Memory- regarding different eras and personalities

First of all, I think it is such an interesting topic to think about how primitive man's memory developed and how different it would have been in comparison with us, who are living in this modern world. 

"Livingston remarked on the outstanding memory of the natives of Africa, such as that manifested by the envoys of chiefs, who carried very lengthy messages over enormous distances and then repeated them word for word. They usually traveled in groups of two or three, repeating their message each evening as they moved along, so as not to alter its precise language. One of the arguments adduced by the natives against learning to write was that these messengers could transmit news over a long distance quite as well as the written word."

It seems that the way how people perceive, digest and encode information can affect their memory at a great deal. If you think about how people would have remembered things when there was no paper to take notes or draw on, pencil or whichever to use as a tool to write with, or camera to save any moment as an image, probably they must have tried to use verbal message repeatedly as was illustrated in the excerpt above from the chapter. 

At this point, I just wondered if their short term and long term memory capacity, in general, would have been very different from ours, which is about 7 (so-called 'magic number') items on average in case of short-term memory. I also wondered how people developed or even retrogressed as time goes by (not in terms of human developmental stage, but in terms of generations and decades change). For instance, nowadays, due to the development of technology, we mostly rely on smartphones, alarms from schedulers, and the e-mails when there's any information to recall; hence, technically, we do not feel necessary to memorize or remember things too often, but instead, we can quickly look for proper information when needed, using internet or any device. Aside from the widely acknowledged idea that the human brain's capacity is almost unlimited (in that even after the whole life span, the human usually use up less than 5% of their brain capacities), I was thinking that the even the magic numbers could have been different for those who lived a long time ago. Inevitably, would they have been better at remembering things?

If so, what does it tell us about challenges and changes to the current teaching and learning? Previously, there were lots of exams and tests where you could easily get an A by simply memorizing concepts, some examples, and even the flow of logic and writing them. I feel shame to say this, but the top university in Korea, 'Seoul National University' also announced the results from a research that examined how SNU students get a higher grade in their college life and most of them were found to use remote memorization in answering the questions from instructors; It means something. That tells us the required ability from a course to get an A is not so much different from an ability to memorize things, which should not have been that way in my personal opinion. If the instructors encourage and inspire students to come up with new ideas, synthesize different lines of thoughts, dig into what students are interested in, etc, then their ways of getting good grades should not be by using remote memorization, isn't it? 

As in Einstein's quote that Imagination is more important than knowledge, I also believe that 'the role of memory' and 'the way how we intend to use it in educational contexts' will matter. 

While I was thinking about how human memory can differ to each other, I thought personality can be one of the factors (though it is mostly cited factor in ed-psych) based on my experience. So I see myself as a very person-oriented type of person, who likes to chat with people and spend time together with them. I usually remember comparatively well which event (or conversation) between me and him/her/them occurred which year, which season, in which contexts. Meanwhile, I am relatively poor at remembering any announcement or notification about logistic issues, and I thought maybe this difference within a person can arise from that person's personality and character. In which area and domain, do you have a better memory? Is it domain-general or domain-specific? would be another interesting point to think about.