I have no clue as to how life was before books. I can tell you I have incredibly good and fresh memory but it's much worse when it comes to web-accessible stuf

I have no clue as to how life was before books. I can tell you I have incredibly good and fresh memory but it's much worse when it comes to web-accessible stuff, like what's PHP's function for this or that, while at the same time I can recall conversations from south park episodes I haven't seen in years. I have googled the same function at least a dozen times while at the same time I could recall every detail of the Silmarillion after having read it only once (that was a while ago and I had much better memory but still). It is highly likely that accessibility lowers the ability to retain knowledge in its raw form, as increasingly the brain relies on pointers to base a google search on instead of keeping track of the whole thing.