CHECK out this interesting article from Wired Magazine, which says we might be remembering fewer things because we now rely on gadgets like mobile phones and online tools such as Google to store our memory, so to speak.
Here’s an excerpt:
We’re running out of memory.
I don’t mean computer memory. That stuff’s half-price at Costco these days. No, I’m talking about human memory, stored by the gray matter inside our heads. According to recent research, we’re remembering fewer and fewer basic facts these days.
This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.
That reflexive gesture — reaching into your pocket for the answer — tells the story in a nutshell. Mobile phones can store 500 numbers in their memory, so why would you bother trying to cram the same info into your own memory? Younger Americans today are the first generation to grow up with go-everywhere gadgets and services that exist specifically to remember things so that we don’t have to: BlackBerrys, phones, thumb drives, Gmail.
Personally, I don’t really see this as a reason to worry. I actually have a pretty good memory, but I have to admit that, like many people, I’m relying on tools to remember many things for me. I mean, do you really want to memorize cell phone numbers? (Which reminds me, remember those dark ages when mobile phones didn’t have caller ID? It wasn’t so long ago, but it’s hard to imagine putting up with that these days.)
Or how about life before Gmail? It’s revolutionized e-mail so thoroughly that I almost can’t imagine how we were able to survive without it. And why try to cram all sorts of information in our brains when we can now Google?
I’d like to see this as liberation, an unimaginable extension of our memory and knowledge. Think of what it was like before the invention of writing, when the oral tradition had to rely on a person’s memory to remember information and pass it down to the next generation? How much brain power have we freed up by recording facts, so that we might use our minds more creatively, as opposed to rote memory, allowing us to turn information into knowledge?
As the great Albert Einstein put it, “Information is not knowledge.” And, as he pointed out, “Know where to find the information and how to use it — that’s the secret of success.”
In the end, it might be true that we remember less on our own than the generations before us — but we now know more than they could ever have imagined.
