Memory and representation

Broadly speaking this is a good corrective to the moral panic sort of stuff we've been seeing lately that this title refers to Google Is Not Making You Stupid : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR. I found myself, musing over a side-bar this time though.

We have evolved not to be representers-of-the-world, but to lock-in and keep track of where we find ourselves. We use landmarks and street signs to find our way around;

I'm not sure the two things are so far apart or even fundamentally different. Representation surely involves picking out particular features out of a large potential field of percepts and using those features in communication based on, among other things, a sense of what other people may pick out (and this is heavily influenced by culturally-driven convergences). These features are probably landmarks in the relevant communicative transactions and, by analogy, landmark-like things in other kinds of discourse. I'm hypothesising, I guess, that the psychological mechanism for using landmarks, therefore, is recycled into perception-for-communication: ie representation ....