Chapter 33
24 "Never memorize what you can look up in books"
Library of Congress, World Treasures of the Library of Congress, July 29, 2010, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/world/world-record.html.
25 the disuse of neuron "trees" leads to their shrinkage
Walter J. Freeman, How Brains Make Up Their Minds (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 3743, 8182; Society for Neuroscience, "Brain Plasticity and Alzheimer's Disease," 2010, http://web.archive.org/web/20101225174414/ http://sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=publications_rd_alzheimers.j.
26 connecting our brains seamlessly to the enhanced capacity
McLuhan, Understanding Media.
27 "calling things to remembrance"
Plato, Plato's Phaedrus, translated by Reginald Hackforth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 157.
28 TCP/IP protocol
Kleinrock Internet History Center at UCLA, "The IMP Log: October 1969 to April 1970," September 21, 2011, http://internethistory.ucla.edu/2011/09/imp-log-october-1969-to-april-1970.html; Jim Horne, "What Hath G.o.d Wrought," New York Times, Wordplay blog, September 8, 2009, http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/wrought/; George P. Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), pp. 2, 219.
29 and the less one relies on memories stored in the brain itself
Carr, The Shallows, pp. 19197.
30 life-forms on Earth is our capacity for complex and abstract thought
Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 199.
31 neocortex in roughly its modern form around 200,000 years ago
R.I.M. Dunbar, "Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no. 4 (1993): 681735.
32 with a genetic mutation or whether it developed more gradually
Constance Holden, "The Origin of Speech," Science 303, no. 5662 (February 27, 2004): 131619.
33 to communicate more intricate thoughts from one person to others
John n.o.ble Wilford, "Who Began Writing? Many Theories, Few Answers," New York Times, April 6, 1999.
34 hunter-gatherer period is a.s.sociated with oral communication
Nicholas Wade, "Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born," New York Times, April 14, 2011.
35 language is a.s.sociated with the early stages of the Agricultural Revolution
Wilford, "Who Began Writing?"
36 Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India, the Mediterranean, and Central America
William J. Duiker and Jackson J. Spielvogel, World History, 6th ed., vol. 1 (Boston: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2010), p. 43.
37 the emergence of sophisticated concepts like democracy
Carr, The Shallows, pp. 5057.
38 Their relative powerlessness was driven by their ignorance
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
39 written in a language that for the most part only the monks could understand
Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Chained Library: A Survey of Four Centuries in the Evolution of the English Library (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
40 eleven print editions of the account of his journey captivated Europe