I’ve just finished reading this book and i’m in a position of contemplation now. Something very important has happened to me. 

Firstly. I dropped my iphone into the toilet last week. A tragic event. But it left me moderately less connected to the world than I was before. Which if you are a connected maniac like I am was an unsettling experience, initially. 

What?

Well. Recently, i’ve been stepping a little backwards from the online sphere. Sometime last year during my exploration of our digitally connected world, I wondered what it would be like to be disconnected from it for an extended period of time. 

I didn’t make it that far, but I did take a break from Facebook for time. And with the absence of my phone, I’m wondering what it feels like to not have the connection to everyone else. And that’s what it feels like to me. Like a thread of life to the big network, where no matter what happens around me, even if and especially if I’m alone, I can share events and moments with people and they will know it happened. I will make a memory and share it.

The reason I started reading Moonwalking with Einstein is because i’ve noticed my memory is deteriorating quite a bit. I regularly loose my ability to form decent sentences with moderately intelligent vocabulary, I forget names instantly, I can’t remember why I came into a room, I can’t remember what happened last week sometimes. Awful. But I don’t think its a brain disease. I think its bad habits. So I read this book in order to find a way perhaps to better organise my filing system for memories. 

What I didn’t expect was how much light it would begin to throw onto my external, connected life. I have become so dependent on my computer and my social networks to house all the information for me, is it any wonder than my brain has become lazy?  

That is not to say that I think that External Memories are a bad thing, but an alarm bell is going off in my head. This blog, even, has become a space, where I place abstract ideas relating to Voice, rather than attempt to remember them. I don’t have to search for them in my brain. I just have to scroll back through the history.

And what does that mean for my thought processes? Am I engaging at all with this information that I am posting on my blog mentally? Am I using this wonderful organ the brain at all to its potential?

One of pieces of information that has created a rather strong neural pathway in my head, from the book, is that the Greek word inventio is the root both invention and inventory. This implies obviously the importance of knowledge to creativity and expertise. I need to know it in my mind, in my body, in order to create. 

I’m still externalising this thought, because I havent perfected my memory yet and I would really like to remember this journey!