The Art of Remembering... "In the Burning Heart..."
The ease of the internet is causing us to lose a major skill... memory.
There was a time when the calculator was a threat to our brains. Getting a calculator was the lazy man’s way to do mathematics. The steps required to solve math problems would be removed and eventually these skills would atrophy in our brains, pruning our synaptic pathways. Those who studied math before the calculator were sharp-witted, and we were disdained.
Then came the internet and that made looking for little matters quite easy. Look, the internet is largely a blessing (like the calculator). Let’s be clear about that.
Still, I found myself today lost in an 80s and early 90s fighting movie vortex as the song “In the Burning Heart…” kept echoing in my head. Which movie was this from? Was it a Rocky movie, and if so, which one? Was it a Jean-Claude Van Damme film, and if so, which one? Rocky or Blood Sport (surely not Kickboxer)… probably Rocky, but which one? This mental inconvenience can easily be resolved in an internet search that could be completed as quick as 3 seconds and as long as 5 minutes, depending on the skill of the search. (I’d guess 3-20 seconds in my case). But that would be too easy. No, I would not go the way of the calculator-dependent math student and criminalize my own brain. Not going to happen. The thought came to me during a cardio session, so the song was most likely presented in a training scene—doesn’t feel like Van Damme. I know, I could easily search for it. The more the song rocks in my brain, the more that I am confident that it is from a Rocky movie. Since it isn’t the Eye of the Tiger, it must have been one of the later Rocky movies. Was it the chopping wood scene? Was he training with Apollo while preparing to take on Mr. T (whose character name I’ve forgotten but I could just look up)? Can’t be where Rocky fights Tommy Morrison, or is it?
In the end, the calculator did increase speed in processing math and eventually opened up high schools to teaching advanced topics (for the time at a least) in subjects like calculus, which previously were only offered at the collegiate level. Sure, the internet is now an indispensable tool for our advancement (as well asa our collapse), but do I need it for everything? I am trying to measure the value of working through my memory to find the answer. Does it matter if I remember which movie it was from or is it that I’m okay with not knowing the answer immediately as my way of not being depending on a web search? Maybe the fact that this song is persisting in my head is a constant call to train ruthlessly. Maybe not knowing the answer immediately provides a value that I would lose if I just typed in a search. Time to write a newsletter, then do some training Rocky Balboa style.
P.S. If anyone knows the answer from memory (i.e. WITHOUT searching online), type it in the comments.
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