a beautiful description by Carl Sagan.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.
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