Take a moment to think about the last time you memorized someone's phone number. Was it way back when, perhaps circa 2001? And when was the last time you were at a dinner party or having a conversation with friends, when you whipped out your smartphone to Google the answer to someone's question? Probably last week.
Technology changes the way we live our daily lives, the way we learn, and the way we use our faculties of attention -- and a growing body of research has suggested that it may have profound effects on our memories (particularly the short-term, or working, memory), altering and in some cases impairing its function.
The implications of a poor working memory on our brain functioning and overall intelligence levels are difficult to over-estimate.
"The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system," Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, wrote in Wired in 2010. "When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought."
While our long-term memory has a nearly unlimited capacity, the short-term memory has more limited storage, and that storage is very fragile. "A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind," Carr explains.
Meanwhile, new research has found that taking photos -- an increasingly ubiquitous practice in our smartphone-obsessed culture -- actually hinders our ability to remember that which we're capturing on camera.
Concerned about premature memory loss? You probably should be. Here are five things you should know about the way technology is affecting your memory.
Information overload makes it harder to retain information.
Even a single session of Internet usage can make it more difficult to file away information in your memory, says Erik Fransén, computer science professor at Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology. And according to Tony Schwartz, productivity expert and author of The Way We're Working Isn't Working, most of us aren't able to effectively manage the overload of information we're constantly bombarded with.
When the working memory is experiencing digital overload, it's like a glass of water overflowing. Schwartz explained in an interview with The Huffington Post in June:
"It’s like having water poured into a glass continuously all day long, so whatever was there at the top has to spill out as the new water comes down. We’re constantly losing the information that’s just come in -- we’re constantly replacing it, and there’s no place to hold what you’ve already gotten. It makes for a very superficial experience; you’ve only got whatever’s in your mind at the moment. And it’s hard for people to metabolize and make sense of the information because there’s so much coming at them and they’re so drawn to it. You end up feeling overwhelmed because what you have is an endless amount of facts without a way of connecting them into a meaningful story."
The Internet is becoming the brain's "external hard drive."
Research has found that when we know a digital device or tool will remember a piece of information for us, we're less likely to remember it ourselves. A recent Scientific American article likened the Internet to the brain's "external hard drive," explaining that the social aspect of remembering has been replaced by new digital tools.
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