Chapter 7: Memory Overload

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Welcome to the Deep Dive, where we take the sources you send us and really pull out the most crucial and surprising insights just for you.

Think of it as your shortcut, yeah.

Getting straight to the good stuff without getting bogged down.

Exactly, and today we're diving into something fascinating.

How humans, well, how we process and store information, especially as societies got bigger.

Right, our listener wants those aha moments once it cut through the complexity.

So that's the mission today.

Absolutely, and the big question, pulled straight from the reading you sent, is basically this.

How did we get past the brain's limits?

For managing all the info needed for big societies and what happened because of that?

Yeah, and we're talking about all kinds of info.

Simple rules, complex math, the whole lot.

Okay, let's unpack this then.

Where do we start?

The brain itself.

Let's start right there.

The brain is amazing, obviously, but it has built -in constraints, especially for huge groups working together.

Memory alone just doesn't cut it.

Right, like think about football maybe.

Evolution gave us legs, arms.

The physical bits.

But not the rule book, right?

We have to learn the rules.

It's not like puppies playing, which seems more instinctual.

Exactly, that's a great comparison.

Our big -scale cooperation often relies on these shared imagined things.

Football rules, kingdoms, money, religion.

Things we all just agree exist, even if you can't physically point to them.

Precisely.

Yeah.

They're not hardwired like, say, how a beehive works.

Bees don't need meetings to decide who gets the nectar.

Huh,

no bee union reps arguing for better pollen distribution.

Right, it's genetic, environmental.

For us, these social ideas need constant upkeep.

Laws, customs.

They have to be remembered, passed on.

If everyone in an early kingdom just forgot who was supposed to be in charge.

Poof, chaos.

Because it wasn't natural in a biological sense, it was learned.

And that brings us to the brain as what the reading called an empire -sized database.

It has issues.

Okay, like what?

Well, first, limited capacity.

Sure, you hear about incredible memory feats, ancient neminis.

People were citing epics or laws.

Exactly, but even they had limits.

Think of a modern lawyer, brilliant, knows tons of case law, but not every single detail of every case ever.

The brain's hard drive is finite.

And no cloud backup back then.

Definitely not.

Second problem, mortality.

Brains die.

And the info stored only in them dies too.

Ouch.

And even passing info down orally, generation to generation.

It's like that game of telephone, right?

Things get garbled, misremembered, change.

Absolutely, the accuracy just degrades.

But maybe the biggest limitation is the kind of information our brains evolved for.

Ah, right, hunter -gatherers.

Exactly.

Their survival depended on remembering really specific stuff about their environment.

Which plants kill you, which heal you.

Where the animals are likely to be who's who in the social group.

Like remembering that mushroom under that specific tree is bad, but the one nearby is good.

Crucial details.

Or your example, Lucy remembering her history with John to figure out social dynamics.

That's complex, but it's specific relational data.

Okay, so our brains are good at that kind of info.

But then - Then came the agricultural revolution.

And suddenly,

societies needed a whole different type of data.

Numbers, lots and lots of numbers.

You got it.

Foragers didn't really need to track the exact yield of 500 different plots of land.

Whether you picked 30 berries or 35 didn't fundamentally change your day.

But running a settled society, a village, a town, eventually a kingdom, you need math.

You need to track taxes, harvests, land ownership, debts.

Stuff that just swamps individual memory.

You can't keep all that straight in your head for thousands of people.

It's cognitive overload.

And this bottleneck, this inability to handle mass numerical data

really put a cap on how big and complex societies could get for a long, long time.

Until someone figured out a workaround.

Mesopotamia, right?

Yes.

The Sumerians down in Mesopotamia, maybe 3500 to 3000 BC, they were getting prosperous, society was growing and bam, information overload.

So what did they do?

Some clever people invented a system.

A way to store and process information outside the brain.

And critically, it was designed specifically for mathematical data.

Writing, exactly.

It broke through that cognitive ceiling.

Allowed for cities, kingdoms, empires.

And this early Sumerian stuff, it was on clay tablets.

What clay tablets, yeah.

Using two basic types of signs.

One type stood for numbers.

And they used base six, which is why we still have 60 minutes in an hour, 360 degrees.

Amazing legacy, isn't it?

And the other type of sign represented things.

People, animals, barley, land, whatever.

So you could combine them, like X amount of barley.

Precisely.

Record way more data than one person could possibly remember reliably.

And wasn't there something about the first recorded name?

Oh yeah, that's fascinating.

A tablet reads Cushium.

Couldn't be a title, like accountant, but it might just be a guy's name.

So the first person we can name from history might've been an accountant, not a king or a poet.

Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

It really hammers home that early writing was about practical stuff.

Facts and figures.

Yeah, the oldest messages aren't epic tales.

They're like 29 ,086 measures barley, 37 months Cushium.

Thrilling administrative records.

But absolutely vital.

Taxes, debts, ownership.

The bedrock of a complex economy.

So your modern spreadsheet has very ancient roots.

Okay, so this early writing,

it wasn't like writing as we think of it now.

Right.

It's important to understand it was a partial script designed for specific tasks, mainly math and lists.

It couldn't really capture the full range of spoken language.

Unlike, say, English or hieroglyphics, which are full scripts.

Exactly, full scripts like Latin or Braille even can represent pretty much anything you can say.

Early Sumerian wasn't built for that.

It was built to do things spoken language couldn't do well, like manage huge amounts of data.

It was a new tool for thinking, for organizing.

And Sumer wasn't the only place to come up with something like this.

What about the Andes?

Good point.

Totally different system, same basic idea.

In the Andes, before Columbus, they used Crepus.

And knotted strings, right?

Knotted chords, yeah.

Different colors, intricate knots, spacing.

All encoding numerical data.

Taxes, census info, property records for the huge Inca empire.

Wow, so knots could hold all that information.

Incredibly effective system.

They managed millions of people across vast territories with these things.

So effective, the Spanish actually used them for a while after the conquest.

Really?

The conquistadors used Kepesix.

Initially, yeah.

They needed the data that Kepes held, but eventually they got nervous.

Why?

Worried about being tricked.

Exactly.

If you don't fully understand the system, how can you trust it?

So they phased them out, pushed Latin script and their own number system.

And we lost the ability to read them.

Sadly, yes.

The art of reading Kepes died out.

Most surviving ones are mysteries.

A huge loss of knowledge.

Okay, back to Mesopotamia.

Their partial script eventually became more.

It did.

Between about 3000 and 2500 BC, they kept adding signs, making it more flexible.

It evolved into a full script, cuneiform.

And that could be used for more than just accounting.

Oh yeah.

Now kings could issue decrees, priests recorded prophecies, people wrote letters.

It opened up.

Around the same time, you get Egyptian hieroglyphics developing and later full scripts pop up independently in China, Central America.

So full scripts allow for poetry, history, religion,

all the richer cultural stuff.

Definitely.

But, and this is key, those original partial scripts, or at least the function of handling numerical and administrative data efficiently, remained absolutely vital.

So even with full scripts around, you still needed systems just for the numbers and lists?

Absolutely.

Think about it.

Epic poems might've survived orally, maybe a bit changed, but they could survive.

But complex administration, managing a state, that needed writing.

Specifically the kind good at handling data.

Modern bureaucracy is still built on that foundation.

Databases, spreadsheets, it's the same principle.

Okay, so now you have all this written information piling up, clay tablets, maybe papyrus later.

How do you find anything?

Yes.

The next big challenge.

Having the records is one thing, finding the right record when you need it is another.

Imagine King Zimmerlum of Mari's archive, thousands of tablets.

How do you find one specific land deed from 20 years ago?

Like finding a needle in a haystack made of clay.

Pretty much.

So just writing things down wasn't enough.

You needed organization.

Catalogs, filing systems.

Exactly.

And ways to copy important documents.

And ways to retrieve information quickly and accurately.

Basically ancient search algorithms run by librarians and clerks.

The unsung heroes of early civilization.

Totally.

And developing these systems, cataloging, indexing, retrieval was arguably harder than inventing writing itself.

Lots of cultures invented writing.

But the really successful early states, Sumer, Egypt, China, the Incas, they invested heavily in the infrastructure around writing.

Schools for scribes.

Schools for scribes, absolutely.

But also for clerks, archivists, librarians,

accountants.

People trained specifically to manage information.

And it wasn't easy training apparently.

I remember reading about students getting punished.

Oh yeah, we have evidence like school texts from Mesopotamia showing students getting caned for mistakes, for speaking the wrong dialect.

It was rigorous.

You had to be disciplined to master this stuff.

Because it required a whole new way of thinking.

A fundamental shift.

Our brains naturally work by free association, right?

One thought connects to another sometimes in weird ways.

Yeah, happens all the time.

But bureaucracy demands compartmentalization.

Tax records go here, land deeds go there, marriage certificates in that box.

Everything's separate,

filed neatly.

Try filing, I don't know, a complex feeling or a piece of art in that system.

Doesn't work well, does it?

So to make these external systems work, people had to train their minds to think like the filing system.

Less associative, more linear, more compartmentalized.

That's a huge change in how humans process the world.

Trading some mental flexibility for administrative efficiency.

A massive trade -off.

And arguably one of the most profound long -term impacts of writing on how we think.

And this drive for efficiency for abstract data handling, it just kept going.

Absolutely, it got a huge boost with Arabic numerals.

Which, fun fact, actually came from India originally.

Right, the zero through nine we use now?

Yep, that system plus symbols like plus minus and crucially zero made manipulating numbers incredibly efficient and versatile.

Much more so than Roman numerals, for example.

Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

Exactly, it's cumbersome.

This Hindu -Arabic system, this mathematical script,

became incredibly powerful.

And it's basically taken over the world, hasn't it?

In many ways, yes.

It's the dominant language for global governance, business, science, technology.

Doesn't matter what language you speak or write, the numbers are usually the same.

If you want to influence things, you need to speak numbers.

Translate ideas into data.

Precisely.

Think about how we measure poverty with a poverty line or credit worthiness with a credit rating.

Even happiness gets turned into metrics.

Or entire fields like physics or engineering, they basically are a mathematical script.

Right, you can't really express the core concepts adequately in just words.

The math is the language.

Like that relativity equation E plays serum.

Most of us see symbols, but physicists.

Physicists have learned to think with the symbols using the external system, the blackboard, the computer as an extension of their own minds.

They process information in a way our unaided brains aren't really built for.

Which leads us, I guess, to the ultimate abstract script.

Binary.

The zeroes and ones of the digital age, driven by computers.

It's even more detached from human language or intuition.

Everything we're doing now, it's conversations, seeing things online, money moving around.

It's all just zeroes and ones underneath.

Deep down, yes.

Complex sequences of binary code processed by machines.

It's a form of writing that machines understand natively.

It's kind of mind -bending.

Writing started as our tool, but now is it becoming the master?

We're adapting to its logic.

That's a profound question.

Computers still struggle with human nuance, right?

Emotion, context, ambiguity.

So we often end up simplifying, quantifying, translating our messy reality into the clean, unambiguous language of data and code that computers can process.

And then there's artificial intelligence, trying to build intelligence purely out of that binary script.

Exactly.

Which takes us into all sorts of territories, some exciting, some unsettling.

Sci -fi loves exploring AI, becoming independent, maybe even surpassing us.

The Matrix, Terminator.

Right.

Still speculative, mostly.

But it definitely underscores how deeply script, from clay tablets to binary code, has reshaped not just our societies, but our very way of thinking and being.

Okay, wow.

So let's try and wrap this up.

Key takeaways for our listener.

Well, we started with the brain's limits, how memory wasn't enough for big societies.

Which led to needing shared, imagined realities rules.

God's money.

And crucially, external storage.

First, partial scripts like Sumerian or Quipus, mostly for admin and math.

Game changers for organization.

Then full scripts like cuneiform and hieroglyphics, allowing for literature, history, complex, thought to be recorded.

But the language of numbers, especially with Arabic numerals, became increasingly dominant.

Essential for administration, science, everything.

And now binary code, the language of computers, is taking that abstraction even further.

Reshaping how we interact with information and maybe even how we think.

These shifts weren't just technical.

They fundamentally changed social structures, power dynamics, and yeah, our cognitive processes.

From relying on memory to clay to knots to paper, now to pixels.

It's been a constant evolution driven by the need to manage complexity.

So a final thought to leave our listener with, something to chew on.

Maybe this.

Consider how much we now rely on digital data, on algorithms organizing our world.

How is that ongoing shift shaping our minds, our societies, our understanding of what's real or important?

What are the upsides and downsides of letting these external systems do so much of our thinking?

Exactly.

What are we gaining and what might we be losing?

Okay.

I think we've definitely covered the ground from that chapter.

The key ideas, the timelines, the arguments, the examples like Cushim and the Kippus.

Yep.

Hitting the evolutionary points, the cultural shifts, the author's main arguments about external storage, and the implications right up to today and potentially tomorrow.

We covered the limitations, the solutions, the rise of bureaucracy, the dominance of numbers, and the digital age.

All there.

Absolutely.

A thorough deep dive into how we learn to write our world into existence.