Memory Weakened By Modern Strain.

New York Times 100 years ago today, January 12, 1913:
London Specialist Says That Environment Is Changing Too Fast for the Human Mind.
A BUSINESS MAN DISAGREES
Thinks There Are Too Many Artificial Helps Now, and That the Memory Is Not Taxed Enough.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
    LONDON, Jan. 11.— Is the modern town dweller losing the faculty of memory? is a question now being discussed in London in consequence of the increasing frequency of break-down in memory among persons of every grade of employment.
    The head of one big business firm attributes the prevalence of mind failure to the fact that people are relying less upon their memories and more upon manufactured substitutes. He says:
    "We have all kinds of ingenious files, index cabinets, and memorandum tablets. Office work is so departmentalized that things which a Principal would have carried in his own head years ago are now remembered for him in individual sections by individual members of the staff. A big modern organizer, so to speak, is propped up by a system of mental supports. That is all very well; but when they are removed the lonely brain is at sea."
    A West End specialist suggests this interesting theory to account for the modern loss of memory:
    "I think it is largely due to the unnatural swiftness with which our environment is changing. The most valuable faculty man has is the unconscious memory — the faculty which does for him what he calls instinctive things. It is by unconscious memory that he breathes, shuts his eyes instantaneously when danger threatens the sight, walks, and recovers himself when he slips.
    "He has done such things countless times in the course of his evolution. At first they were performed consciously, but with the inherited results of practice made perfect he does them unconsciously now, and as he progressed and did new things constantly to suit the changes of environment his stock of unconscious memories has gone on increasing in direct ratio to the complexity of the outward world.
    "So long as the changes were natural changes, and, therefore, slow and measured, the faculty of unconscious memory was able to keep up with them. As soon as man became capable of doing almost anything he liked with his environment he began to move things outside of him too fast, and the faculty was unable to respond quickly enough.
    "The modern memory is overburdened with all kinds of new details in life which the unconscious memory is unable to take over just yet. External things do not change one at a time now, but in dozens, and we have consciously to bear in mind that all the time just what our physical reaction to these things must be. Thus we have congestion, and, if external changes prove too sudden and too numerous, that part of the mental machine which deals with them stops through sheer congestion and strain."