Do you remember?

I am still in awe of the memorization skills of Laura Ingalls as a teenager, when she and one other girl (whose name escapes me) recited the entire timeline of American history, annotated with facts they had learned. I have a decent memory, but even I can't remember any presidents after Andrew Johnson until FDR, except Teddy in 1900. Well, I know Grant was before Teddy and Coolidge and Hoover were between Teddy and FDR.

And I was a history teacher!

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Many of us have a hard time remembering facts and dates. We claim it's not necessary because if we need to know, we can Google it. We can remember new bits of information for only a short time. Our short-term memory becomes overloaded. We scroll through Facebook and Twitter, read headlines on news sites. If we read an article at all; usually we skim for the highlights without really reading it.

Memory consolidation -- moving an event from short-term, working memory to long-term -- can't happen when we are reading in the fast-paced, distracted manner promoted by the Internet.

"And thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brains to be distracted." Nicholas Carr, The Shallows p. 194

We become "adept at forgetting, inept at remembering." And anyway, we say our lives are too busy to take the time to remember what s trivial.

But how did Laura do it? She had the overwhelming task of surviving that Long, Hard Winter. They were twisting hay into sticks, in hopes the fire might not consume them quite so quickly, and they hoped the food would last as one blizzard followed hard on the heals of another.

If I'm distracted by the idle nothings of Facebook, she was distracted by surviving.

Yet she managed to commit to memory a long list of dates, people, and important facts, and then recited them, which takes a different kind of brainpower. How did she do it?

She recited and rehearsed. She focused on what was important.

That's the key. She knew the value of knowing history. She understood the importance of not forgetting.

As we rely on Google to act as our external memory, rather than using the one we were born with, we lose the ability to know the difference. The difference between the important and the inconsequential, between the valuable and the hollow. If we don't value our history enough to devote it to memory, then we must rely on outside sources for the information.

Whether you are conservative or liberal, that means relying on the media and an impersonal algorithm that will bump to the top of the search what everyone else is reading.

Think about what that means.

Our history will no longer be our history. It will be whatever Google decides it is. Google values nothing but clicks that, Rumpelstiltskin-like, turn into gold.

I will try to remember, because remembering is what I value.