‘We all know the feeling when a word is on the tip of the brain, but we cannot actually reach it. It could be a historical fact, a forgotten title of a pop song or the name of the fifth Beatle. Anyone with a smart phone knows the temptation of looking up the answer via search machines such as Google. But we also, perhaps intuitively, feel a sense of danger in the knowledge that using such artificial cognitive technology could make our brains lazy…’
Sebastian Groes pits Plato against Einstein in his blog post for the Cheltenham Literature Festival, whose theme this year is memory. The Memory Network has put on several events as part of the festival, including the upcoming Climate Change and the Art of Memory and the Proust Phenomenon.