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there was a lot of social pressure and dignity for being one of the people who could recite oral history
it would provide you a status, so people would take that shit seriously and there would be privlage attached to it
so in short, if you had a good memory for that kind of shit, you would excell at it and get the privlage of not having to do dangerous things
And memory is a skill you can practice. If you spent four years studying and practicing barding instead of going to college, I bet you would be pretty good at it too!
Often multiple times per cooking session too.
If you take the last one and throw the package in the trash, you’re definitely going to have to take it out of the trash to re-read the instructions at least twice.
Are you spying on me? I feel like you just wrote my biography.
The sacred texts!
Books are the original technology that atrophied brains thousands of years before LLM’s.
I can understand this. I unintentionally have all the lyrics for numerous NOFX albums memorized and when my kids were young, I had the entirety of dialogue from Frozen unintentionally memorized and could recite it on demand. I guess it’s similar as it was their entertainment along with history.
Not exactly a thrilling tale worth retelling on that box of corn dogs, is there? I feel like between stories worth committing to memory and people whose job was to retain and retell stories for a living, whether your average dude could commit a story to memory was irrelevant.
I think they used rhythm and rhyme to help. Anyone remember what’s on that one McDonald’s burger with the song?
Why do I hate you now?
Y’all know that oral history usually mutates some over time. It’s not like perfect preservation of history. The same thing that makes all of us re-read directions or recall something wrong has been a part of humanity forever.
Not to say oral history and tradition isn’t important and that we should dismiss it out of hand but we should stop pretending that people are infallible and nothing changed in stories spoken for generations.
To be fair, I’ve not memorised too many cooking instructions, but I can quote about half of “Monty Python’s Holy Grail” with reasonable accuracy, or tell you in great detail a number of stories of “what me and my friends got up to” when I was younger, or give you plot summaries and occasional quotes from half of the episodes of Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Star Trek TNG etc, and lyrics to hundreds of songs from the 1980s and 1990s… and I’m not exactly particularly talented in that area. It’s not a massive stretch to think someone could fairly easily memorise and story-tell one fairly long book.
Dude, came here to say the same thing about the same movie! I’ve been able to pretty much recite Holy Grail (as you say, with “reasonable accuracy”) since college. I can hear three notes from some random song I last heard a decade ago and can probably still name it. But I was in my 30s before I felt comfortable throwing away the Kraft mac and cheese box before I was finished making it.
A lot of the information (or stories or both) used song to make it easier to pass down.
A corn dog sea shanty might be the cure to what ails ‘ya.
