As traditions and legends could be written out on papyrus, people were freed from the burden of remembering the past and were increasingly able to devote more of their cognitive energies to forming new ideas.

Literacy also enables thinking to become more analytical, more complex and more critical. Difficult and abstract ideas are harder to pursue without writing. Just try doing formal logic in your head. Unless you are a savant it is not possible. But once people had a means of setting thoughts down on the page to interrogate them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of thinking was born, one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation.

When we write our ideas down we externalise part of our minds. We can look at our thoughts from the outside. And that means we can walk around them: adding to them, criticising them and refining them.

Writing meant that traditions and received ways of thinking could not only be passed on but also pinned down where they could be analysed, challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation.

—James Marriott, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society