Slashdot Mirror
Are Computers Stealing Your Memory?
alangmead writes: "According to this article in the Sunday Times an increasing number of
people in their twenties and thirties are suffering from severe memory loss. Doctors blame this problem on their over relience on PDAs and computers for holding information for them. As one doctor succinctly put it, 'Young people today are becoming stupid.' I know that I rely heavily on PDAs for keeping track of things for me, but it was because I was already forgetting things. Maybe my decision to use them is rather short sighted."
Don't forget that speed of access is important. And remember: Free memory is wasted memory.
...going to say something about this but I don't remember what.
//OSH
A life is only for those who don't understand netrek.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
And Mr. Flynn is not a fool; he has a valid point, just poorly stated.
"Oh Bother", said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."
Yes engineering's worth is self-evident.
Now let's look at art. Music in particular.
It taught me discipline, motor coordination, time management, and finely tuned listening skills. Music develops connections in your brain that are useful for other things-- for example, musicians tend to make good programmers, since there's a lot of structural thinking on small and large scales in both disciplines. It also teaches communication, teamwork (gee THAT's never useful in the real world), and creative thinking.
I've always thought it to be a good thing to balance out one's disciplines, that's why I double-majored in physics and music. And if it weren't for the music programs in middle and high school, I would never have gotten that opportunity.
I've known too many engineers that really excel in just one thing. Why? People are capable of so much more than that!
In a nutshell, I just see Utilitarianism as being boring, but that's just me. I know many great minds who aren't engineers at all. However, they aren't as naive to think that great minds only work in their particular field.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
I'd have to disagree. Just b/c you know where to find information, does not mean you will understand the information, or be able to use it properly.
It's a summary in the Sunday Times, not the research article itself. What did you expect? Perhaps you believe that every popular news story on a scientific topic should reprint the actual reasearch article in full?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
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I thought that they said we remember every detail of every minute of our lives perfectly; but trying to recall it on demand is the challenge. So, perhaps we do have infinite memory (or, at least way more then we can fill...we do only use 10% of our brains, anyway. Well some of you do at least :) )
Yeah, but why would the New York Times have a .co.uk address?
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Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
Perhaps the notion of PDA's being responsible is a blind alley. I would like to see some real statistics, but the notions of significant quantities of 25ish people suddenly experiencing significant memory problems is a very disturbing notion!
Perhaps the mad cow prion disease is secretly rampent in the population, and the vaguest warning signs are only now just beggining to show themselves. Maybe it is a new, as yet undiscovered virus. Maybe it is the ever increasing quantity of electromagnetic bombardment we all recieve as a result of wireless communication technologies.
I have no idea. But if it really is true that a lot of young people are beggining to show significant memory impairment... That is very frightening!
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
I don't find metal math all that helpful; as long as you can still do it with pen and paper or a calculator, you should be fine. Its not like you read the problem to the calculator, you use it to do the smaller stuff to help reduce mistakes (well, hopefully).
from my experience,
if you watch p0rn site too often,
you can easily forget.
try non to visit p0rn site for 1 year,
surely our memory become better
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
No one seems to have observed that these are results from Japan, where, from what I've read, the educational system is not big on evaluating information. If you've been taught (implicitly) not to question authority, you will have trouble, because you can't reject all the stuff that the computer displays - you'll have to remember it all.
Whatever did happen to the child that said the Emperor had no clothes?
I personally think that spellcheckers (esp like in ms word) that fix your error without prompting are causing me to forget how to spell and worse - to know that it doensn't matter cause the computer will catch it for me. The brain is like a muscle - if you stop using it it gets weak. Just cause I can get in car and drive someplace doesn't mean that I should never wallk anywhere again. You have to live in your body(mind) - not in your PDA or PC.
Talk is cheap. Supply exceeds demand.
an increasing number of people in their twenties and thirties are suffering from severe memory loss. based on what criteria? a study based on 150 people with memory dysfunctions, gives no useful info at all. how much of an increase, give me some numbers, is it in keeping with general population growth, or is it in fact less than population growth. it is entirely possible to have an increase in real numbers, but an actual decline in the percentage of population. if there is in fact a real problem, it is more likely tied to data overload. as sound bites get smaller and smaller, people have to remember more and more. are pda's a cause or just a symptom. I have had short term memory problems since long before personal computers became available, yet my brain is cluttered with enough useless trivia to win your average jeopardy game. it is also important to remember that short term memory loss has always been tied to higher intelligence, hence the concept of the absent minded professor.
I usually forget stuff on purpose - or give incorrect answers! - this makes my life my more creative. I think if your memory becomes too good you'll end up totally souless with no creativity
There's this wonderful scene that I use often when a professor ask's me WHY I would prefer an open note test. Indiana is driving a motorcycle. His Dad is in the Side Car. Indiana asks " Why do you need the book? Don't you remember what wrote?" Professor Jones Replies " I wrote it down so I wouldn't HAVE to Remember it." More or less that's what gets said, and that's why my memory isn't great. I use my memory to remember where I Put it, and I can remember a greater number of places than I can things stored in those places. Later BP
How we educate our children has nothing to do with how we punish our criminals, and nor should it even have to do with how we fund our athletics--they're in completely different social spheres, only loosely bound together by a common interest in squandering tax monies.
If studying trivial matters can lead to studying important things like the hard sciences, then I applaud you. But a quick look at death row will find many who found their way to religion by killing people. Is it really worth the expense?
Read the rest of this comment...
Perhaps not a fool, I would say he is misguided.
His point is quote clear and there may be some validity to it. However, the bizarre combination of engineereing and classical studies he proposes hardly makes any sense.
Have you read "Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom? He raises similar points very intelligently and eloquently (although he thinks that decline in the teaching of liberal arts and the rise of specialized science is a symptom, if not the cause, of the poor state of American education) but unfortunately comes short of any solution.
The problem, of course, is that education has to correspond to the social structures of the society and (to oversimplify a bit) it is hard to imagine going back to caning students for failing to produce correct conjugations of Latin verbs.
Going along with blaming this reporting on grumpy old men - have you ever noticed that the older types seem to keep downplaying the fact that the distribution of unrenormalized IQ scores has been steadily rising, something like 5-10 points with each generation, ever since the 1930s? Why is that anyway? Better schooling? Better parenting? More nutrition? More information availability? A healthier environment? At least taking the lead out of the environment has helped. But the gloom-and-doom types like to ignore this fact.
One of the most amusing (yet supposedly serious) books I ever read was a debate from some time in the 1970's between a proponent of "nature" (i.e. genetic predetermination of IQ scores) and another fellow who claimed (A) "nurture" was very important and (B) IQ didn't measure much meaningful anyway. The "nature" guy got into hysterics over "regression to the mean"; from which he seemed to take the conclusion that dumb people had dumb kids (of course), but smart people tended to have dumb kids too (that regression to the mean thing). From which he concluded we were doomed to ever-increasing levels of stupidity in our descendants!
Energy: time to change the picture.
If it's a random phenomenon, then what are we doing wasting our money to try to encourage it? If it isn't a random phenomenon, then why aren't we using methodologies that produce greater successes?
And if we had to pick a modern language to recode our minds in, it'd have to be C -- they use it for kernels for a reason, you know.
Read the rest of this comment...
When WRITING was first invented, people went crazy saying how stupid people were going to get. When calculators, slide rules, PDAs, etc came along the story almost exactly repeats itself with only minor changes.
;-)
The truth is, having a good memory has nothing to do with intelligence. Just because you don't actively remember dates and times does not mean you are stupid. In fact, I choose my PDA storing reminders for me over the alternative: forgetting 90% of them, or struggling to remember what the hell I came in here for...
I recall a doctor noting that the parts of the world where AIDS is most prevalent are also some of the poorest in the world, and hence TV ownership is low.
...
He then pointed out that some idiot could easily use this statistic to 'prove' that TV ownership lowers the your chance of contracting the virus
"Skill and drill" at the state school level gives kids the raw material they will later need to even begin to grasp principles let alone apply them.
How do you think you got into Caltech in the first place?
I will agree tho', that some students wilter in the face of "skill and drill", and that may well be due to an inclination that first wants to know how and why rather than simply what.
**>>BELCH
Colt M4A1 Carbine: $3100
Kevlar Vest and Helmet: $1000
Flashbang: $250
Forgetting to wear pants to work...
Priceless!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I can't remember what I was going to write.
About 70 years ago, you could ask one person what he did at work that day and his reply would be, "Took the hogs to town to sell." Now days you can ask somebody what they did and the list is a mile long. We are asking our minds and bodies to do more and more things every day. Our memory has not gone away, we just do not have the time to memorize something and then recall it later.
cat memory >> /dev/null
really
Je t'aime Stéphanie
siri
Wow, I'm inclined to trust a doctor's opinion who equates memory loss with stupidity.
Albert Einstein never bothered to remember menial things like phone numbers. He'd probably be a big PDA user if he was alive today.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I think my memory loss might be more related to the tendency of people my age -- smoking a lot of pot.
go get it
I once provided computer support for the Honolulu Heart Program which was a 30 year study on 8000 Asian-Americans.
Do a web-search using 'Honolulu Heart Program' and you'll find many reports which have been spun off ranging from weight vs mortality, tofu affecting brain-age, and caffiene affects on Parkinson's.
m.mmm..myyy
The problem isn't with utilitarianism, it's with naive utilitarianists. The original poster is a great example:
The arrogance of this is breathtaking. It implies a clear, simple, immutable understanding of what all human activity should be for. It also assumes that the world is simple enough that all worthwhile goals are simply and apparently connected to things that contribute to them.
Both of these are clearly and demonstrably untrue. The world's a big, complex place; anybody who thinks they know it all hasn't been paying attention.
ever wonder if these PDA carrying SOBs have memory to begin with??? I have a $35 Sharp PIM, I need to write down serial numbers, things to do, and WWW addresses, its cheaper and better than paper, but I still have to remember things....
my Karma ran over my Dogma
I've read this post and most of its replies, and there is one flaw in all of it that you can see in most arguments about education. Everyone always asks, "What's the single best way to teach everyone to know everything?" If your goal is to make everyone who attends school a master of all subjects you are doomed to fail.
It has ALWAYS been the case that the top 20% (or whatever percentage you like) makes up for the rest. Those people will be the capable people no matter how you teach them. It is this group that runs the government, makes the next great scientific breakthrough, and writes the next great American novel.
The next 20% can with help reach 80% of the top capacity. They carry on with whatever they find themselves doing and think, "If I had studied more I could have made something of myself."
The next 40% can reach 60% and carry on happilty with whatever they get. The rest are doomed. It doesn't matter how you teach them. You'll never reach them.
Until education learns to tailor application to student capability it will always be viewed as inefficient at best and at worst a failure.
- Sig this!
Nice, but you've been watching too many movies. I for one would like to think that I would be able to persist and survive successfully and comfortably if the placating placebos of technology that we think we 'rely on' were to be removed. No more Internet, no more phone, no noisy smog generating cars to waste years of my life in sitting in traffic, no more electricity.. (well, okay, so I'd have to go invent a watermill generator ;) Peace and quiet, if you ask me.
Wow! There's so much wrong with this post that I don't know where to begin. But here's Exhibit A:
1.Engineering's worth is self-evident. [...]3.Physics is overrated. All the great minds are like my fellow engineers at IBM.
Oh, of course! "The smartest people are all just like me!" Hey, that's original. If you had read a little more history, you might know that this is a classic mistake. Or a little more art in your life and you might have heard of hubris.
4.Art is vulnerable to misuse by tyrrants in propaganda.
Which is, of course, utterly unlike the products of engineers, which are never used to maintain tyrrany.
You're just being ridulous here; art and literature have an enormous power to subvert, and all tyrants suppress "dangerous" art. Note also that broadly educated people are immunized against propaganda in ways that uneducated people and people with only technical educations cannot be.
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are wonderful unattainable quanitities.
So? You can never get to "East", either, but that doesn't mean that compass directions are useless. Moreover, capitalized essences like Truth and Beauty were a western intellectual fashion; they are an interesting way of looking at the world, but by no means the only one. Yet another thing you don't learn in a Mech E class.
It's not that things can't be nice or pleasant, and perhaps someone is willing to pay for such commodities in the free market. But if we're going to finance public education with public taxes, then we'd better show some results now.
I will happily grant that art instruction shows absolutely no value this week. You can't eat it. It doesn't keep you dry in the rain. If an animal bites you, you can't use it to cover the hole.
The utilitarian value of art is in the longer term. For the artist, the value is twofold. As another poster pointed out, art develops skills and capacities that are not easily gained otherwise. But beyond that, the artist uses art to explore the world, to come to grips with and to gain and understanding of something. Art is especially good at dealing with the sorts of non-rigorous and ill-defined areas that science is poor at: perception, emotion, culture, and what it means to be human.
For the consumer of art, the utilitarian value is not mainly, as you seem to think, entertainment. It is in the ability of art to present new views, to challenge old understandings, to convey and evoke emotion.
A Slashdot-friendly example is George Orwell's book 1984. It makes issues of privacy, transparency, and the power of information control accessible to anyone, and it gives it personal, viceral meaning. Through his art, George Orwell developed his view of the evils of totalitarianism; through his art, he helped us all see his terrifying vision.
That piece of "useless" art has been continuously in print for more than 50 years. Thank goodness you weren't on his school board to guide him away from "useless" activities. And thank goodness you weren't on my school board to cancel the literature class where I read it.
Let's not forget that cultures that predate written language are documented as having extraordinary memories (for example, much of the Old Testament was passed down through generations by memory before it was finally written down). Our minds got rewired when we formed language, when we began writing, etc. So, now that external information storage is so easy to come by, it's natural that our brains will be less trained to handle this aspect of our lives.
Memory loss in this sense is a misnomer. Like some previous posters i believe that our memories may just be doing what Darwin would find obvious - shifting focus to the things more needed now days. Since we have Palms, i can devote a few more brain cells towards that damn df flag that i always forget.
And besides, what about the fact that many (if not all slashdotters!) speak over 5 or 6 languages. Lets see these doctors sit and write Perl, PL/SQL, HTML, php, C/C++, and more in a day. Oh, and know how to configure and operate dozens of disparate programs across multiple platforms - hows that for memory you quacks!! :-)
..Brent
You musn't enthrone ignorance simply because there is so much of it.
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
It nearly borders on eugenics: if the bottom portion of the population is doomed to failure no matter what rehabilitative processes we enact, then why shouldn't we just weed them out to begin with? You don't need to be reminded where this kind of thinking can lead.
Education should embrace children's potential. You seem to want to leave them lying in the gutter.
Read the rest of this comment...
"Young people are relying too heavily on paper. They write things down such as directions to friend's houses, and phone numbers obtained at bars. In any given classroom, students can be seen writing down what their instructor is saying."
This paper-use trend has increased dramaticly since the introduction of the pocket-sized notepad and golf pencil. Now you can fit paper technology in your pocket!
"Reality is less than television."-Brian Oblivion
The reason we memorized them is, starting Junior year or so, every college application, every load application, every application for any kind of information or benefit demanded your social security number right after your name (or sometimes, instead of a name). I first tried a post-it at my desk, then said "screw it" and memorized the damn thing.
Of course, it isn't funny after you have to explain it... Inside joke, I guess.
Well, the doctors over stepping their mark again on how relevant their opinions are. Hmm.. something about the evils of computer games comes as a flash back. If only we all chose nice safe ways to occupy our time and did things the old fashioned way. Frankly, the fact that I can do more, achieve more, and EARN more than these self promotingly smart doctors by not bothering to remember stuff they think is important certainly says something. I don't need to remember this stuff, cause unlike them, I know how to use a search engine. Economics mentions something I also don't bother to remember about opportunity cost and something else about benefits of specialisation.......
A few months ago I was giving everyone the wrong phone number for my home. Until I saw it written down somewhere. But I can remember that a Colt costs $3,100, and a MP5 $1,700 and oh well you get the point.
I forgot my sig.
One thing I don't think this study takes into account is that modern teaching and living methods emphasize knowing what you need to know (or where to look it up) when you need to know it (the "just-in-time" school of thought). And the way we're trained now gives us the ability to learn and/or relearn something that we need to know more or less at lightspeed.
/dev/null. And isn't that the way it's supposed to work?
Case in point, I can't recite all those French verbs the way I used to, but I can now tell you far more than I ever expected to know about inputs, outputs, interrupt requests, software configuration, and file management...and I'm just beginning. Guess all those French verbs went to
Sigh... No gov't job for me, I guess...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
There is absolutely no way this is true, because, uh... The thing is, ummm. Just like that guy was saying to me the other day. You know, about the... uh, stuff. About the memory thing.
It's the same document it was two hundred years ago precisely because it was intended to last for all time as a universal declaration of human rights in the face of tyranny.
We may have higher taxes than we used to, but that's because we chose to under the 16th amendment. Unlike your country where you're perpetually beholden to the whims of your parliament, we answer to no one but Divine Providence and the letter of Law.
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I will happily grant that art instruction shows absolutely no value this week. You can't eat it. It doesn't keep you dry in the rain. If an animal bites you, you can't use it to cover the hole.
Well, it's quite clear that you don't know the first damn thing about art or art education.
Step out of your ivory tower and into a classroom sometime. Half the kids are eating paste. All students are given smocks which, by the middle of the quarter are covered with a waterproof layer of tempera paint. And there's nothing quite like a papier-mâché band-aid to keep your insides in after a gut bite from a ravenous woodland grue.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Actually he _did_ mean Plato. The only reason we think we know what Socrates said is because Plato told us he said it. By writing it down, I might add.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
You are absolutely correct, and I regret making such a foolish error. Art education is indeed not just valuable in the long term, but also in the short.
One minor correction: tempera paint is water-soluble. Much better is to give those nippers a good shellacking.
From your website:
"and infused the runes of the Waffen-SS with an élan now become legendary. "
This is as far as I got. The 'runes' of the waffen SS were infused with blood and misery. The Waffen SS openly (and without hesitation or guilt) moved away from the relative honours of soldiers and into the darker territory of murderers. Your argument's die with this statement.
Im proud to be a European but Im even more proud just to be a decent person. Try it some time.
Jon
Funny, I always though it was all the drugs I did that gave me a bad memory.
You leave me hanging for two days only to come back and laugh at me? To laugh at my country? To laugh at my hopes and dreams, the glories and aspirations of this great land?
I stand for something. We stand for something. What do you stand for?
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Clay-Tablet-Mad Generation Offends Gods, Becomes Forgetful
NINEVAH: Growing numbers of the scribe class are suffering from severe memory loss because of increasing reliance on clay-tablet writing technology, according to new research.
Sufferers claim to be unable to recall the complete inventories of the agricultural goods under their care, and forget specific business transactions enacted as little as a year ago. Worse, they sometimes fail to recall the names of their ancestors, including those who begat them only a few dozen generations ago.
Priest-doctors are blaming the new, wildly popular system of cuneiform writing. They maintain that the use of this powerful new sorcery angers the gods, who punish the perpetrators for their hubris by sapping their powers of memory. "Young people today risk the retribution of the gods with every notch in the clay," said High Priest Assurbanipal of the Temple of Ishtar. "Who are these punks to think that with their filthy scratching they can come closer to the supreme omniscience of the deities? Memory loss is a fitting punishment -- it's an eye for an eye."
When a Babylon royal kitchen servant, age 22, could not recall the location of King Gilgamesh's favorite delicacy among the 22000 jars stored in the palace cellars, the ruler's guards slew him swiftly for his failure. "It was so easy to consult the tablets," he lamented at the execution. "I just never thought Inanna would be so offended that she'd make me forgetful."
exactly
And you know, looking back on it with 20+ years' perspective, I realize now that I was right. It was dumb to try to force me to memorize the multiplication tables. All it did was make me miserable, and I never learned them in school anyway. The answers eventually sunk into my head in daily life, but not for some years after my school tried to force them down my throat.
Moreover, I'm sure many of the kids who did submit and memorized all their multiplication tables like good do-bees are now among the many millions of people who professionally ask "would you like fries with that" and can't figure out correct change even with a computerized cash register to help them. People who can't add or subtract or multiply don't have the problem because they got to use a calculator in school - they have the problem because they don't think about anything.
"They made me do it in school and now they don't and everybody sucks because of it" isn't good logic. The school made me write with big uncomfortable pencils on cheap paper and didn't let me use a pen or bring my own decent paper. I remember what school was like 20 years ago... so I applaud my aunt and uncle for providing computers and word processing software to my kindergarden age cousins.
as Einstien used to say, never commit to memory anything that which you can write down. I used to get very upset with myself when I couldn't remember the memory map of my c64 or the hex value of every opcode. The attitude is perverse and only necessary if you plan to be stranded on a desert island with your c64. Since when has memory had any association with intelligence what-so-ever? That's sort of quiz show mentality went out in the 50's didn't it?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I personally used to remember every single one of my appointments. I got tired of doing it and began to write everything down. Now I make no effort to remember, but instead check my calendar every day. Does this mean I can't remember? No. It just means that I freed my brain up to work on other things.
Another observation is that this article appears to be somewhat misrepresented here at "/.". The article presents 2 different possible causes for memory loss. The first is that young people have relied too much on technology and have not exercised (my word) their brains enough. Thus, they lose their memory abilities due to the brain's equivalent of obesity. The second is that there is so very much information in today's computerized society that the brain gets overloaded and loses its ability to distinguish between what is important and what is not. Thus, people lose their memory abilites due to the brain chucking away important things and remembering unimportant things.
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Gee, I'm glad this has been brought up, because I'm quite concerned about this new invention, paper. People are able to write things down, so they don't have to remember important information! Also, we should take a closer look at telephones. I haven't ever met my insurance agent in real life: this must be because of the telephone!
My god, this "study" is so full of holes it's laughable. A 28 year old salesman who suddenly couldn't remember where he was going, when his appointments were, or what he was even selling? And it's a computer's fault? Jeez, aren't people responsible for any of their own stupidity any more?
Perhaps this is a sign of a greater shift in importance from pure memory to analytical skills. The teaching world seems by and large to have followed that.
I'm taking a math class right now and having a hard time because the prof seems to have put such a high emphasis on memorization. However, working as a programmer in lots of different environments and rapidly changing technologies, i've found that my capacity for research has helped me far more than my memory.
Too much info == not enough time to process it. The younger you are, the more info is thrown at you, and the better you get at processing it, but the less time you have to spend memorizing any of it. Information is commoditizing, and consequently becoming less valuable intrinsically as consituent parts. Those who can make sense of it in a larger view do well, and those who hang onto it will find themselves with that info and not much else when that info is no longer valid.
just my blog and pix
Please, using a PDA is no different than telling your secretary to remind you of your appointments for the day, or keeping numbers in a rolodex, or even having your secretary keep numbers in a rolodex. "Ms. Smith, please get Mr. Brown on the phone". I'm sure any programmer with a PDA can remember the syntax of all the commonly used C commands, regardless of whether they know their mother's phone number. I think that's a much more impressive feat of memory.
However, there is some relevance here. As we rely more on technology, we become more interested in things getting done, and not how they get done. For instance, many grade schools now allow calculators to be used in grade 2 to add and subtract. Only a couple lessons are spent on multiplying or division, and then it's simply plugged into the calculators. What this results in is that students get their homework done faster, and with fewer calculation mistakes, but they have NO idea why it works. When these same students hit calculus, algebra, etc, they become lost, because they don't have the basic mathematical foundations to understand the more complex ones -- they just know the calculator can do it. Society ends up with people pulling out a pocket calculator to figure out how much the tax on their big mac meal is going to be because they can't add 5% in their heads. This ignorance simply perpetuates itself. Instead of understanding how a mathematical simulation of a complex model works, it's taken for granted that some programmer correctly entered the formula they were handed. The answer pops up, it looks right, so we continue on, and then boom, a nuclear bomb goes off in Iowa.
Someone with solid basic math skills could probably make a killing by adding an extra percent to grocery, restraunt, or shopping bills, because just about anybody who checked their bills wouldn't have a clue that they were being overcharged.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
It doesn't seem to me as if this is a very well thought out determination. It DOES seem to me that the memory 'shortage' cuts across all boundries of people including those who's use of technology is limited due to economic or ideological influences. 'Our' generation (I'll use the 'our' here since I am 35) is one that has had exposure to more, and a wider range of, synthetics in our environment. Plastics being the largest, and most prevelent of those. There are plastics in every day use that closely resemble human hormones, such as estrogen. It's a case of "let's blame computers for something we haven't (or are to lazy) to look at deeply and scientifically."
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
and thought this was a story on how computers are converting your brain cells into ram? i wonder if mine has ecc.
This is really sounding like a loch-ness article : they had some content to give, so unearthed a freak ranting against PDA.
Some common observation :
people have been complaining since Socrate that the new generation are getting less polite,educated, etc... But I'll bet that trying to be Leonard the Vinci today will really really more difficult than during the renewal...
each time a new technology hits the market, a mass movment of people scared by the unknown is going to find evidence that the new thing is harmfull, and especially for the brain. Remember reading people arguing that because of their lack of precision (finite-precision arythmetic), computer will be useless.
This article has a strong smell of urban legend. As for scientific evidences, the number of people they report is laughable.
It is not even coherent on itself : on one part, it states the risk of loosing your memory because you are not exercising it, and right after that it complains about the information overload (buzzword) and what damage it may cause.
And the poor lady that downloaded his memory into his pda, she is probably lacking some feedback loop. Because if I start to loose my memory like this, I will try do to something before loosing my work.
[Pruneau
...about this, I can't remember where though... I think it said... um... forget it, next time I'll bookmark it.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
That's a completely unfair generalization. I was stupid long before I got ahold of a computer.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Anyway, personally before PDA's, I had... Notepads! Yep, I wrote things down (in pencil) on a notepad I had near me 90% of the time. My memory has always been poor for little things like phone numbers, errands to run, etc. Hell, I think I picked that up from my mom who'd write down the things she needed to pick up at the store/do for the day on a piece of paper and cross things out as she completed things. So, what, a pen/pencil and paper must make you dumb too. Taking notes in class. Post-it notes. Calendars. Microcasette recorders. After all, you're relying on them as a kind of "external memory", right?
So what if people aren't dedicating more of their finite time and effort into memorizing menial details? Good for them. I thought the whole point of our technological advancement was to increase our quality of living.
--
One other thought. I don't know how one can judge another's intelligence by that individual's inability to remember their sin or health numbers (or whatever other nations equivalents may be). I don't know them, but then I have never had a reason to. I have the cards in my wallet. I can remember other things really well. I can make my way through a *nix file system, I know the emails of my ta's... etc. This could really just be a change in society and those who have been around in the *older system* are judging intelligence with a different set of rules than the *newer system* would.
eno.
Oh well. More crap for the "information overload is a disease" pamphlets. Using external memory aids is only going to help you remember things better, so don't take the article's implicit device and throw out your datebook.
My guess is that people nowadays can remember things fine, but their memory is not categorized, so they have a hard time recalling things. Its sort of like storing a lot of data as a linked list instead of as a tree.
No data, no cry
I don't mean to troll, but I really disagree with the hypothesis of the experiment.
I think the more likely culprit is nutrition and changes to the educational system more than whether or not we are using computers and PDAs.
Firstly, did you know that the amount of monosodium glutamate (a neurotoxin and flavour enhancer) and preservatives in food has been increasing by a factor of 10 every decade? This means that today's teens and 20 year olds are consuming around 10,000 times the number of preservatives and chemicals that our parents consumed, and we are consuming them often during critical mental and physical development stages. Laws go into place so that companies have to indicate monosodium glutamate on their ingredient lists so that people can avoid it if they want. You know the solution companies use to avoid this? Hide MSG in completely natural sounding ingredients like hydrolyzed proteins, yeast extracts, natural flavour, modified starches, etc... They might seem natural, but they're teeming with chemicals that our grandparents were largely not exposed to.
Who knows the long term effects of these chemicals on people? In fact, it's been shown that even in people who are not sensitive to MSG, the amount of MSG consumed, on average, in a day, overexcites and kills (fries) a large number of neurons in your hypothalamus.
Education systems have also changed. My mom went to school with the nuns and they were forced to spend long hours at night memorizing things like Shakespeare passages and such. We don't encourage that in today's education system. Memory is like a muscle; the more you work it, the stronger it becomes. Less emphasis goes on memory and more emphasis on thinking. Thus it's only natural that memory will decrease.
v
When I quit this line of work (there's not an awful lot of market demand for burnt-out air traffic controllers), my short-term memory went to shit. I'm lucky to be able to remember my home phone number, and I certainly can no longer listen to someone rattle off a string of characters or instructions, and then regurgitate them verbatim. It's apparent to me that short-term memory is something that's developed over time, and is also something that atrophies over time when it's not used. Long-term memory is still there: I can rattle off an approach clearance per the 7110.65, although there's nowhere on my resume to put that particular skill.
Man, I just counted the email addresses that I check on a weekly basis and I came up with 10. Yeah it's a tad excessive but they're so easy to collect...
Anyway, my girlfriend uses Gator to store her passwords, and it's tragic to see her away from her home PC and not remember any of her passwords. I've found the best way to keep up with all these logins and passwords is to simplify. I just came up with a single super-unique login name (to prevent anyone from having alreayd registered it) and a simple low-security superpassword that I use with it. Sure, it isn't very secure, and yes, people could use that L/P to break into all of the other accounts if they got it, but I'm not worried. For sites that store my credit card records, I use secure L/P's. For sites that force me to setup an L/P to browse the news or chat about a certain game, it's just easier to have one universal. I also recommend assigning a dummy hotmail account for the records though, to soak up all the spam that will follow.
------
Let me give you the lowdown
Einstein said that you should never memorize what you can look up.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Another study I read linked eye-blinking to Alzheimers. Same reasons. Boy are we in trouble.
Your use of irony is weak at best. If 90% of phone calls in my office were not work related, I would fire people. Calling a daycare once is not a problem. Calling your friends all day is.
/costs money/. Most Businesses pay on a per/call basis, even for local calls.
Please come join the real world before you go spouting your know-nothing high-school garbage.
Subjective oppinion. My use of irony, in my instance, was particularly apt. 90% of my phone calls in the office are probably personal. That is, I make about 5 calls a week on my office phone, and 4 aren't for work, but involve things I'd have to take off work to resolve otherwise. If I need to talk to a person in the office, I walk on over.
The person's use of percentages as indicating rampant abuse of the system means nothing, because he didn't mention any volume associated with it. If the average time spent is 30 minutes, and 90% of that is non-business, then we aren't, statistically speaking, talking about a lot of time. On an average day, I routinely spend twice this amount of time waiting on coworkers. However, if we're talking 4+ hours, then yes it is a problem. Not only is it counter-productive, but it
Thanks for the offer. Can you list the benefits so that I might adequately compare my opportunities? Since you seem to be a presumptious asshole, I already know some of the negatives.
Can't you see it, the answer is obvious!!!!
I just wish I could remember what it was:)
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
PDA's havent been out long enough for any serious study to be accurate in any way. Every good business-person knows that keeping information written down makes the sucessful salesperson/ceo/whatever. If the PDA really maks people dumber than they should have seen a sharp increase in stupidity when we achived the following....
Writing - Now I dont have to remember everything.
Calculators,
Computers,
Radio,
Television... wait a minute... That does make people stupid.
etc...
Besides, does this "study" take into effect Windows CE based devices that require the owner/user to re-enter all data on a regular basis due to lock-up's failures? Based on the study, That should make people with photographic memory.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"A preliminary study of 150 people aged 20 to 35 has shown that more than one in 10 are suffering from severe problems with their memory"
1: that's not a suprise.
"One sales assistant aged 28 said she suddenly found herself unable to recall written words and was dismissed from her job. "
2: that's not a suprise.
2) Look at this quote: "One high-flying 28-year-old salesman treated by Dr Sawaguchi was forced to give up his job when he found himself forgetting where he was going, who he was supposed to be seeing or, when he finally got there, what he was selling." Maybe he's just trying to do too much and is burning out, PDA or no.
Correction: 4 out 5 = 80%.
Today's PLIF: http://www.plif.com/thisweek.gif
--
This is why you see much greater emphasis on arts and other trivial applications of human talents, instead of engineering and classical studies.
You couldn't have said it better! I hear that some students also waste mental space on emotional and social skills as well. What a terrible waste!
This comment has been modded up to 5 because the moderators can't see that it's a JOKE. For example:
You can't teach a whole generation to drive society by encouraging them to feel about driving. You have to give them rigid rules and test them on their grasp thereof. And if they don't conform, then you make them conform. It's not totalitarianism; it's just common sense.
At least I hope it's a joke...
It's unfortunate they say that. In my small little sample of technical students I have met, several of them who are in fact quite bright, tend to forget the little things... but concepts that _normal mortals_ can sometimes not understand are much easier to deal with and remember when they are explaining it to someone.
they say:
"They claim these gadgets lead to diminished use of the brain to work out problems and inflict "information overload" that makes it difficult to distinguish between important and unimportant facts. ".
Don't they take into account that the younger generation is also able to grasp how theses things work and how to design them? I would call that some sort of balance...
The last thing is... other than being terribly flashy, i don't see why no one is promoting PDA's like its salvation... Imagine the amount of paper we stop wasting for writing little nots to ourselves when we have one of those suckers?
Well...oh crap - I forgot why.
As I became a computer geek I went from remembering books worth of information in my head to keeping a rough draft of many many more types of information in my head along with knowledge of how to find the details when needed. So it may seem I remember fewer things but really it is just a memory management technique. For me I can't completely work when you take away the Net because it's became a part of my mind. Eventually I suppose enough people will evolve around the Net that it'll have a direct hack to the Net directly into the human body. Every step closer takes us that way. Mainframe to desktop to laptop to PDA etc. It gives intelligent people great flexibility to be able to only remember what they must and to store the details somewhere else. Anyone can be reasonably expert in anything if they learn how to look up the information on demand and understand how it goes together.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
1 -- Einstein said something like "Never remember things that are in a book."
2 -- Have you looked at the general condition of the folks in the UK? Who cares what their doctors think? When they can make their teeth whiter or stop sending people across the Atlantic for heart surgery then MAYBE I'll care what they think. Assuming I put this down in my Palm IIIx.
---
This
Well over the years I have noted several things that have seemed to shorten memory spans. I think the latest before this was that caffine reduces one's memory. Now take into account that more people are drinking coffee/tea/pop in larger quantities so in a way yes memory will be getting shorter.
:)
Now my brother has an increadable memory compared to anyone else I know. My memory is filled with crap about what IPs do I go to. How would I route X though Z while not bothering Y. My memory is dealing with a very selective view of life. As I'm sure many of the readers here do. I don't know the first thing about wood working but I can setup and get an entire network going by myself and not have to worry about stability
I think the real questionthat should be asked now is not "How short are our memories getting?" but "How specialized are our memories getting?" I'm sure we could find that there are similarities.
If old people are so smart, why can't they find the "ANY" key? Why are they scared of computers?
No wonder E is going so fast now.
Ashes of Empires and bodies of kings,
The truth about Michael
Heck, the ancient Greeks warned about the damage to memory that writing would cause. See Plato's Seventh Letter or Phaedrus for starters.
Or, check out Walter Ong or Marshall McLuhan for a more coherent take on the way forms of media affect each other.
Memory is overrated anyway. :)
cbd.
Why memorize a lot of stuff that you will forget sooner or later, when you can organize your information?
How is knowing 100 passwords, 1000 phone numbers, endless number of formulas, ... going to make us smarter?
I am a lot more creative and productive when I can take things from where other people or I left them before and improve them instead of creating some sort of memorization process in my head for a bunch of little things.
An example on how retarded it is to memorize a lot of stuff instead of using stored information would be writing Windows applications without using any libraries.
http://www.drudgereport.com/ had this before noon from http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/ 02/04/stinwenws01005.html
I didn't do it, and if I did, you can't prove it. Bart Simpson
Please go back to your hive and tell the Queen that we prefer to think for ourselves nowadays. Your brute-force method of implementing "common sense" makes you sound like a Fascist.
"Only that way can we insure that the new generations can learn from my generation's mistakes and fulfill our promises of greatness."
You obviously aren't the model for the new Master Race. The mistakes of past that should be learned from are based on the misadventures of small-minded technocrats who sought to eradicate free thought and make the world conform to their sense of morality.
[You should have been beaten more in English class... or is it your plan to do away with the inefficient rules of the English language, like the difference between "ensure" and "insure"? Doubleplusungood, citizen!]
And whose "promises of greatness" are we trying to keep? Yours?
Keep your dogma off my humanity.
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
My memory is all shot to hell, but I sort of figured it was because it was ram-packed with hundreds of ips -- networks, host addresses, etc.
I agree wholeheartedly. If you don't use your brain, it's going to rot. That's why sex, television, music, video games, etc. cause so much brain damage.
I don't know about you, but I feel inspired after a good romp in the sack. Drives my wife nuts, but I get some of my best thinking done after about a half hour of rest/afterglow.
So what are these liberal teaching methods if they're not an attempt of one generation to learn from the previous generation's mistakes?
And if this is truly what you are after, how in hell do you expect to achieve this by drilling kids with all the same knowledge and information that caused you to make those mistakes in the first place?
I didn't pay for my operating system either
GROWING numbers of people in their twenties and thirties are suffering from severe memory loss because of increasing reliance on computer technology, according to new research.
That why I use CTRL+C, CTRL+V to remember the bits of articles and previous posts I am quoting when posting.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Just curious, but in what qualitative and quantitative measures do you believe arts are trivial compared to engineering and classical studies? Truth, Beauty, and Goodness can all be found in arts, as well as sciences; and each of these is defined in classical studies, if not by the laws of physics.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
- ignorant rant
- moronic tirade
- clever but stupid
- clever but pointless
- on topic, but why
and my favourite:
- gee, you are a flaming fuck (which of course is an automatic -5)
Yes, this is truly a dilemma here on slashdot. We need more moderation categories!
Are you really that dense as to not be able to figure it out on your own?
If so, get a dictionary. Look up "irony", or, in this case, "satire". These definitions may point you in the right direction, and further may explain why you hope of a retraction is about as realistic as peace in the Middle East.
But what about websites that rely on host-headers ? :))
So what if people use Palmpilots as auxillary storage for stupid crap
(like '1 yr anvrsry 05/23, make rez at cafe de la pimp', for example).
Just because you use a Palmpilot to 'remember' appointments does not mean you're getting 'stupid', just that you have more important things to keep track of in 'moist memory'.
My 'trivial crap memory' has sucked as long as I can remember (heh), but stuff I've done on a day-to-day basis in the past sticks to this day.
I could prolly be back up to speed in VB within a day if I had to be, even though I haven't touched it in ~3 years.
It's the one-off stuff that catches me, and thus, goes into the Visor.
Sounds to me like the case examples referenced had more to do with people not paying attention in the first place, rather than forgetting.
--K
I'm one of these young people (19), in my first year of college. I took all honors courses in high school. My sister mostly takes college prep (one level down). Her classes have to memorize key words from a book or a formula or a chart but no understanding is demanded. You had to figure out why things occured, why the formula worked and what the chart implied, as well as the information at my level. Knowing that the assasination of some Archduke started WWI is less important than understanding the political climate that led to the war.
I got to college and my engineering course (EE) the kids hit the wall because it wasnt just memorization. You had to understand the whole thing. Random facts dont do anygood. Being able to adapt, being able to understand systems, being able to apply those facts, that is far more useful.
Also, if there is one thing the school systems of America (where I have experience in) it is not more rigid enforcement of conformity!
This is why you see much greater emphasis on arts and other trivial applications of human talents, instead of engineering and classical studies.
i think one side of your brain was out talking the other in that one..
and besides, i doubt there's a lack of balance in the emphasis on subjects these days. if anything i'd say it's probably more level than it has been for previous generations.
matt
When I was younger, similar arguments were made regarding pocket calculators: so many people were fussing about it that we in fact weren't allowed to use them at all (not even for square roots and logarithms) until something like grade 7 (this happened in Italy BTW, not sure what's the situation here in North America).
;)
I personally think that electronic aids *help* people become smarter, since one has to use less brain power for trivial things (i.e. remembering your doctor's phone number or that you have a dentist appointment in three weeks). Being able to calculate a logarithm or a square root by hand doesn't mean that you're smart, most of the time it means that you are able to find your way around logarithmic table books
I am sure that similar arguments can be made about cars: since when car usage has become widespread, the population has become much more sedentary (with all the problems associated with it) but at the same time the quality of life has become better in many ways (if you get sick, you don't have to wait hours/days for a doctor to travel to your neck of the woods).
If PDAs are so bad, why don't we ask the author of this article to stop using his computer and write future articles with a chisel in a slab of stone? I'm sure that overreliance on word processors has made as many people stupid as overreliance on PDAs...
-- the cake is a lie
Aren't scientists of all people supposed to know these things?
They should, but they've been using their intelligence-sucking Palmpilots too much.
--K
Interesting! At a company I was consulting for, we did a very similar thing, except this time with the phones. We began monitoring phone calls, and the results were startling. 90% of the phone calls were not work related. Several people actually lost their job because they were taking care of personal business while on the phone. One person actually had the audacity to call her kid's daycare center. She was subsequently terminated. Following our initial audit, I suggested and it was decided to authorize outside calls only with a keycode. I like to feel I made a positive difference, and can sleep better at night knowing that employees at that company are only doing what they are being paid to do.
News flash 10,000 B.C.: t
he invention of the "tool" is causing
the average primate to lose his ability to work
with his hands. Is this the end of life as we know it?
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but let's think are we losing our ability to keep track of
what we are doing or are we preparing ourselves to
use our brains and bodies for something else?
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
Not everybody can be a poet, novelist, painter, or philospher. But we sure as heck could use a few more McDonalds attendants that can add or read the captions of the little pictures of a hamburger.
Need I say more?
-Michael
-Michael
Yes, it runs linux and you insert it into a child's ear.
The content of your choice will be directly forced into the brain through rap-music.
The unfortunate side effect is that if there is a buffer underrun (no content to force) the child immediately begins producing Movies like Save the last dance...
I'm throwing the prototype away.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
So that what that grey fuzzy stuff inside my computer case is, it's my memory. They must be stealing it while I sleep, I guess I need better computer security.
The Economics of Website Security
Short-term memory loss is also a frequent side effect of common anti-depressants like Prozac and Zyprexa. I bet the more widespread acceptance and subsequent prescription by more doctors/psychologists has to do with the memory loss.
Now I'm sure this was relevant to something... what were we talking about, again?
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
I use a PDA and P-in system and don't have a problem remembering things short or long term if I know what I'm trying to remember will be important. I can tell you that a sample of SnI2 I made last Wednesday weighed 117 mg off the top of my head. I wrote it down right away but I'm going to need to remember that when I write the lab report this week. Once I've written the report I probably will forget ever having done the lab because I won't need to remember it. I will however remember that the reaction of Sn and I2 will not proceed if the temperature goes above 40C.
What I'm saying is that I use things to avoid having to remember little details I won't need more than a couple times a year by writing them down on paper or bits. I have no problem remembering things that are important in the short term or long term.
In other words nuts to them for saying technology makes you stupid. I think those people would be found stupid no matter what they were doing.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
I'd like to post a meaningful comment on the subject... but I can't seem to remember what it was about....
maybe if I could have the artical on the post comment page.
I think a significant effect which needs to be taken into account is that PDAs can remind you of information that you would have forgotten that you once knew. So they cause there to be more information that you are aware that you've forgotten, even if they do not make your actual memory any worse.
For example, I used to know what times certain places close. Now I still remember those, but also have in my PDA the hours of more places, including openning times and more variation based on day of week. This is a whole bunch of information which I have come in contact with and forgotten due to my PDA-- but the role of the PDA was making me pay attention to it in the first place, not making me forget it afterwards.
He used a funny example though, that the invention and use of writing caused people to stop memorizing stories.
You can read about that here. It's not a new idea.
--
Freeper Logic
Bullshit. Like one of my High School teachers...he was a great teacher, but hated Latin and Greek and pushed for it to be removed from the curriculum. Yet, he had gone through some 10 years of both himself, and expected students to understand literary references to those same Classical languages. Odd, huh?
I believe the original poster meant that real education demands a combination of the two, memorisation and analysis. Nobody learns Calculus through theory without practice. Even your Caltech course taught 'facts', principles. Those facts were then applied. Years ago Education fought against memorisation without analysis; the pendulum slowly swung to the other side, analysis without memorisation. Both are pretty damn wretched without the other.
"Oh Bother", said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."
Oh man, don't ever mention Marijuana on Slashdot! It seems the moderators are prudish to the extreme.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
I'm 24, have been using computers/PDAs since I was 5. I bought the first freakin' Newton for cryin' in the beer! If anything, having to remember IP addresses has helped my memory, rather than hindered it.
People have had the analog equivalent of a PDA for decades! What about all those 1980s, dot-com equivalent, wall-street high-flyers with their leather-bound day-planners? Did writing down someone's phone-number in their address-books cause them to forget their mother's maiden name? I think not.
Any as far as the information overload issue, if anything, the digital generation is better at weeding our useless information than their elders. I can watch TV, listen to my stereo, talk with friends and code all at the same time. My parents have to mute the commercials on the TV in order to think.
At any rate, this is pure media sensationalism. If students are getting "more stupid" these days, why the hell can't my dad program the freakin' clock on the VCR or write down a URL I say over the phone.
-Name Forgotten
Read the rest of this comment...
YHBT. Look at what is on his homepage: goatsex. Too bad my mod points just expired, or I would have been able to get rid of his stoopid posts.
Walt
That's what they said when we added this nifty alphabet thing. "Kids today," they said, "Next thing you know, they won't be able to recite 10,000 line epics from memory."
Yeah, like that happened...
You know any kids that can recite 10,000 line epics from memory?
I didn't think so.
What's happening is that we're using our brains for other things (for instance, learning how to operate the equipment that takes the place of memory, and in many cases is far more useful than memory - you can beam your address book to someone and then they have it forever; can't do that with phone numbers in your head). Problem, I guess, is that some people get so optimized for certain tasks that they start losing the ability to do other things that are in fact useful some of the time.
A similar example is physical activity. These days I know people who get winded walking a few blocks or a few flights of stairs, and gasp in shock at the idea of walking a couple miles rather than driving or taking a cab.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to regard these people as pathetic lazy schlubs, much as the Times-quoted researchers who used words like "stupid". On the other, though, they're still nice people, and productive members of society. Technology has enabled them to optimize for other tasks.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
What is this, the classical "This is how it was in my day, so now it must be the opposite" argument? I thought for a moment this was moderated up because of humor, then I noticed it was marked "insightful."
First, I'll admit, I'm not at issue with all of your conclusions, just your arguments. Out of the many facts you learned as a child, exactly how many of these do you remember today? Many? If this is the case, how many do your peers remember?
I do not mean your intellectual coworkers, if they exist, I am referring to everyone you went to grade school and college with. From your comments, I can infer that all of these people benefitted greatly from the knowledge that was vigorously injected into them during their school days and they must be the ruling elite of our times.
Now, to address your point that kids are taught how to think, instead of what to think. Did you make your argument faulty on purpose, because it came off that way.
Let me see if I can get this straight: since cirriculum isn't supposed to push beliefs on people (damn liberal thought!) if therefore restricts what can be taught. This was your point, which you immediately abandoned by shifting the argument. Congratulations, they obviously didn't treat debate back in "your day."
"..kids don't even know what to think about anymore." What the hell does this mean? Does it mean that the thoughts of the younger generation lean towards trivial things, or does it mean that there is little thought going on? And where the hell was this increased emphasis on the arts?
I've seen schools lose funding and close down music and art programs. I've watched amazingly talented people lose the most accessible outlet for their talent because schools were unable to keep the programs open. I seriously doubt these funds were put into engineering and classical studies.
Which brings me to my final point. You've stated that "our society" has created an environment for "them and us." Quite frankly, if it is our society, we are the people creating the environment. As children have little control over this, I can only blame the aging adult population. Where were you when kids needed help with their homework? Where were you when the school district created the guidelines of how children will be taught? It's as if you were part of a generation of people digging a hole, now you're looking at a bunch of people stuck in it and claiming you never touched a shovel.
I personally think things have been fairly constant and this is pretty much bullshit, as I've seen amazing people of my own generation do creative and innovative things with both the arts and science, but we've been judged as incompetent by thse like Chuck Flynn because we didn't grow up in the same environment that he did, and presumably, the environment his generation was responsible for creating.
I guess everyone with a day-planner/agenda must be getting stupid too. Maybe the thicker your day-planner, the lower your I.Q. Maybe some people are looking to get a grant for useless research based on flawed theories and just trying to make them sound respectable... Sheesh!
Seriously though, this is really dumb. It seems like some technophobe propaganda more than science.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
I was just commenting to my wife about this issue about a week ago. I can barely remember phone numbers any more. I have near constant internet access and my entire address book has been moved online. One of my cell phones has voice command dialing and the other phone remembers up to 99 numbers. With all this technology, I have almost no need to remember phone numbers. If the Yahoo address book ever goes away, I'll be left with my rarely updated hard drive backup. I find it interesting that these people are equating memorization with intelligence! The number of facts you can store in your head is meaningless without some grasp of what those facts mean. Your ability to memorize the yellow pages doesn't really help you solve logic puzzles. "Yeah, definitely idiot-savant!"
"War makes me sad." - Me
It appears that the end of the article suggests people aren't bothering to remember names and numbers, that PDAs and speed dials are keeping us from placing names, addresses, and phone numbers into long-term memory. We enter the data in under 20 seconds and poof! we're on to short attention span moment 153 for the day. To remember something, you repeat it to yourself for about 30 seconds. It's a shame the article takes such great lengths to remind us of short- and long-term memory spans.
----------------------
I really wonder ...
... Could it be that they own PDA's as a result of not being able to remember things?
If I were forgetful, you'd better believe I'd look for a tool to help me remember things.
All the arguments against this article have already been stated, no need to repeat them here. This article is merely an individual's opinion.
$0.02 worth from a non-PDA user in his mid-20's.
---
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
One scientific study: Hokkaido University, Japan, 150 people aged 20 to 35, showing 10 had "severe problems with memory"
One quote from the university's professor of neurobiology, including "Young people today are becoming stupid."
2 "journalism" case studies, of two young people who suffered from extreme memory loss (the human angle)
3 experts from Japan, Britian, and the US, who guessed at why this might be the case, all pointing fingers at technology (all who gain from people with memory problems).
1 typical British hyberbolic headline, "Computer-mad generation has a memory crash".
<rant>
This kind of reporting seriously annoys me. The original scientists call it a preliminary study, it gets posted on the wire, and "journalists" make the story sound like they just discovered a cure for cancer or that the end of the world is next week. Journalists once were the voice of moderation (let's check the story, just the facts) but now have resorted to encouraging panic to sell papers.
</rant>
For one thing, this research has yet to be independantly verified. It is possible that the study was flawed / biased, that the results aren't as bad as they first seem, or that 7% of the population has ALWAYS had "serious memory problems" by the age of 20. I know a few kids I went to school with had problems memorizing, even before they were in the second grade.
This seems to be a raw old-world vs. new-world story. A few extreme cases are used to call the entire younger generation flawed, to say that new teaching methods suck, etc. etc., until you want to walk away and say "You don't get it, old-timer!"
Sure, I have trouble remembering dates, times, birthdays, etc. That's because, when I judge a date to be important, I put it into my PDA, which reminds me with enough time in advance to do something about it. I simply don't spend any time memorizing this stuff. But I can judge what is important and what isn't. Important stuff goes into my backup memory (the PDA), unimportant stuff goes into the shredder.
To say that the PDA is making me stupid makes as much sense as saying cars make us slower. Sure, if it was me vs. someone from 2000 years ago, that person may be able to walk 10 miles faster than me. Maybe significantly faster. But I can beat him with a car anyday.
The end test is effectiveness. I believe we haven't come up with an education method that truly prepares kids for working with technology, but we are getting better. The answer isn't to take away technology until they've memorized tables and historical dates, but instead to teach them to use the technology more effectively. If they have to look up when Columbus landed in America, but know how to use Quicken to do their taxes and use Outlook to insure they never have to send a belated birthday card, then more power to them. Or better yet, can figure out Linux or BSD enough to use the open-source versions.
Let's stop living in 1950, and start living in 2050, or at least 2000.
You know any kids that can recite 10,000 line epics from memory?
I didn't think so.
LOL! That's exactly the point of the parent of your post. He used a funny example though, that the invention and use of writing caused people to stop memorizing stories.
He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
Remember the story about how Palm's Graffiti was making people forget how to write regularly? This is the same sort of spoof. People have had datebooks and address books for /years/; PDAs are merely electronic versions of these.
And if you need any more proof, there's the well-known "Flynn effect", which refers to the fact that IQ scores have risen significantly over the past century (mostly, but not entirely, explained by better nutrition and medical care).
Okay, what exactly is a PDA or a computer? It is a storer of information. What is a booklet, a notebook, or a filing cabinet? The same thing, but less efficient. Quite simply saying that "young people are becoming stupid because of computers" is like saying that anyone who takes notes on a pad of paper and then looks at those notes later is also "stupid." These people aren't stupid, they're at least smart enough to know when they need something to help store their information.
Doubly funny is that a doctor would say this. Doctors typically have nurses and staff secretaries to help keep track of the things that they quite simply forget. How a secretary or a nurse cleaning up after you is better than you taking notes in a notebook (or PDA) is beyond me. This is just somebody who has some sour grapes in regards to PDAs blowing off steam.
-wd
--
chip norkus(rl); white_dragon('net'); wd@routing.org
mercenary albino programmer for hire
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
Yeah, historical documents record similar ocurrences when a new technology called "writing" was developed. Those short-sighted fools, writing things down instead of just trying to remember them. Just look where it got them.
"an increasing number of people in their twenties and thirties are suffering from severe memory loss. Doctors blame this problem on their over relience on PDAs and computers ... 'Young people today are becoming stupid.'"
Maybe, or maybe we should try and use something other than memory to determine how "stupid" you are? From a very early age in school, I quickly realised that the people who everybody thought were "smart" were more often than not no way more intelligent than me, they just had better memories. Ever hate the guy who did no work, smoked pot, and still passed every class with aces? Did you think it was he was super-intelligent? Ever stop to think that maybe he was just blessed with a better memory than you?
Every class that I sucked at, I sucked at because I have a pretty shitty memory (except PE, but that's cause I waz a lazy little prick). I feel sorry for those out there with little or no memory, especially the intelligent ones.
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
I am glad that today I'm taught how to think instead of what to think. Maybe you're thinking of church instead of school? I don't know, but I learn what to think by myself. Nobody tells me. I am just taught the basics of how to solve a problem, then I must piece the puzzle together myself. I can't always have a teacher standing by my side when a problem comes up that I have never seen before. If I learn to just "do" a specific problem, then I will never be able to do a different problem, even if the concepts behind the two are related. I must learn the concepts first so that I can apply them to any problem.
Strict memorization is not the key to anything, besides getting an "A" on your test or quiz. You may be able to recall the information that day, but what about the next day? Or the next year? I doubt you could recall it. What is important today is application. You don't learn what 2 + 2 is. You learn how to get your answer. Of course, one doesn't have to ask themselves "ok, I have two, and I have to add two to it, what do I have now?" After applying the concept of addition over and over to the same problem you naturally remember the answer. This is the best way, by far, to learn--not only in math, but any subject.
However, if you don't know what an answer is, you learn where you can find it. It is so much more important today to know where you can find an answer if you don't know it, since there is so much more information today. It's more important to learn "how to get an answer" than "the answer." That's why teachers in math, physics, etc. give credit to incorrect answers. It's the correct steps to getting to an answer that are more important. Not the answer itself.
You had to learn how to recall trivial things, because it was the only way to survive and prosper. The best minds of my day were like that.
That doesn't work today, unless you plan on going on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Application today is the key. Not the recollection of pointless facts.
You have to give them rigid rules and test them on their grasp thereof.
I took one of those today. They are called quizes. I have another one tomorrow. It's called a test.
You can't teach a whole generation to drive society by encouraging them to feel about driving. You have to give them rigid rules and test them on their grasp thereof. And if they don't conform, then you make them conform.
You add 2 + 2 and you get 4. Hypothetically, let's say that when I see 2 + 2 I had 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. I did it differently than your way, which is the "normal" method, but am I wrong? By your standards I am.
What's needed is a better combination of the two methods. We should insist that our children learn both what and how to think. Only that way can we insure that the new generations can learn from my generation's mistakes and fulfill our promises of greatness.
So in Literature class, we should teach students that one work sucks just because, but this other one doesn't instead of explaining why it is such a good work and how to distinguish them from others that are not?
So, to summarize everything here, school today is not about remembering answers. It's how to get answers to infinite amounts of problems. There is only so much that you can remember. There is no limit on the application of concepts. Now there is something you can remember. So do it.
Twenty somethings smoke a lot of bud. Thats o.k. 'cause when you forget something....ummmm... I forget what I was going to say.......
I don't have a PDA (or GSM for that matter) and I'm forgetting heaps of stuff daily.. In fact I just remembered I should be calling a friend of mine.
What's true is that PDA's just make you look much smarter than you really are though, and one can start wondering whether society is currently being pushed beyond human capacity with all these nice little techtoys.. Still, if buying a PDA can save you from the pain of your colleagues throwing silly looks back at you on monday morning, gimme gimme!
No sir I'll be training my memory for just a while longer, for one it gives me a kick being able to do things without stupid techcrap, it's like this extra challenge, and lastly those PDA thingies may be very fancy but I'm not buying them unless they start becoming less restrictive in use (keys, voice rec, wireless,..) less expensive, and most of all, SAFE FOR OUR BRAINS (as opposed to GSM's which are not, but apprently no one cares)
With great power comes great electricity bills.
I'm in my twenties. I do NOT own a PDA. I don't even own a cellphone or a calculator (mainly because I don't actually need any of these things, so see little point on spending money on them).
Despite this, I'm still terribly absent-minded. I tend to remember interesting stuff in incredible detail, but boring stuff like phone numbers, and the names of people I'll only ever meet once, I tend to forget (the former I write on a piece of paper). I even forgot to do the State Inspection on my vehicle for two months. However, I didn't forget the policeman's reminder because it suddenly got very important (the removal of wealth in the form of a fine if I didn't get it done within 10 days!)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The bloated software is stealing my memory. What was i talking about ? Huh ? Talking ?...
This was posted at Plastic.com several hours ago :-D
But, it is a good story, so let it be.
______________________________
Eric Krout
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
We've seen our muscles and physical health degrade
as a result of using motors to do all of our
physical work. Now maybe we'll see our brains
atrophy as a result of using computer to do
our mental work.
...Oh crap. I forgot what I was gonna say...
Click here to read too much about my personal life
I discuss these and other principles in my memory document:
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
"Many experts believe information overload is making it difficult for some people to absorb new information, as they have reached a limit of what they can store in their brains. These people forget things because they were too distracted to absorb them in the first place."
Holy sh*t. This is *so* me. I have been getting increasingly scatterbrained over the last couple of years (coincidentally since I've taken a full-time software development position). I can't remember discussions I've had, or specifics of meetings. I can't stand to read much except to-the-point news and manuals. I even keep a friggen sticky note with my phone number and address near the telephone so that I'm not flustered when I order out, for Christ's sake. Man, and I thought I had like early-onset alzeimers or something. I need one of those daily brain teaser calendars or something.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I don't think it follows that filling up a student's head with facts teaches them what to think. In fact, I have some anecdotal evidence that it stops them from thinking at all.
Case in point, I work for a pre-service, math and science teacher education program. One of the things we have done is revamp our science courses emphasizing quality math/science education over quantity. In other words, the students may not cover quite the quantity of content that you get in a regular science class, but they get a much deeper understanding of the material, and they are required to demonstrate this understanding...
Now back to my point, we occaisionally get a few pre-med students in our classes, these students are masters of memorization, but when asked to apply what they've learned conceptually, they scream to high heaven about it, not only do they not think, they don't want to think, as though it's something totally foreign to them!
Finally, I've been working in the education field for about 6 years now, and not once, ONCE, has anybody in our groups talked about communing with electrons. I'm still trying figure out where this sort of blabber got started, it's certainly not part of any teacher training program I've ever been a part of, or have heard of. I don't mean to flame, but I don't know where this mindset has come from (although I do have a few suspicions), and, frankly, it really ticks me off everytime I hear it!
I agree with you that education should have strong content and critical thinking components, but I strongly disagree that we should be teaching people what to think. That is not a road I would recommend we follow, it's every bit as bad as not thinking at all. The ability to think critically is enough for most people to be able to wade through the crap that's constantly presented to them, the problem is that there aren't as many people out there as there should be, that knows how to do it.
Alright, I'll stop rambling...
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
The ability to memorize facts is really faux intelligence.
I remember when I was younger my parents wondered why I didn't have to memorize the Declaration of Independance word for word or the order and years each president took office. And the answer is because it is MEANINGLESS.
It is much more important to know why than to regurgitate facts. Why be able to recite something word for word unless you know what it means. Granted there are many algorithms and equations that are worth memorizing because of their recurring uses...but I think this is the exception rather than the rule.
I have what I believe to be an excellent memory. But I prioritize my memory to remember things which I think are important. For instance I can never remember somebodys name the first time I meet them. Why waste my precious memory space for somebody's name I will most likely never see again. If I meet them a second and third time and the meetings are worthwhile I will NEVER forget their name.
Why fill your brain with the verbatum Magna Carta when that precious space could be used for creative and analytical thinking.
I was going to type something here, but I forgot what I was going to say.
Remember, a truly wise man never plays leapfrom with a unicorn
It's a too little known fact that when you eat or drink a product containing Nutrasweet artificial sweetener your body has to deal with a nasty by-product chemical Methanol ("wood alcohol") which is so toxic it is fatal at only 300milligrams/kilogram of bodyweight. Check out Google on methanol and nutrasweet.
Scroogle
I'd appreciate it if you would post a retraction.
Ben Schumin :-)
(no sarcasm intended here)
Where do you folk get your information about education? Newspapers? TV? Journals? Rumor?
There is such a gulf between the reality of the American educational system, and public perception of it, that it's nearly impossible to have a meaningful conversation on the topic these days.
Like in this post, ChuckFlynn is going on about "modern teaching methodologies", while in the real world the techniques he's bashing have barely been implemented anywhere. Lots of school boards have written curriculum documents *saying* they're going to use some new method. But in practice, teachers get NO training in them (or in anything else). The curriculum documents sit on the shelf, unused.
Then critics come along a couple years later saying "Well, this method was a complete failure."
Please come join the real world before you go spouting your know-nothing high-school garbage.
Have a look at this link for a good introduction to a number of mnemonic memory systems. I did one years ago (which I paid a few clams for) and I've never regretted it.
When up to speed you can remember things like:
Interestingly, memory seems to suffer from bit-rot much like software does - use it or lose it.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
A long time ago, I forget when exactly :), I made a conscious decision that I would stop duplicating effort when writing things down. I started using computers to keep notes, I scanned text from books, I hacked into my Profs account and copied his class notes instead of writing it down on paper while waiting for him to copy his printed notes onto the board. Yes this doesn't work for things like learning a language where memorization and autonomic response must be set by constant familiarization.
But I am more efficient then the guy scribbling like mad with a pencil next to me.
College Profs are now beginning to understand the advantage of printing notes for students. In Doctorate level classes, everyone now expects there to be a custom book, written by the instructor that contains all the info you need.
We could be OLD SKOOL and force everyone to copy text off the board, but that would waste everyone's time. True, I can't remember my mother's phone number without consulting my pilot or online address book, but I personally feel that's OK.
Encyclopedias. Dictionaries.
The worst offender of all:
*Index Cards*
And it's all those Babylonian's fault for using their pointy little heads to figure out how to use their pointy little stylus' to make pointy little marks in wet clay.
Just look at the historical record. Civilization and technology have been going down hill ever since.
The causal relationship is clear.
Plato had Socrates point this out in the Phaedrus as part of his reasoning as to why he doesn't write down all of his profound thoughts. Plato was big on irony in case it wasn't obvious. (Same goes with that whole "fascist" thing in the Republic ((remember Socrates didn't fit the ideal mold he was describing, it was a metaphor...))
So I forget some stuff, big deal. All of those things are unimportant to me anyway, so who cares?
Exactly! I believe that mostly I don't remember things that I don't really care or think about. Why should I remember them? Because it matters to someone else? Well, let them remember it then.
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
People at my work kid around with me because I have 20+ windows terminals open at any given time.. Half of them are man pages, some have perl-debugger windows (to test out concepts), and many just sit in the proper directories so I don't have to cd back and forth.
I'll have 10 emacs frames open so I can compare and contrast sections of code.
I've arranged all the windows so as to maximize parallel viewing..
The reason? I can't remember all the little fragments. "0xFFE08 is the search key.. Ok, what was it again? Oh hell, let me copy and paste." "I just used this function like 10 times, but I forget what the parameter order is. Let me look it up again."
Not too long ago, I memorized pie and "e" to 50 digits as a mental exercize.. I had no problem doing so (simple repetitious exercize), but I still haven't memorized my second-phone-line, even though I look it up like twice a day for the pizza guy.. I never remember a new person's name. I scoff when someone gives me a phone number to remember, assuming I'll remember it (I politely do that when they give me a name). I can't remember the IP address that I regularly ftp to manually (I look it up every time).
I don't carry around a PDA, but my work-station serves just as well. I carry around a date-book with all my phone numbers (which essentially plays the role of a PDA). I use to carry around a pocket notepad and pen to jot down reminders, but that got to be too combersome; I just carry my book-bag around everywhere.
With things like cut-and paste, and high information over-load, I've trained my mind not to even try and remember.. Even the important stuff like equations I can always reference within 5 seconds.
My friends all joke about my lack of memory, and my girlfriends have often been frustrated by it. But not a one of them would characterize me as stupid, as this article seems to imply I should be.
I honestly believe that if I had never seen a computer in my life my memory would be many times greater than it is today. Also if I'd continued to use my bench-press, my arms would be many times their current diameter. I don't feel a loss for either of them. My mind is very tuned. I read a lot; I philosophize a lot.. I learn new computer languages regularly and can analyze with the best of them. I'm an engineer by trade, and can talk physics until the sun comes up.. Just don't ask me what your name is.
-Michael (something or other)
-Michael
Now I can't remember a phone number to save my life.
Is it really the technology? One of my freinds hypothesized that i simply don't "allocate memory" for phone numbers anymore. He argued that since I have to remember URLs, IPs, Ports, Hex Color Codes, Passwords galore, email addresses and the like that I don't have "room" for Phone #s anymore.
Another freind's hypothesis is that since I don't have to dial those numbers by hand anymore, because I use the "Display Dial" in my cordless or the address book in my cellphone, that I don't memorize numbers because I don't have to go through the process of dialing them. This seems less applicable to me than some others because I always remebered 9 numbers, not a pattern of buttons, like some people. Another take on that is that when I was younger, people's numbers didn't change nearly as much as they do now. There were only 3 exchanges in my hometown then, now there are 2 overlapping area codes with a ton of exchanges.
My hypothesis is a combination of the two, plus the issue of not giving a damn. Back when I remembered phone numbers, I was in my teens and twenties. I CARED what this person's number was. I wanted to call people in my spare time. I was a social butterfly intent on being liked by all.
Now I groan when it rings and almost never pick it up to dial. And if I DID want to talk to you, I would definitely email you first. I hate baseball almost as much as the telephone, and I don't still have all the Orioles' batting averages memorized.. so why would I remember phone numbers?
This is where the pot smoking theory comes into play. Sure I used to remeber numbers after a few years of casual use, but it's been every day for ten more years! I don't feel *burnt* but I'm not ignorant enough to think I wasn't affected.
So the real question is...
Does technology make us forget or does technology simply Enable us to stop remembering?
There are many places for memorization that are good as a basis for learning. Some I can think of are multiplication tables, and states/countries and their capitols.
It is something like language. There has to be a certain vocabulary that is memorized so that the rest can derived from context. Multiplication tables are generally viewed as part of the vocabulary of math and a calculator is a poor substitute for the knowledge gained form learning them.
Perhaps a better example comes from the study of politics. Before assesing the merits of a candidate, a person must know the hard facts about the office, the government, and the constitution (or local equivalent) before he can properly mull over the "soft" facts presented by the candidate, his party, and his PAC.
t
I do not believe that devices such as PDA's are making us stupid, more that our memory is being redirected to other areas, such as our social interactions, and the development of different areas of the brain. We still absorb the same amount of information, but when someone gives us their phone number and we enter it into our phone/PDA, then we will most likely remember something else about them that we may not have if we didn't have these devices, such as something trivial like their hair colour. Cheers all. Boodle
Oups, but, as you had only learned how to memorize, you forgot to think and realize that thinking and memoriztion are two different things.
Kids are today thought how to think. Some of them get rather bright on it. They are not thought how to memorize, or tricks for speedy head-calculation of rather trivial formulas.
And, we need not to teach them what to think, but the mistakes we made, so they kan think of new ones.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Next thing you know, we'll be writing down stories instead of passing them down verbally from mother to daughter, as is proper. Think of the chaos that will ensue.
I blame big industry - the mule-herders and temple-builders always trying to find ways to squeeze one last giant stone wheel out of their customers.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
When I hit 30, I realized that I was getting old. Everyday, I would try to remember my childhood and found I remembered less and less. Then I realized that all the fear about getting old was the root cause of my problem. I don't worry any more and ... what was I talking about I forget.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
Once, I was at my house and I had just gotten some new memory, a 128 MB DIMM, and I went out to grab some food. When I came back, the memory was gone. Of course I didn't want to accuse it out right, but I had a feeling my computer took it. But maybe I had put it somewhere else. So I looked around, but couldn't find it. I said, "alright, who took my memory?" My suspicions were confirmed when the computer said nothing, just sat there with a humming fan and running a screensaver like nothing was going on.
It turns out, my computer stole my memory, and I haven't really trusted it since. I opened it up and there it was, plain as day. Did it think I wouldn't notice?
It's a tradeoff...do you want knowledgable dumb kids or smart ignorant kids? Both are extremes and we need to hit a happy middle.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
A similar example is physical activity. These days I know people who get winded walking a few blocks or a few flights of stairs, and gasp in shock at the idea of walking a couple miles rather than driving or taking a cab.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to regard these people as pathetic lazy schlubs, much as the Times-quoted researchers who used words like "stupid". On the other, though, they're still nice people, and productive members of society. Technology has enabled them to optimize for other tasks.
I see the exact opposite. People who recoil in horror at the thought of walking a mile or two tend to be lazy, stupid people. The most intelligent and amazing people I know are also the most physically active. Exercise improves blood flow and general health, both of which profoundly affect mental health. Attitudes towards physical exercise also tend to reflect on attitudes towards life in general. If you're lazy to the point that you don't want to walk up a flight of stairs, how are you going to approach a difficult problem? Most people I know of that avoid physical activity like that also avoid mental activity. There are the occasional exceptions, like there are for everything, but they're very rare.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Uhm, what was this article about? I forgot.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Wasn't it Einstein who said that he didn't waste memory on things like his address or phone number, since he could always look them up in the phone book? So people don't memorize lots of things when they have PDA's to help them remember. You'd HOPE they might be using that brain capacity for something more interesting then....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I can't seem to remember facts as well as I used to. But instead I seem to remember where information is. I might not remember the details, but I can remember where to find it again, which seems more useful to me.
I have a horrific memory but I'm doing ok in classes... Don't you have to know more in order to operate a PDA/computer?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
As far as I'm concerned, my ability to remember important stuff if still as good as ten years ago--I still only remember what my gadget can't keep for me, or the stuff too important to commit to external storage only.
And: what exactly is the difference between jotting down that phone number or date in your TimeSystem organiser, or some rather helpful electronic piece?
And the end of the day, I can back up my electronic memory far easier than my paper memories...
I spent much of this January playing dopewars. It saved my sanity during a very slow trade show.
Ha ha...
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Hey, how stupid are we really getting? Computers are mostly used to store data that people a few hundre years ago didn't use to have to remember, so are we back there, and were they stupider (more stupid?) that out fathers and mothers?
People always fear that the younger generation is getting dumber. On the other hand, we surround ourselves with a world of chemicals and radiation unlike anything ever seen before, so who knows. I doubt us not having to remember details makes us dumber, consider the huge load of other infomation we have to remember nowadays.... But who am I to say this...
- Knut S.
Modern technology is being designed to replace existing, decent applications. The best example is the idea of a date book. You can step through several iterations of this technology:
It's important to have technology that complements current ideals. Such as datebooks that remind us every morning what we have to do that day. Or reminds us to start thinking about paying off that AmEx bill. Without these hooks into our brain to remember things, yes we do forget about them. But with advanced enough software to remind us of the little things (such as give Sweetest day presents, attending useless meetings, or wash behind our ears) we can use our potent intellect for more advanced processing and more advanced thinking.
For instance, i've been using my extra capacity to memorizing Counter-Strike maps. Currently I'm up to 20-30 or so maps that I know by heart. However, I'm sure Dr Takashi Tsukiyama would put me in the 'stupid as hell' catagory because I can't remember my own cell phone number because I have it stored in 5 different electronic places and on my business cards. And well, that one number I've avoided memorizing has allowed me to know where to snipe on de_jeepathon2k. Hurray for technology!
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Well, at least you got this part almost right:
>Kids are being taught how to think, instead of what to think, out of some liberal notion that we shouldn't make their beliefs conform to our own experienced ones.
Though to be completely correct, it would be "some liberal notion that understanding logic, reasoning, and how to do your own research is more important than being able to recite 'facts' that someone else presents to you".
Having attended schools that were on opposite extremes of this -- a state school (where everything was "fact", "skill and drill"), and Caltech, where, everything very heavily emphasized understanding basic principles, I can say with some experience that "skill and drill", and memorizing "facts" is a total crock.
The "tough" problems at the state school were the ones where they used variable "x", instead of variable "z" (like in the book). This would complete mystify most of the class, because they'd "learned" to recite "facts", instead of understanding principles. At Caltech, after having one problem during the term emphasizing a basic principle, you'd be expected to be able to apply that principle to novel problems for the rest of the course. You were never expect to regurgitate it as some "fact".
There are volumes of research, now, backing this. Not only do more comprehensive teaching techniques produce students that are better able to apply their knowledge to novel problems, it turns out they also enjoy it much more, and are more interested in pursuing education.
This is not Great Britain they are talking about, but Tokyo.
/.ers to read articles!"
"PDAs affect ability of
What are churches but a school for divine thought? They're both instances of the profound advancement of human thought: we, unlike animals, build temples to knowledge. Sometimes they are the science buildings your fellow students inhabit. Sometimes they are the parishes that guide schoolboard decisions. Either way, it's a beautiful thing.
Reread what I advocated: I'm advocating a balanced approach, incorporating the best of both worlds in a magnificent compromise. Students should be taught both what to think as well as how to think. The only way they'll succeed in this dark world is if they can do both.
You can't argue against this point, because it's tautological. The only argument you can propose is that we can't expect so much of our students and their teachers. But that's a lazy good-for-nothing cop out. I'd be embarassed to live in a society that can't expect the most of those who would weave its moral and social fabric. You're not actually arguing that, are you?
So, to summarize everything here, school today is not about remembering answers. It's how to get answers to infinite amounts of problems.
Kids aren't getting any answers, today. Whatever your philosophy, it's important to realize when you must throw your hands up and try something new. It's called the scientific method. You're the one advocating dogma, here.
Read the rest of this comment...
I had a great argument refuting this article, but I forgot what I was gonna say...
I type on a computer about 8 times faster than I write with an ink smearing device on dead tree pulp. This may well be true for people other than me as well.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
These problems with memory would go away if we all improved our relationship with information. Far too often we have the one-night-stand, storing information in our minds one evening, only to discard them after the exam the very next day. In order to hone our capacity for memory, we need to develop a long-term relationship with our information. We need to give it all attention it deserves. That way it will be there for us in times of need.
He didn't agree with some of the theories because they didn't fit into theology; their description of the universe wasn't orderly enough for him to see the fingerprints of God within it which went against his belief that a being of order was at the helm. Could be that not enough of the mechanics behind the theories was/has yet revealed to satisfy his beliefs.
Doesn't mean he thought it was bunk, he just couldn't reconcile physics as described by others to his beliefs.
Any spoon would be too big.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
150 people is hardly a study. "No formal studies" means no studies. Premlimary findings such as these are essentially meaningless, and really we should all...
Someone you trust is one of us.
Are Computers Stealing Your Memory?
My computer just got an addition 512M of memory. I could have used that myself!
NO CARRIER
Sounds like this is typical of technology. The more you rely on the tech to do your job for you, the less practice you get.
A farmer, for example, who used to plow his fields by hand or with an Ox, would be much stronger through use and practice of his muscles than today's farmer, who augments most physical labor with machinery.
Apply this to technology. Let others think for you, and soon you forget how to think at all. This is a nice point to keep in mind for those people who like to think that our government should do as much for its people as possible. (hint!).
Hehe, your right but for the wrong reason. Those jobs attract the walking wounded because they are the only people who can't get better jobs. If you want good help you have to pay for it -- businessess know that, they just don't care.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
It is not our brains that are becoming weaker, it is the amount of information and our awareness of the information that increases as the information age evolves. To handle this pressure we develop tools to aid us in the process.
To quote my high school football coach (no I didn't play): "Our team can't even hold the ball, let alone do any fancy passes."
The trick is time management. Less and less of a given day is available for a given subject.. I've watched as my high school periods shrunk from an hour per class to 40 minutes. Skill and drill works very well in the military where they can't make any assumptions about your competence. They've found a system that keeps their soldiers alive, so they're going to burn it into their heads like little dogs (at least for the enlisted).
For those that could care less about school, and for the school where the teachers are most worried about keeping the kids quiet and paying attention, getting them to complete their times tables might be enough (or equivalently, being able to spell conscience).
Cal-tech isn't for your average high-school graduate, and it assumes a certain level of personal discipline.
There's an alterior approach known as montasori(sp?). Which is a hands on method. It's a great motivational tool, but as I've seen from it's graduates, they tend to be behind in the amount of material they cover. A quote from a graduate, "It's a fun school, not a science school."
In short, different methods work for different people. Those that feel confined by "skill and drill" are more than welcome to seek out more sophisticated approaches.
-Michael
-Michael
Out of the many facts you learned as a child, exactly how many of these do you remember today?
Most all, I would say. I still remember how many legs horses have and how many legs pigs have. And that knowledge has served me well.
Many? If this is the case, how many do your peers remember?
My peers? I reckon they're doing ok, because my generation wasn't exposed to these abominable teaching philosophies as much as yours was. "Debate"? Sure, we had debate. We also had plenty of other things. Don't criticize what you don't understand, son.
If things are constant, then it's only a greater sign that the system has failed us and has failed our children. We must learn from our mistakes and strive to do better than our parents did. You haven't emigrated back to where your great grandparents (my parents) came from, right? Why? Because you've learned better. We made this country the best in the world through hard effort and hard choices.
The status quo is not a choice. You must learn to grow.
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The details they are testing for have been supplatanted with remembering vi commands.
no big deal. I can use vi to do anything, right?
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
It's a sign of poor programming. I recommend everyone reboot.
Example: I have no idea what my social security number, blood type or insurer is. If I was ever in an accident, I'd be good as dead. However, that seems unlikely since I'm inside all day playing Counter-Strike, of which I've memorized every inch of every stage, the cost of each gun and ammo type, and the IP address of my favorite servers. My memory is now commited to useful things.
Given a reasonably level playing field, who would win a fight between a bear and a shark?
All you've done is list a bunch of negatives about IM without delving into any of the causes. Did the company provide any training with IM? Did it issue or remind the employees of the company's usage policy? Better yet, did they have a usage policy out regarding IM because if you're in the U.S. those people who got fired may have grounds to sue the company for snooping in on their conversations.
How did IM cause them to lose touch with their co-workers? Here's a hint on how to get a free 15 minute break. Get out of your cube to ask a co-worker a question and hunt them down. With IM, I can get immediate feedback.
One of my coworkers uses IM to keep in touch with her kids. In this case there are moral benefits and the phone line stays open for business calls.
Don't fault the tool because the craftsman is inept.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Personal observation bears this out. When I was in college, young people were really smart. Now that I'm my forties, they seem really, really stupid.
Funny, though, my parents said the same thing when I was young.
There is almost no insight, analasys or objective press left. What you see on TV leaves no room for thought, just the latest scoop, highest bodycount and jucies stories. The movies are more sex and mindless violence less drama, good acting and intelligent scripts(with a few exceptions). Computers are used to surf pr0n, play action games and chat while at work. Ppl are 'too' well off and don't want to spend time learning new stuff when they can zap away at 100+ channels of pure crap, 40 million pr0n sites, never reading a single piece of text longer than a screenful. In the wast flow of information one can't take in everything so you disregard the things hard to grasp content with thinking 'at least I think like most others'. Well what can you do? People are sheep. I am happy knowing I don't think like most others.
As one doctor succinctly put it, 'Young people today are becoming stupid.'
Gramps has been saying this for years.
Dancin Santa
The first comments were a little sparse, so I'll practice using my memory... :-) (I had some pretty compelling personal reasons to research this in the early 90's)
:-)
Aspertame is composed of two amino acids. One of these amino acids will cross the "blood-brain barrier." That, by itself, isn't particularly worrisome, but the blood-brain barrier has a finite capacity and (iirc) transports the amino acids in the same proportion as they appear in the blood stream. This means that consuming a lot of aspertame will "crowd out" the other amino acids.
This can have some surprising results. A close friend of mine was an apparently healthy 30-year-old, but he had such severe tachycardia that he was starting to black out - imagine sitting quietly and having a pulse of 180-200! (That's higher than the "maximum heart rate", faster than what you would get in an all-out sprint!) His doctors had given him EKGs, CAT scans, etc., and had no idea what was wrong. I knew he drank a *lot* of diet soda and suggested he try cutting it out. He did, and the tachycardia stopped. There is no proof of a causal relationship - maybe it was a coincidence - but he swore off diet sodas for life.
My experience was that diet soda (which I rarely consumed anyway) would actually cause me to become more "intoxicated" than a six-pack of beer if I drank a single can of soda while taking a particular prescription medication. My doctor and I both checked the PDR, there was no interaction listed but that was where I learned about the blood-brain barrier effect. I'm sure some people would go "cool!" at being able to get stoned off a legal diet soft drink, but it terrified me since nobody knew how it was happening and what damage it was causing.
Finally, the <u>Atlantic</u> also did a long article on concerns about Aspertame in the early 90s (or late 80s), but I don't recall the details of that article. (I think that's normal memory loss
Bottom line: I try fairly hard to avoid unnecessary exposure to artificial sweeteners. (It's impossible to avoid all exposure unless you live life like its 1799.) The extra pounds I'm carrying have their own risks, but those risks are known and can be mitigated by taking care to exercise regularly. The risks posed by consuming artifical sweeteners for decades, sweeteners that cross the blood-brain barrier, are unknown.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
This is why you see much greater emphasis on arts and other trivial applications of human talents, instead of engineering and classical studies.
Dude, you can't be serious. The arts? A trivial application of human talents? What are you, a robot?
I remember a correlation/causation error my college Poli-Sci teacher told us about. In a three month period, the murder rate and the amount of ice cream sold increased at a very similar rate in New York city. Some researcher concluded there was something in ice cream that induced homicidal tendencies. What the research did not look at was the three months in which it happened: June, July, and August.
BigCat79
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
Things are different today. People are vastly more mobile and better connected. I sometimes get agitated over the fact that it takes me a moment to remember my current phone number, but then I consider the fact that I've lived in ten different apartments in four cities over the past 12 years, and I've had at least four different business phone numbers plus a whole smorgasbord of cell phone numbers, pager numbers, voice-mail access numbers, and various other things that I've committed to memory at some time or another. I just looked at the address book in my PDA, which is far from a complete representation of every person I've ever met in my life, and still it's got over 1,000 entries in it.
In other words, there's just much more stuff to remember than there used to be. A big part of the reason I got my PDA in the first place was that I had a hard time keeping track of all my meetings -- I actually have a really good memory, but when you've got like 20 meetings or teleconferences a week and they are all moving around all the time, it just gets insanely hard to keep that all in your head. So I made the choice to try to keep my head empty of stuff that is intrinsically pretty useless, like phone numbers and appointment dates, and use my brainpower for things that were more interesting.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
While it may be true that we tend to forget more detailed information, I would argue that we are getting better at "knowing where to look" for the info we require. There have been countless times that I've forgotten the url of some page I once visited, yet was able to successfully retrace my navigation path from some point ten pages upstream.
Technology allows us to play with bigger and bigger building blocks; one consequence of this may be that the mind takes the smaller ones for granted. Is this such a bad thing?
What sort of research would it take that would produce these sorts of results? Is 'people are becoming stupid' an actual scientific term?
To me it looks like the cases cited in the article can be attributed to a stress related mental breakdown. One of my co-workers (at an old job) got physically sick (requiring bed rest), when the responsiblities he took on, and the idiots he hired, caught up with him. And its not like the Japanese aren't know for working themselves to death... Better get a tinfoil hat, the orbital mind contol lasers might get you and zap your memory.
--locust
People aren't getting more forgetful or losing their memory than in the past. We're just trying to memorize much more than people in the past.
Forgetfulness is not the problem. It is a symptom. Relaxing your life is the solution. Now quit reading this and go put in for some vacation... AND TURN OFF THE ANSWERING MACHINE AND LEAVE THE CELL PHONE AT HOME before you leave. Also know that it is not "wrong" for you to do this. You are not "hiding". You are on the paid vacation time which you've earned. You are God.
Even better than that is the quotation from Oliver North, famed figure in the Iran-Contra Arms scandal in the 1980s. Note that there were tons of accusations that North ordered senstive documents destroyed to prevent the truth about the scandal from emerging. When later asked about why such important elements of the deal were never commemorated in writing, North is quoted as saying: "If it's really important, you don't have to write down." Actually, I can't find the direct quote around here, but that's a pretty close paraphrase.
==
Why is this moderated interesting rather than funny? Do our moderators really believe it is more important to memorize data for a silly game, rather than data that could save your life?
The ONLY hard fact in this article is "A preliminary study of 150 people aged 20 to 35 has shown that more than one in 10 are suffering from severe problems with their memory."
First note a few things about the above statement. One is that 150 people is not a very large sample of a population, although large enough that we might want to be worried about the 1 in 10 figure. Another is the word preliminary - generally this means that the study is not conclusive. In fact, the article doesn't even mention how the survey was performed. Maybe a big poster was put up "Interested in memory loss??? Call ___" Of course then more people with loss will show up.
Note this is severe memory loss, none of this forgetting how to do math on paper - the case they give us include forgetting where you are going and not being able to remember written words when they are trying to.
Even given the above, the actual research group which did the survey came to no conclusions about technology. The writers of the article clearly listened to doctors saying things like "I THINK technology is to blame." The only evidence that technology might be to blame is that it is the younger generation which is being afflicted.
This is a problem that clearly needs looking into, and many, many more studies before blame can be placed. (How about a study of people who have been using technology just as long as those of us in our 20s who are in their 40s or 50s? Or maybe comparisions of people using technology vs. not using technology). For all we know of those 150 people who are the closest thing to hard evidence we have, only 10 used PDAs or similar devices. Maybe this is a deeper problem than we think. Just don't come to any rash conclusions before we know all the facts.
Yeah, like that happened...
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
...the Windows-loving jackass in the next cubicle keeps stealing my memory! Last week I had 256 MB, now I only have 64.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Or maybe we're just spending time learning things that are more important or more abstract.
I mean, really, why do I have to remember the name of every person I met in college? Wouldn't remembering the name of every C++ function in the Standard Template Library be more usefull since I'm a programmer? That's a tough task, so who can blame me if my memory sets aside areas usually associated with information I can store in my PDA to remember the other stuff.
My brain is smart afterall! It does many things on it's own that I'm never even aware of.
I've always thought of using one's mind is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. Rely on PDAs, paper and pencil, string on the fingers too much, and what does your memory have to exercise it?
Read a book, try to remember things on your own, turn off the TV once in a while! (ok, maybe not that last one)
(disclaimer: I love my PDA!)
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
That's a good point. As an example (I'm a 22 btw, and I learned thru the kind of teaching you describe.) The other day I was writing some software at work, and I needed to multiply two values together for some sample input and I had simply forgotten how to do it with paper! Extremely disappointed in myself I used a calculator, and later I was able to do it and a couple other problems in my head fairly quickly as a test. I realized that in math at school we were able to use calculators and I hadn't done it in so long, I had just forgotten.
I agree with you on that a middle ground needs to be worked out. However, your statement to "make them conform" just won't work. I don't think it's particularly wrong, but our culture today encourages kids to not take that crap. Even my nephews and nieces, kids just a few years younger than me, adhere to this even more so than I did. If kids feel they being treated unfairly, whether they are or aren't, they are more likely to just stop responding or retaliate than to give in. Our culture glamorizes that.
I think this may actually be a step in the right direction. There is a pretty big percentage of mental invalids as you say, but I don't think there is a whole generation of them, far from it. In your time, besides the civil rights movement of course, there was little "task-based" organization towards creating bigger and better things. Timothy Leary gave people acid in an effort to fix "what" was wrong, but no conception of "how" to do it. The hippies protested "what" they felt was wrong, but provided little "how" and so essentially just waited until the Vietnam War ended. Todays children are raised in an free thinking environment, which can mean we don't have as much cultural baggage to overcome in being effective. And... we can be much more equipped to whoop ass and take names when given the correct tools and information (sadly, when provided with the wrong tools we may not always whoop ass for the good guys, though.)
Analysis is not the be-all of solving problems in this world, even in "rational" fields like science. Experience, too, plays a key role, and here memory is key. Many are those "eureka" moments when your brain, for some reason, connects two things together and you leap forward. Te more "stuff" you remember, the more your brain can draw on here. Without that library of experience, it's like you're solving a new problem every time from scratch.
Besides, have you watched MTV lately? Point made.
BTW, I'm thirty, I use a Palm daily, and my wife can vouch for the stupidity part.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
People in their 20s and 30s have a significant fraction who've been smoking dope for years.
Smoking dope is known to be correlated with memory loss.
The connection must be computer...
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
People have used various remembering aids for years. Everything from a computer, a piece of string tied on your finger, writing on your hand, to a piece of paper. It's crazy to try and say that these memory problems are because of electronic devices. The real problem probably lies in the fact that more drugs have been used by people in those generations than have been used by generations in the past.
just my 2 cents
i certainly never felt like i fit in. aren't there higher modes of thinking than knowing all the answers on a quiz show or remembering every telephone number. oh, hold on, i do remember every number i see.
I don't know if that's entirely true. I'm becoming less and less dependant on, say, the PHP online reference as most of that is starting to stick. I also work sometime in technical support, and I'm finding myself referring to our knowledgebase less and less.
Perhaps this is for those who are developing their learning skills in general by using the net?
Oh well. Sorry honey . I wish I didn't repeat the same stories all the time.
----
They don't belong on the phone. Take off work if you want, but you aren't going to get paid for it.
Of course I wouldn't expect you to understand that. Most spoiled white suburbanite slashbots have a hard time understanding real-world economics, and prefer to live their lives under the impression that money is dropped on them from magic fairies while you live under someone else's roof, drive someone else's car, and masturbate furiously as you download yet another "hax0red" program because once again you have "stuck it" to the "man".
HTH
It was all the old people who were stuped.
funny how the intellegence curve is following me ...
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
The rise of memory problems has coincided with the widespread adoption of C++. Fortunately most of these problems will go away as .Net and C# become the standard environment.
Perhaps these doctors just got older and now view the same range of patients as being younger.
... script kiddies;
Young, stupid, and access to a database of scripts on their BITBOXES.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
The computer science curriculum required memorization of facts at the discrete math level, but past that it was based entirely on analysis and application. The music program required memorization of pieces and lots more memorization of seemingly trivial facts about composers, theoretical systems, and even memorization of the accepted view on certain aesthetic issues. Not that it didn't contain its share of bullshit, but were it not for my arts education my memory would have atrophied long ago.
They claim these gadgets lead to diminished use of the brain to work out problems and "information overload" that makes it difficult to distinguish between important and unimportant facts.
To me "information overload" and "diminished use of the brain" because computers remember stuff for you is two entirely different things.
Information overload is certainly something I experience.
I grew up in Africa and we didn't have any TV. Or phone or electricity except for two hours in the evening. If I was bored then I played soccer or went fishing etc. We had one magazine subscription to National Geographic and I read all of those articles the whole way through.
In America life there is so much stuff going on. Instead of sitting down and reading National Geographic the whole way through I surf the internet. And instead of reading everything I just skim through articles quickly. And instead of reading one page after another in a linear way I always end up having 8 netscape windows open.
Not just netscape though because I have to have good music playing in the background. And I am also supposed to be doing some programming homework so you xemacs open. And also it is important to be playing mud so I have a mud client running. And my roomates are watching TV in the other room.
So it's no wonder I start forgetting things. And I don't even have a PDA.
Of course the state is going to fail to set the proper curriculum. It's beholden to politics. All governments are. This is nothing new.
Children need to be taught both to memorize and to learn. You must first memorize what you cannot understand; only then can you keep it within your mental grasp long enough to ponder it and mull it over. It's central to all right models of learning. This is nothing new.
What is new is how we've completely given up on trying to solve this problem. We're overrun with apathy in a world where we see that our parents have failed and see that our children are failing their children. "Why bother? It's inevitable." And that's a reprehensible attitude for you to take.
Learning comes from the grasp of the ability to distinguish differences. You must have a base of knowledge before you may learn to recognize other data and build analogies from there. This is why it's more important than ever for children to be given truth that they can trust, so that they may form opinions of the uncalculated and unprocessed world out there. To do otherwise would be to insist that their lives always consist of pre-chewed pablum.
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Next time someone throws one of these "kids today" stories in your face, bring up the following.
.01
Socrates, as Plato's mouth-piece in Phaedrus suggests that books are going to destroy the art of memory. Basically, before there were a lot of books, people spent immense amounts of time memorizing entire works and repeating them. Simonides, for example, used what he called 'loci' to recite entire 20,000 line poems from his head. It's how we have have Homer's works and a lot of other "oral traditions."
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates laments that Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented letters, had misjudged the effect of his invention:
"This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without reality."
Yeah, so if you believe this PDA piece, then go burn down the local library while you're at it. I'm sure your local doctor would appreciate that (laugh). Memory prosthetics are good as long as you don't use them to stop remembering, but instead to be able remember more than you could possibly otherwise.
My
-carson-
http://www.media.mit.edu/~carsonr/
Or made us code stuff that was already in the STL or an existing library?
I can see the point for learning something once, but these examples usually existed in classes where you were not allowed to use advanced calculators or the STL or(name your specific example here) throughout the entire class!
And they give the lamest excuses for making us hold onto the way they learned to do something! "If you get stuck on a desert island, you'll be glad you learned how to use a slide rule." Yeah, right.
If humanity is to progress, we must learn things once, and learn how not to reinvent the wheel. The skill we should be learn is to find out whether or not a problem has been solved before - if so apply the solution, and if not, be able to use our wit, intelligence, or if those are lacking, a smarter persons wit and intelligence to solve the problem.
Our society is getting an order of magnitude more complex each generation. We need to have computers do our grunt thinking for us if we are to keep up with advancing technology.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Hmm?
People have been writing stuff down in case they forget for ages... why does the PDA all of a sudden cause amnesia?
I don't get it.
Janimal
The whole story is a bit silly because it doesn't have any data from formal research and relies heavily upon two anecdotes.
Remember Sean Connery as Indiana Jones' father in the most recent movie? Indiana asks him something, Dad says it's in his diary and he doesn't know, Indiana disbelievingly asks him if he can't remember, Dad summons up his dignity and replies, "I wrote it down so that I wouldn't have to remember."
Or my favorite quote from Alan Turing (paraphrased): Programming should always be exciting, because as soon as something becomes boring or repetitive, it should be turned over to the machine.
I've automated so many of my sysadmin duties that I can't remember how to do them manually anymore. :-) Frees up more time for programming.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Norbert Wiener
1894-1964
Wiener's contemporaries on somewhat strange Professor
Two months before his death, in a ceremony at the White House, Norbert
Wiener was awarded the National Medal of Science. The citation by
President Johnson said: " . . . for marvelously versatile
contributions, profoundly original, ranging within pure and applied
mathematics, and penetrating boldly into the engineering and
biological sciences".
"I must have met about 20 people who had won Nobel prizes, or were to
win them later, and quite a few people one meets around Cambridge,
Mass., do not move their lips when reading, but it seems to me that
Norbert was literally more gifted than anyone else". ( Deutsch, K.W.,
"Some Memories of Norbert Wiener: The Man and His Thoughts", IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, pp. 368-372, 1975)
According to ( Deutsch, K.W., "Some Memories of Norbert Wiener: The
Man and His Thoughts", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and
Cybernetics, pp. 368-372, 1975) Wiener went through what he himself
called a pessimistic "tailspin" at least every three weeks. When they
first met during the war, Wiener's first words were: "I am terribly
depressed. How are things going?"
An excerpt from "Recollections of a Chinese Physicist," by C.K. Jen
(Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1990) "As I near the end of my personal
recollections of life at M.I.T., it is impossible to refrain from
relating my eye-witness stories about a brilliant man, Norbert Wiener,
and his lovable eccentricities. I took two semester courses under
Professor Wiener: one was Fourier Series and Fourier Integrals, and
the other was, I believe, Operational Calculus. It is vivid in my
memory that Professor Wiener would always come to class without any
lecture notes. He would first take out his big handkerchief and blow
his nose very vigorously and noisily. He would pay very little
attention to his class and would seldom announce the subject of his
lecture. He would face the blackboard, standing very close to it
because he was extremely near-sighted. Although I usually sat in the
front row, I had difficulty seeing what he wrote. Most of the other
students could not see anything at all. It was most amusing to the
class to hear Professor Wiener saying to himself, "This was very
wrong, definitely." He would quickly erase all he had written down. He
would then start all over again, and sometimes murmur to himself,
"This looks all right so far." Minutes later, "This cannot be right
either," and he would rub it all out again. This on- again, off-again
process continued until the bell signaled the end of the hour. Then
Professor Wiener would leave the room without even looking at his
audience".
Phyllis L. Block, graduate administrator in the Department of
Mathematics (MIT) recalls: "His (Wiener's) office was a few doors down
the hall from mine. He often visited my office to talk to me. When my
office was moved after a few years, he came in to introduce
himself. He didn't realize I was the same person he had frequently
visited [before]; I was in a new office so he thought I was someone
else".
Robert K. Weatherall, vice president for alumni and director of the
Office of Career Services and Pre-Professional Advising, related
another Wiener story told to him by an MIT alumnus who "was driving in
New Hampshire and stopped to help a tubby-looking man with a flat
tire. He recognized Norbert Wiener and asked if he could help. Wiener
asked if [the alumnus] knew him. Yes, he said, he had taken calculus
with him. `Did you pass?' asked Wiener. `Yes.' `Then you can help me,'
said Wiener".
Wiener as a prototype of an "absent-minded professor". These
anecdotes (collected by Howard Eves, a math historian) are told about
him:
He went to a conference and parked his car in the big lot. When the
conference was over, he went to the lot but forgot where he parked his
car. He even forgot was his car looked like. So he waited until all
the other cars were driven away, then took the car that was left.
When he and his family moved to a new house a few blocks away, his
wife gave him written directions on how to reach it, since she knew he
was absent-minded. But when he was leaving his office at the end of
the day, he couldn't remember where he put her note, and he couldn't
remember where the new house was. So he drove to his old neighborhood
instead. He saw a young child and asked her, "Little girl, can you
tell me where the Wieners moved?" "Yes, Daddy," came the reply, "Mommy
said you'd probably be here, so she sent me to show you the way home".
One day he was sitting in the campus lounge, intensely studying a
paper on the table. Several times he'd get up, pace a bit, then return
to the paper. Everyone was impressed by the enormous mental effort
reflected on his face. Once again he rose from his paper, took some
rapid steps around the room, and collided with a student. The student
said, "Good afternoon, Professor Wiener." Wiener stopped, stared,
clapped a hand to his forehead, said "Wiener - that's the word," and
ran back to the table to fill the word "wiener" in the crossword
puzzle he was working on.
He drove 150 miles to a math conference at Yale University. When the
conference was over, he forgot he came by car, so he returned home by
bus. The next morning, he went out to his garage to get his car,
discovered it was missing, and complained the police that while he was
away, someone stole his car.
For example, Alzheimers has been linked to television - the rapid cut scenes of television mean that the visual part of our brain has to work overtime to completely regenrate its mental map of the world every few seconds.
Source?
--
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
In The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke trots out his favorite theme about the spread of literacy: it killed the phenomenal memory of medieval Europe. People used to store vasts amount of knowledge in their heads because they had no other way of keeping it. Through continouous usage and practice, your average medieval peasant could remember a heck of a lot of things without writing any of it down (he couldn't!).
Medieval scholars had even better memories by using mnemonics (the term even comes down to us from them) and a Cathedral of the Mind. A Cathedral of the Mind is almost the same memory trick they sell in infomercials: imagine a Cathedral and all it's rooms, cloisters and features. Associate a mental image (the more bizarre the better) relevant to the topic you want to remember with one of those features. Now, you want to remember somthing, just go for a walk in the Cathedral in your mind and you'll remember all your mnemonic tricks associated with them.
The spread of writing and cheap paper pretty much killed these memories. Why remember something when you can write it down? Now this is not neccessarily a bad thing. For starters, you are far less likely to have memory corruptions over time. Knowledge now automatically survives the originator (before, you had to brain dump onto someone else or all you knowledge would die with you). But we haven't lost our memory; we just chose to remember different things. With the information overload of today, we don't remember the trivial things because we have too many important things we have to take in and use in our daily lives. Reading Slashdot and the memories generated by it are far more useful in my head than remembering my social insurance number which I carry on a plastic card anyway.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
That doctor is an idiot. What he said is the dumbest thing I have heard in a long time. Every one of us is a little dumber for having read it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
These people have obviously never seen my grandfather try to program a computer.
Of course, neither have I... He won't go near the things.
---
Hey, I am NOT forgetful! I own two handhelds, laptop, and a desktop, and I keep track of all my stuff on... Err, what were we talking about again?
This sounds like the story we saw a while back about neurologists becoming worried that people using grafitti on palms were losing their ability to write normally. It even had quotes from people, saying things like, "I looked down with shock - I had written the entire sentence over the same spot!"
It was a satire of course, and I thought it was hilarious. Some people were taken in though, which I suppose just made it funnier.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Plato, if I remember my philosophy classes, said the same thing about writing some time ago. Go figure.
Um, basics of logic? Correlation is not causation? Aren't scientists of all people supposed to know these things?
Maybe it is?
a
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
Well, personally, I can't remember ceirtian types of things. Whether it is because I simply don't pay attention to them, or maybe it's because I smoke too much. Maybe a lot of young people (maybe a larger number of nerds) are just potheads. Hehe, oh well, go ahead and moderate me down for sayin that.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
You've got balls man (course you're going in as the coward). I'd almost want to see this marked up as funny; almost.
Though I think there is a modicum of legitimacy to your argument. I'd like to point out one thing.. Women tend to do better in high school.
The "agressive" males are usually too busy being the class clown, the jocks, or just dissidents (frustrated with their mal-adjustment to society). Women have better "spot memory" as I call it. Men are more prone towards mental visualization of the abstract. But the general maturity level still gives the edge to women.
I don't see how mainstream History, Chemistry, English, Physics, Biology, or most definately Math has changed for the femanine. All I see are attempts at multi-culturalizm, with emphases on the emotion of the children. That doesn't make it any more boring for the aspiring student (no matter the gender).
At my school, at least, we had 4 difficulty levels.. Remedial, general, college prep and honors/AP. There was plenty there to challenge you. (If they weren't enough, you'd often go to a school upstate).
-Michael
-Michael
Seems to me the Doc forgot what he was talking about in between sentences. Notice how he switched from a capacity issue to an attention issue as if the two were related.
Of course, the best work is often done by those closest to the problem!
--
Computers suck at thinking, but are great at memorizing. Why should we devote brain power to doing what computers do perfectly when all that does is reduce the amount of time we can spend doing what computers cannot?
Leave the memorizing to the computers and the thinking to the humans.
Tell it the hand cuz the face aint hearing it! (sorry, I know thats stupidity in an art form, but nothing as bad as the article)
Ok, go ahead and try your method. What you will find is that you can teach someone what to think, and you can teach them how to think, but if you can't teach them why they should think, they will do neither. If you don't engage students in the learning process, and allow them to make their own discoveries, they're going to head right back to the Cliff's notes and memorize as much as they can for the exam, and forget it all a week later. All because you've told them what to think and how to think, but given them no reason to think for themselves.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
--
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
Starting early this year, aren't we?
Really, people always mistrust themselves. I personally use paper, mostly because I can't affort a decent PDA and because I like being backwards and archaic (despite being a big computer nut.) On the other hand, technology IS making us stupid, not just stealing our memory. Calculators and digital watches have stolen my ability to do math in my head or read analog clocks (okay, I can do both, but it takes a while.) The internet lets stupid people share stupid ideas faster than ever, and most people, stupid or not, tend to beleive what they read on a website...so long as it looks semi-professional. Sometimes I wonder just how dependant on technology we are, and what would happen if there was no electricity for a month.
:wq! DOH!
On a semi-related tanget. Why do we `advance' as a race by inventing things and researching our world? We can be (and was) perfectly happy (as happy as we are now, which is to say, never satisfied) w/o all these nifty convoluted doodads.
Roy Miller
--Roy
They sure were. I also had to shovel snow, rake leaves and mow the lawn, all in the same day.
Manifest reality. Education through revelation. The world is a beautiful place, but that doesn't make it a complicated one. Most of it is self-evident: history is a collection of incontrovertible facts viewed through the lens of contemporary values.
Go ahead and teach them why to think, also, if you wish. I'd rather not leave that decision up to them. If they don't want to think, then they'll be disciplined until they do think. It's pretty simple.
Read the rest of this comment...
The preliminary study only had 150 people; for a brain-related issue, this sample size is laughably incredible. A newstory on this should have never gone to print.
It also says the results are 1 in 10 showing memory lapses. How does this compare to the population? I can name 1 in 10 of my friends who DON'T have a PDA and are not on drugs who can't remember names.
IMHO, this a scare-tactic story meant to drum up funding for a research project to fulfull someone's thesis.
m.mmm..myyy
The correct spelling is Montessori. I went to such a school for K-6. Schools vary somewhat, however, my mother has a Masters in Physics, my dad has a PhD in Chemical Engineering, and they were comfortable with me in the system. It was the Montessori environment that introduced me to programming in first grade on a TI-99A; I am now a professional software engineer at a Fortune 100 company and still remember my excitement of working with TI Basic (I wrote about it for my college entrance essay). Were it not for the open environment of Montessori education, I might never have been exposed to programming (even though my parents both did extensive work with Fortran IV and I have my mom's Fortran manuals from the 70's!)
The concerns you have expressed have very little by way of solid basis. If you're worried about your own personal reaction to all the technology around us, you can control it yourself to a large degree. You don't have to use a cellphone, PDA, etc. etc.
But translating your own personal attitudes into some kind of global biological meltdown isn't justified. Our technology will have a big impact over the next hundred years, including many bad ones like pollution of various kinds, changes in the Earth's temperature, weather patterns, etc. But all the evidence we have to date indicates that brain meltdown isn't going to be one of those problems, pop-sci articles in mainstream media notwithstanding.
This reminds me of a science fiction book -- I think it was Oath of fealty -- where one character had a direct link from his brain to his company's computer and used the computer to remember things for him. Then he found out that someone had broken into the computer, meaning the cracker had effectively broken into his brain.
A few hundred years ago, illiterate European
peasants supposedly had 200x the memory we do
now. It doesn't matter if we use a computer to
keep track of dates, or a piece of paper. The
effect is the same: We don't rely on our own
memory for daily things, so our memory becomes
stagnant from underuse.
I have to say, you did have me going for a while; I was right there with you until you started going off on the uselessness of art, the futility of teaching unobtainable ideals, etc. But first, a little background; I'm a classicist. I finished High School here in 1997, with several years of Latin and Greek. I had to memorise good chunks of the Aeneid and Homer, as well as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Byron, Milton, and others. I had the sort of education you seem to be advocating. On the other hand, I had a year of music, two years of art, history and practice. Throw in a little calculus, physics, chemistry, and 4 years of religious studies, and you've got my High School experience in a nutshell. By now, I've probably done more dead languages than you've ever heard of.
So why all this bullshit about removing art and other intangibles from the curriculum? Nobody (sane) ever said that they have to be mutually exclusive. Art, beauty, truth were the great ideals of those classical civilisations you seem to love so much; Medieval Europe stole those values from Rome, Rome stole them from Athens and Greece, Greece stole them from the Hittites and Assyrians, the Hittites and Assyrians stole them from the Sumerians, the Sumerians...well, that's where the record ends, but I'm sure they came from somewhere. Sure, throw in a little innovation at each point along the way, borrowings from a lot of 'loser' civilisations, and you start to come somewhat close to history.
I suppose I still agree with your end point, the combination of fact/memorisation and analysis, but your methods stink.
"Oh Bother", said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."
To and from school? Yeah, these were tough times!
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Well you know if I could get the damn SDRAM chips to go into my ear and interface them properly with my brain I probably would not forget things quite so often...
...with something really insightful, but I completely forgot what I was going to say. Damn it... -elan
ironic that the only reason they're remembered now is because they were written down? :)
- "yes but can you hit someone over the head with a rolled up internet?" -Foxtrot
The emphasis is on task-based learning and goal-oriented teaching. Kids are being taught how to think, instead of what to think, out of some liberal notion that we shouldn't make their beliefs conform to our own experienced ones.
That isnt what I see in schools today. Schools today base almost their entire curriculum off of what is required in standardized tests, chosen by the state. These kids are taught exactly what you say they aren't. They are taught what 'experienced beliefs' say they shoud be learning. I my opinion, this fosters the loss of memory due to gadgets like pdas, computers, etc. If you are taught to memorize, and taught a limited set of skills, then using a pda makes it easier to not remember things. Let the pda memorize it for you.
If kids were instead taught how to think, how to learn, and how to educate themselves (which you apparently think is a bad idea), then they wont rely so heavily on the gimmick of memorization, and are more likely to actually learn things, rather than just memorize. there is a diffference.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
So some doctor thinks PDAs make young people stupid, since they don't have to remembers as much. Stupidity isn't memory: it's intelligence. That's aptitude, Doc. What you mean to say is "PDAs mean young people don't have to remember as much." Now who's stupid? Yeah, you.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
My dad used to be able to spit out news stories of people hacking their pencil to run BSD, and then Beowulf-ing them. Since I subscribed to /., I havn't had the brains to ping my shoelaces!
Damn you CmdrTaco! You are ruining the world.
-Spackler
PS:I would have written that in BOLD, but I couldn't find my palm pilot to lookup the HTML code!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Why in the heck does a lack of memory equal stupidity? Does that mean that the autistics who can remember conversations/books vertabim are hyperintellegent? What crap. ::sigh::), but it is kind of disturbing.
That said, I have been using a computer for most of my bookkeeping/writing/calculating for the last 10 or so years, and I've noticed that my spelling and 'in the head' math has gone into the toilet. This isn't a turrible thing because I have adaptive devyces(get it?
Of course, I'm a better thinker now and my papers have become more consise and intelligent (this post notwithstanding) because I don't have to concentrate on layout or spelling, I can put the entirety of my brainpower to use getting my point across.
The other side of the coin says that our children and thier children are going to have a piss-poor understanding of how the mechanics of the language work, and will subsequently not be able to make themselves easily understood.
But, of course, I isn't a scietficist.
Brant
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
I think the researches noticed this trend and came up with a theroy they could shock people with so they would get in newspapers (and ultimatley get research grants I'm sure). Such broad statements as "Young people today are becoming stupid." are at BEST ageism and demonstrate a bias of some sort. A real scientist would have said, "Our studies apear to show that the people in their 20's are at higher risk for memory disorders then previous generations."
*IF* the hypothesis is true -- that younger people do have a higher incendence of memory disorders, then theres still absolutley no evidence that computers, pda's, or any other device is at fault. It could as easily be attribuatable to polution, acid rain, mad cow disease, the point being that they have no proof at all other then conjecture.
OD
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Remembering trivial details is not a sign of intelligence. I know people who can lots of trivial details, but who could not solve a problem to save their lives. Problem solving is intelligence, as demonstrated by Albert Einstein. Problem solving is what people get paid big money to do. That's something to remember.
If you were posting this anonymously, I would dismiss it as a troll and figure the Score: 5 to be moderator error. But as you are not, I consider it to be the most subtle satire I've seen on Slashdot.
... and other trivial applications of human talents, etc.) what you were trying to accomplish. Even pandering to your audience; this is a joke you EXPECTED to be dismissed! I can see you laughing all the way down the comment list.
:D
In fact, had it not been for your closing line - and fulfill our promises of greatness - I would have not re-read the piece and realized (The best minds of my day were like that and arts
If, however, this was an earnest commentary on what you believe, you have failed. Horribly. I suggest you head back to school and pick up some communication skills - something perhaps left out of your comprehensive fact-based education?
Cheers,
levine
Homer: Oh Lisa, you and your stories! Bart is a vampire. Beer kills brain cells. Now lets go back to that building... thingy... where our beds and TV... is.
"I'm making perfect sense, you're just not keeping up."
In any case, the article sounds a bit overblown to me. Of the people I know who use computers or PDAs to store lots of information, none of them has anything near the memory problems that are described in that article. In fact, the people I know who use the devices actually have quite keen memories, both short & long term.
One in ten people forgetting where they are going, etc? Because of overuse of a PDA? If this is even true, it sounds like there might be some other factors involved there (stress of IT-heavy workers?).
I have always had utterly horrible handwriting. It is pretty much due to the fact that I think far faster than I can write, and attempting to catch up with the writing hand results in crabby, unreadable cursive lettering that I can't decipher later.
Working with the Palm's character recognition has changed my handwriting somewhat-
One, I write larger letters.
Two, I write more slowly.
Three, I rely on block letters more often.
All of these put together generally result in handwriting that is readable by others simply because I've taken the time to make it so instead of screaming ahead. Things which I've written (undrafted) on the Palm are also slightly better constructed than a good deal of my keyboard-written things, simply because I'm thinking about it more.
If I were to take quick notes I'd probably rely on a keyboard of some sort, as Graffiti does slow me down to a level that can't be used to take live notes (although I've been experimenting with shorthand, and this might make things easier in general.)
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
When I was a kid I sure wished I had a laptop and a PDA, so I could read what I wrote, catch everything the teachers said, and not drift off.
Dude. Pencil, paper. Ta-dah!
Yeesh.
Ah, yes, of course. Science has been progressing by revelation for a couple of hundred years!
Alright, now you really are trolling
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
The tides ebb and flow
to polish stones of knowledge.
Who again am I?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I guess PDAs are valuable because nowadays we have more items to remember. Everybody seems to have several phone numbers (home, business, mobiles), fax numbers, pager numbers, instant messaging numbers, email addresses, you name it. I was never able to remember that kind of information...
Technology is advancing. How long before everyone gets a palm pilot type memory device implanted permanantly? I know I'd be close to the front of that line.
So if we scorn the use of technology to enhance our memories, will we be unprepared when it becomes very simple to "add" a few SIMMS and never forget that first kiss, or how about someone else's first kiss?
Few people know how to kill their own supper... this article is complaining about the same type of "loss of skill" which is part of our evolution.
Krispy Cream is people
Money spent on art over the last few decades in our schools has dwindled down to next to nothing.
Art is integral to society. Let's not forget that art and technology are inextricably intertwined. When humans were running around in loincloths with spears, they were drawing on cave walls, trying to understand the world in which they lived.
Some of the greatest minds in human history - people like DaVinci and Jefferson, were versed in the arts and technology. In DaVinci's case, they were inextricable.
Without the art in industrial design, there would be no Palm devices, no military camouflage (yes, artists came up with the idea of camouflaging ships in WWI). I could go on and on about the benefits of art in practical terms, but that ignores the larger benefits.
Art is part of being a human being. Without art, without personal expression, life is soulless. Art is what makes imagination real. Greatness is not just measured by how well someone knows their multiplication tables.
I agree that we need to improve how we teach children, but rote memorization of facts at the expense of art and other "trivial" subjects (do you consider music to be art?) is not the answer.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The notion of info overload is empty. Information density is fractal, and scales across the ranges of our senses and concerns - there is always more than we could ever take in. Consider an ancestor in a tropical rain forest - great density of information there. All wilderness contains a great density of info - look at the culture of the Australian aboriginals, their song lines, even in the desert. Consider the information density on the streets of NY or London today - not much different (or different in its fractal distribution) than that in those same cities 300 years ago, or ancient Rome - and on a scale approaching natural wilderness. If anything perhaps our cities are a bit less info dense now, more simplified by modern streamlining of life, style, option and opportunity.
... there's never too much, the doors of perception have evolved wonderful filters to assure our minds are not over-illuminated (and given us wonderful internal and external means to adjust those filters).
The only place where information density differs from normal ranges for the human species over its development is in certain suburban tracts, where the uniformity of housing, landscaping and occupants presents a sterilization where those factors of wildness present in both deep countryside and deep city have been partially eliminated. For these info-deprived citizens, we pipe the weak signals of our media. But the richest media presentation only approximates the density a wilderness has for a species involved in survival there, and the lack of pertinence to survival of much mediated info can only be partially compensated for by a BFG.
So: Was it their PDAs? Or were they raised in the steriler reaches of suburbia, with schooling that focused on far simpler questions than are involved in prioritizing among the richness of a full city or country life? Did their parents always drive them around rather than sending them off on their own to learn exploration - and the consequent opportunities and dangers? Were they raised to believe that all answers are in some book, or computer, or PDA, so that physical presence in the world, attention to its details across its fractal ranges, is destraction from the primary task of looking up these answers?
Information overload? Sit in a mountain meadow in spring and tell me about overload! Information is delicious, and comfortable, and precious
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
If people are no longer exercising their memories at all because they can rely on PDAs and other tools, certainly their memories will atrophy. However, I know a significant number of people who use various tools to keep track of large bodies of information that has no intrinsic significance in order to free themselves to learn things that are useful to them.
As an example, I stopped trying to remember my parents' phone number the first time they moved after I left home. The only importance that sequence of digits has is a way to reach them. But I still take the time to remember the names of their friends and neighbors at each new home. I've met several of them. They are important. I don't bother remembering things that I can look up when I need them, but I give more attention to things I may need to know when I can't consult my secondary storage.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
If there *is* any truth to this article, there's still no good evidence that PDAs have any relevance. I think a more likely cause would be information overload. When, before the internet, could you get so much interesting and relevant information so fast? The library would be the closest thing, and that takes a lot of time looking up books, and the information within is generally years stale.
Now on the internet I have information relevant to any query available, and TONS of it. Not to mention all the news I care about available mailed to my e-mail address, or accessed from my bookmarked sites.
Maybe for the first time in history people are filling up their memory before their old enough to blame it on disease..
This reminds me of that one quote, from that one guy...
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Rebel: I hate math! - all we ever do is algorithms.
Conformist: But they are gonna slap me with an F if I don't do these gazillion problems by Wednesday!
Rebel: How is the darn thing ever used in real life?
Conformist: And mom and dad are gonna ground me if I get an F!
Rebel: Maybe I should learn just enough to get by - I will have more time for this cool robot that I am building.
The bare truth - schools don't encourage curiosity outside of the curriculum and do not provide an environment where failure results in learning new models/patterns/skills. Think about how people learn - babies will keep trying to get up and walk until they succeed. Falls and bruises will not hold them back. Why do we let schools "beat and bruise" our minds till we don't know any better? When was the last time when getting a "D" or "F" was considered a success? Go and explain everybody that you actually learned something along the way.
Now I understand this "wacko" teacher I had in college - he would give us like 100 calculus problems to solve overnight. The conformists would moan and groan and go home and actually solve the crap out of all of them. Some of us would solve a couple, get the gist of it and move on with our lives. We would devote more time to fun projects, programming, reading or whatever - next day we would come up to the prof and tell him all about it. He never even asked about the homeworks from the previous day. But he would get all excited about things that we find interesting and are passionate about.
Enough of putting kids in a mold!
I bet people said this about books in the middle ages. I think there is a difference between not being able to remember things, and not memorizing it in the first place. Sure people used to memorize the entire bible, but now they don't because they don't have to. That doesn't mean that they can't if they tried.
You have a point, but you've gone way off the deep end with it. Your point is simply, someone who has well-developed memorization skills has a huge advantage, and we shouldn't neglect developing memorization abilities in kids.
That said, it's still true that it's more important to learn how to think, then it is to memorize some facts.
The solution? Engage kids in activities that develop their brain, as opposed to their mind. Treat the brain as an organ, much like muscle, that grows stronger from exercise. Memorization games, visualization games (such as chess), language games, etc. Work the mind like a muscle, and it will develop all the skills it needs. Give it a rich environment, and it will learn lots of knowledge, and retain it, too.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
They haven't been implemented because they don't work, and not the other way around. The usual liberal mantra is to throw more money at it and just "try harder". It's a waste of resources and a waste of time.
You don't seem to think that teachers investigate their teaching methods before they implement them. That's an insult to teachers, in my opinion. Back in the day, they were the most respected branch of the public sector because of the leadership and influence they held over our children. They still do, in spite of what you're claiming.
How can you expect teachers to thrive if you won't give them the respect they are due? That's the question you should be asking.
Read the rest of this comment...
By using IP addresses;
"Text URL's are for sissies!" -FoxTrot
"Ummmm..."
It's so true. So that's why half my users write down their passwords and keep them within 2 feet of their computers.
What was the topic again?
Cue The Sun...
Wow, a round of applause for this, this must be one of the ten greatest trolls ever on slashdot. Look at all the responses, got modded +5 insightful, and not a single post identifying it as a troll yet.
Bravo!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I seriously can't credit this report unless I see a scientific paper with the data. There _is_ evidence that a rich environment improves cognition and memory, so I suspect some other cause--perhaps increased exposure to neuroactive substances or carbon monoxide, or increased stress-related anxiety. Alternatively, there may be some environmental pollutant entering via the olfactory system and damaging the memory systems.
The parent did not specify what general grades he was talking about, and I didn't either, which was my fault.
I agree with you in regards to the lower levels.
My comments mainly apply to middle school/highschool. However, teachers have the responsibility to link memorization with application. One common example are the multiplication tables.
(attention deficit disorder) Diagnosed, but it is simply a subcategory of a whole brace of culturally and biologically derived symptoms. When I was a kid I sure wished I had a laptop and a PDA, so I could read what I wrote, catch everything the teachers said, and not drift off.
That stuff sure helps me now. My brain is so active now because I can stay consistent on something for an extended period of time, without having a teacher to watch over me to do it!
What's wrong with shaping my environment to increase my effectiveness? And who would think that they are the only person who efficiently uses these tools, either? Most people who invest in these tools and continue to use them must find a use for them.
Maybe it's video games that breed stupidity? Some marketer deliberately harnessing eyeballs? Screw video games, lets focus on educational technology. My attention span certainly improved when I figured out all the useful, profitable, and interesting things I could do with a computer.
Wouldn't you think everyone else's would, too?
-perdida
Goat sex free since 2001
Hard to speak for you when I don't know who you are...or what you're saying!
What if, like many replies have said, using your memory less and less causes it to atrophy? I'm not saying it does, but it sounds like a reasonable assumtion to me.
/. should probably take the time to memorize the difference between to, too, and two -- then and than -- etc. ;-)
Consider this along with the observation (again, this may or may not be true) that our minds' architecture resembles that of von Neumann architecture where the program exists in the same memory as the data. Then, if the the mind's ability to retain data shrinks to zero, we may still be able to process efficiently (intelligence), but what would all of that processing power be acting upon?
While I generally hold that it is more important to understand how or why something is rather than simply memorizing facts or one-off solutions, I don't think that exercising our powers of memorization every now and then will cause us too much harm.
For example, some of the submitors to
"Perl 6 will give you the big knob." -Larry Wall
So lets get this straight: reading slashdot twice daily, is filling my mind with useless junk and making me unable to remember the phone numbers my cell phone remembers for me... Ok, I fully admit that my memory is going. I used to learn poems off by heart in minutes, and a good quotes would be on call at any time, now I stuggle. And I'm only 20. But on the otherhand if my mind is simultaneously being filled with other knowledge, it isn't that I'm losing my memory, or even that I'm not using my brain: my memory is being used to capacity, and, my brain no doubt constantly choosing what to keep and what to bin. Times have changed, and what we need to use our memories for is changing. Rather than needing phone numbers, and appointments, we have tools for these tasks (PDAs, cell phones, computers...) and keep our own memory for whatever we judge more important (whether it is upgrade locations on our favourite quake levels, c syntax, or the business deal we're working on). What's the big deal?
this signature is a virus, please make me your
Uh, Hi. I went to a Montessori school from Kindergarten through 5th grade before switching to a traditional public middle school. Quite contrary to your post, I was FAR ahead of my peers in terms of both my ability to learn, and in knowledge of discrete facts.
Since I had the opportunity to move at my own pace (instead of being held back by 30 other students in my class) I was exposed to far more material than your average 5th grader. I've found that this is a typical experience for a Montessori student.
-Harry
School teaches you how to conform to society. Church teaches religion, which teaches you how to understand the world as it really is, and how to better it and yourself. I've learned much more about logic, reasoning, and observation in church than in school.
And no, slashdot karma does NOT transfer to heaven.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Sure, I've got a terrible memory for many things, facilitated by my computer and fiancée. And I'm an advocate of teaching students the importance of problem solving and learning how to find the answer, rather than rote memorization of a fixed set of solutions.
BUT...operating with this mindset assumes that the information will be available. How many people here have had their DSL/Cable 'net connection go down and decide to call tech support to report it...only to discover that the only way you know how to find their phone number is from the web site? Certain information vital to your survival/lifestyle you need to memorize, in case the external sources become unavailable.
How screwed would Dr. Bowman have been in 2001 if he didn't know how to manually blow the explosive bolts, repressurize the airlock, etc. in 2001 when HAL went bye-bye? Don't become too dependent upon complex tools which may fail...
If it takes longer accurately to recall information than it does to find it - with references and additional information - then the loss of memory under discussion is perhaps not such a big deal after all.
My brother's essay on Google becoming an extension of his brain touches on this too.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Contrary to the article, I use my palm for storing short poems I want to memorize or formulae I need to review before a closed-notes, no-calculator test. I find that having the information with me absolutly everywhere allows me to effectively use my otherwise wasted time.
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
In order to develop kids' brain, you have to give it a nourishing environment. The nourishment you must provide is a rigorous feeding schedule of memorization. It's the basis and matrix for further development.
Games are what you should be playing with your friends. They're not what you should be doing in school. Doesn't school mean anything anymore? Do we just send our children and grandchildren to a massive festival of self-congratulatory intellectual masturbation? Where are the standards? Where is the discipline? How are we supposed to expect them to come out at the end with a sense for where they belong in society?
Teach them skills. Teach them how to put themselves towards useful ends. What you're advocating is the complete abdication of our role as parents and grandparents.
Read the rest of this comment...
Was this study peer reviewed? Or did the researchers forget that part?
Seriously, this is only one, small study. I'd like to see what data is being used as a baseline, especially when hearing claims like, "In the past two years, more people in their twenties and thirties have presented themselves with memory impairment," as Dr Takashi Tsukiyama is quoted in the article. Did he participate in the research? Or is he some random MD?
Finally, what, if any, link was found for computerization of personal data being the cause of the reported memory loss? computerized PIMs and paper-based day planners have been around for a long time, and nobody's mentioned those in peer-reviewed journals claiming they cause memory loss... Other than portablility, how are PDAs different from PIMs, and other than computerization, how are PDAs different than day planners?
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
If you're serious? Well, to paraphrase Londo Molari, "Arrogance and stupidity, all in one nice package. How efficient of you!"
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
memory is like a muscle. the more it is used, the stronger it becomes. the fact that pda's and the such take a burden off our memory explicitly implies that memory "muscles" aren't being used, hence weaker memory. however, many minds have compensated by taking in larger amounts of other types of data. the fact that our brains have to store ten times the amount of information our parents had to outweighs the pda's influence beyond mentioning. it might hone a particular part of our memory, but the brain is still stronger than in previous generations.
Now, the simple fact is that all sorts of electronic devices do affect our mental abilities adversely, and in various ways. They do so through radiation, which heats the brain up, not a good thing. They can do so through the inherent way we use them. For example, Alzheimers has been linked to television - the rapid cut scenes of television mean that the visual part of our brain has to work overtime to completely regenrate its mental map of the world every few seconds. God knows what will happen to the computer game generation, who have to do it several times per second.
We just don't know enough about electronics to be really sure what is happening. We have only had electronics such as computers, televisions, PDA's and so forth for a couple of generations. We evolved to function in the African Savannah, with a much more sedate lifestyle, not to be running around with radiation punding into our brains and new stimuli and motivating forces every few seconds, as we do today, all the damn time.
We can't escape from the modern world, it is everywhere. What we need to do is make the modern world more natural, with the enlightened use of technology. But the corps and the government aren't interested in that, so how do we convince them? I just don't know. I am really beginning to despair. Especially when I read news like this.
It pisses me off.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
OK, let's face it. Before PDA arrived, there were things called databank. And long before databank, there were things called pen and paper. The same people using PDA now would be using either of them to take notes, people's names and phone numbers, etc., if Palm never was successful. Now why should be blame the lowly PDA and computer for memory loss? Our brains only have so much capacity; we're bound to forget some things when we have to memorize not only people's name and phone number, but home fax number, office phone number, office fax number, cell phone number, pager, office e-mail, personal e-mail, ICQ UIN, personal home page URL.. gosh, I can't even count the number of e-mail addresses I have!
Whenever remembering computer-related things, they come easily to me (programming languages, ect). I'm also pretty sure that my real life memory has been better because of computers. ;]
The one thing I have noticed is that sometimes I have a very inconsistent short term memory in that sometimes I can remember a whole conversation after having it, sometimes nothing.
Anyways, I think the moral of the story is that in today's high tech society we can no longer depend on our own memory, so get PDA...
Scientists report, based on one badly performed and error ridden study, that 1/10 Japanese workers suffers from memory loss, but are considerably more relaxed and happy. A fellow who used to be a salesman was reported as saying "Yeah, I really couldn't remember why I what I was trying to sell anymore, ya know? It sorta had no meaning to me anymore, no depth. I went to a doctor to appease the company (and secure a nice disability check), but man, thank god I'm done with that job".
David Andre
dandre@cs.berkeley.edu
Keep it in perspective. We must have priorities.
If money is scarce, then we must have stricter priorities. Scarce quantities must be rationed, lest we not produce the results we intend. If we have the choice between teaching people how to read or teaching them how to draw, then we have a duty to teach them how to read. Literacy is of paramount importance. If we have a choice between teaching them how to do math and teaching them how to play music, then we have an obligation to teach them how to do math. Math skills are of paramount importance.
You're being unrealistic, here. You're saying we should do everything. We simply cannot. We must have our priorities, and the responsible choice is to put extraneous subjects like music and arts lower on our list of priorities than important subjects like reading and maths.
Read the rest of this comment...
As a simpler version, how many of you remember the phone numbers that you have on speed-dial on your primary phone? Now this is just anecdotal, of course, but I've got a friend who started using speed dial a few years ago and quickly added all of his numbers to his primary phone. These days, not only does he have trouble remembering the numbers on the speed dial, he admits that he has more trouble remembering NEW phone numbers as well. As easy as it is to dismiss this out of hand, I'd definitely say it's worthy of further study, even if the results of that indicate that something in your lifestyle is *gasp* detrimental to you.
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
I'm posting this at the risk of seeming like a reactionary fruitcake, but make your own decisions:
Also check http://www.dorway.com/ for extensive background information.
- US Air Force pilots are not allowed to consume Aspertame
- More than 10,000 food products contain Aspertame, everything from mints to soda to cereal.
- When heated above 86 F (30 C) Nutrasweet turns to Methanol (wood alcohol) This then digests as formaldehyde and Formic Acid.
- The two main ingredients of Nutrasweet are: Phenylalanine and aspartic acid which are essentially natural, however are never found independent of other amino acids.
- May cause autism by affecting unborn children (cases of autism has been on the rise for the past 20 years)
- in 1996, 60 minutes showed a porportional rise between brain tumors in the US and use of Aspertame in the US since 1981. Why has this never been mentioned in the recent cell-phone cancer scare?
Someone scanned what claims to be a Department of Health and Human Services paper cataloging symptoms reported to the FDA.Additionally, these are the "92 symptoms" the FDA knew were associated with Aspertame when they approved it. These were discovered in an FDA document brought to light thanks to The Freedom of Information Act.
The things that I do pass off completely on the palm are cd track lists, directory contents, and rarely-used phone numbers, none of which I would store in my brain otherwise. If a person starts to use the palm to keep track of their friends' numbers, or of the locations of their weekly classes, then I might start to worry about their memory -- but otherwise, it's a boon not to have to remember trivia -- who thinks we should give up DNS service so that people will have to develop better memory for dotted quads?
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
GROWING numbers of people in their twenties and thirties are suffering from severe memory loss because of increasing reliance on books and other word storage devices, according to new research.
Sufferers complain they are unable to recall names, written words or appointments, and in some cases have had to give up their jobs.
Doctors are blaming paper books, personal organisers and road maps. They claim these sophisticated information devices lead to diminished use of the brain to work out problems and inflict "information overload" that makes it difficult to distinguish between important and unimportant facts.
One researcher commented, "Why, in my day we could memorize the entire Odyssey! All we had was the 'rosy fingered dawn' to help us. Kids these days!"
Give us a break!
The real reason the doc cited was 'information overload'. I recall hearing a story about one poor fellow in a cisco training class. After 2 days of learning the ins and outs of cisco IOS and routing, he held his head between his hands and left the room crying 'BUFFER OVERFLOW! BUFFER OVERFLOW!'
Never before in the recorded history of man has the ability to view information exceeded man's ability to deal with it. Until the information age, that is. If we could just delete all the comercials from life, I'll bet people could 'cope' a lot better too!
Please, everyone, say it with me: The ability to remember facts does not equal the ability to think, to solve problems, etc. The trait being discussed was memory. If the doctor had said 'Young people today are becoming scatterbrained' that would be one thing, but this is just silly.
Sorry, this is just a pet peeve of mine.
Lets see Mr Troll, today I've earned my company £1000 net of my pay. But I've cost them £1.50 on personal calls. Oh no I don't conform. I must be sacked.
Twat.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
The problem with anecdotes is that they're precisely that: anecdotes. A single datum in a vast world of contradictory stories. I'll share one of my own, if you want.
But getting back on point: teaching people what to think is the only way our species can survive in the new millennium. We only live on this earth for eighty years or so. There's far too little precious time to reinvent the wheel by having each person perform the same elementary experiment or reading of primary sources. Heck, kids can't even manage to do the reading as it is -- they'd rather read the cliff notes.
Teaching them what to think is the only way to end this vicious cycle. Teach them what we already know to be true so that they may be freed up to discover what we do not yet know. That's what you guys like to call the "open source" method, and as philosophies go, it's one of the better ones. Don't reinvent the wheel. Build on what your forefathers built.
Read the rest of this comment...
Delete all of your phone numbers (after memorizing them), and then use your PDA just to play games.
The other reason that people think the next generation are dumber is because they are not dosed with the same general level of influence as their parents. We don't have the sort of general knowledge to live in our parent's day, and we do not instill the general knowledge to allow our kids to live in our age. They've got their own problems to deal with.
The os2fan thinks that people are not getting enough REXX, and she would have this as a compulsory subject as far as seventh grade. Many things os2fan knows comes from people doing things that she would never have dreamed of doing, like putting equal signs in file names.
But os2fan is a dinosaur from 1999, and there has been a whole year gone on in the IT world. So she is wildly out of date :( She has learnt really basic HTML, though, and scares people by typing up web pages directly in the DOS E Editor.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
And don't ever teach my kids. I honestly wonder how someone can actually say "We don't need the fundamentals." If someone didn't sit you down and teach you how to sound out letters, you wouldn't be writing that post or arguing anything at all, Mr. Instantaneous Talented Genius. Society runs on memories and communication... whether it be literary or mathematical. Your bloodline will go the way of the Dodo if you keep that attitude up. So do me a favor, and get out of the way of the ones that are not too lazy to be taught. And stay away from my kids and everyone else's before you teach them that they don't need math if they pray to the Sky-Wolf spirit every night.
I recently wrote a short story on kuro5hin about a related issue: what happens to us when we don't need memory at all, since we can get all required information from the web. The article can be found here.
-- MMM"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
it's sad as hell, but i never remember anyone's phone number anymore, and when my cell phone battery dies, i'm shit out of luck.
___________________________
http://www.hyperpoem.net
hyperpoem.net
Agreed. The arrogance and disregardance of the arts displayed by some science-types can be rather annoying. Artwork (or should I say good artwork) is an expression of creativity, and true creativity is something beautiful and something to be striven for. Eistein himself was said to have played the violen at times to help him think. What is needed is balance; the mind needs to be stirred and exercised in every possible way.
Correction, if a person makes 5 phone calls a week, and 4 are personal, they are getting fired.
Well, I guess when you graduate from managing a general retail mall outlet, you'll develop some sense of perspective. I've never been fired. I'm under 30, I make over $100k a year, drive my own car, live under my own roof and pay my own bills. Bottom line is the productivity I provide justifies my salary and justifies 5 minutes of non-work phone calls a day. And I grew up in a lower middle class family, so spoiled white surbanite slashbot really doesn't apply here. But then we get back to the subject of you being a presumptious asshole.
>According to this article in the Sunday Times an
>increasing number of people in their twenties and
>thirties are suffering from severe memory loss.
>Doctors blame this problem on their over relience
>on PDAs and computers
Ahh! Computers are destroying my brain cells
>for holding information for them.
Never mind.
--
That's right:
"A creative mind does not accept the process of memorization",
Albert Einstein
What? The use of repetition to establish rhythm is now verboten? I consider it a threat to my craft to have limits placed so arbitrarily: "Here, and no farther."
Fuck that.
I'm gonna do what I damn well please. Because I have that choice, and I'm me.
there is no such word as troll.
there is no such word as troll.
there is no such word as troll.
there is no such word as troll.
there is no such word.
there is no such.
there is no.
there is.
so there.
thex23
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
Notice the closest we come to any hard data in this article is a "preliminary study" - a study that wasn't randomized, blinded or controled (like a lot of Japanese medical research, but thats a different issue.)
The rest of the article is hyberbole and conjecture -- but ends with a comment from the only expert cited in the article that in reality says the exact opposite from the thesis of the article (people are forgetting because they are storing too much crap that should be externally stored.)
This is simple journalistic sensationalism. It has no place here.
+--------------------- You idiot! I told you we were facing the wrong way!
Pretty soon, everyone will forget where they put their PDA, thus gaining their memory back.
"When the going gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro." - HST
Please let me know if this is true, right now it is hearsay, but pertinent hearsay.
At a social gathering, a reporter walked up to Einstein and asked him what the speed of light was. Einstein replied that he didn't know.
The report was a taken back, for he was supposedly talking to the smartest person alive and yet Einstein didn't have the answer to a question he must surely know. He asked Einstein why he didn't know and Einstein told the reporter, "if I needed to know, I know where to look."
While our ability to remember some things might be diminishing, at least with PDA's, it allows us to get to the information we desire. We might not know the answer right off but we know where to look for it.
As long as I can remember not to eat yellow snow I think I'm going to be ok.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
out of the 400 something posts that I have seen in regard to this subject not one mentioned that it might be possible that we are all suffering from too much information? with the invention of the internet the ammount of information that our brains process everyday has been increased 10 fold. our information has to assign some element of priority to everything that passes through our brains because not everything can be held there. and the information that we process now has no priority. I would write more but im writing from work so pardon the improv. READ THE BOOK DATASMOG
drug law enforcement is modern day witch hunting.
It's a well-observed phenomenon that people who are better at learning abstract ideas are poorer at remembering discrete details. Einstein had trouble remembering his own street address and phone number. I suspect that the majority of people who own PDAs have the more abstract kind of memory and therefore use the PDA to suppliment their weaker concrete memory.
Several of my great-grandparents were born in this country. However, from my original post, you have no idea which country I'm from. Keep guessing. For all I know, you're referring to India. I mean, IBM has a few offices there.
When I said things have been constant, I meant only that our methodologies have not significantly changed and that learning continues on. Your very criticism was based on a belief that the methodologies of today are inferior to those of the past. Are you now saying that they sure as hell should be better, or we've failed? By your own logic then, we've failed.
By using the same or similar methodologies, we only build upon the past. Haven't you ever heard the phrase "to stand on the shoulders of giants?" Apparently not. As for your earlier posts detailing that arts and classical studies were the only worthwhile persuits, it makes me wonder... why the hell are you posting a social commentary rant on slashdot? That seems the very opposite of your goals.
I also take offense to calling me "son." Quite frankly, by the context of my post I left no indication of my sex, and only slight hints of my age.
Oh, and the phrase you want is "The status quo is not an option." It rings much truer than saying it is not a choice.
Damn, I forgot what I was going to say...
"pr0n": An anagram of "porn," possibly indicating the use of pornography. - www.microsoft.com
... we eventually wetwire computers to our brains, where we can store (or upload/download) whatever information we want. Then as we rely more and more on the computer part of our brains to remember information we might really see some long term deterimental effects...
:)
... not to mention the creepyness of us all going Borg
--
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
Wanker.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
I love my PDA. I use it to store around 300 names, addresses, phone numbers, weeks of appointments, and a myriad of other things. How much of this information do I use reguraly? Almost none. However, the important stuff such as family's birthdays, my anniversary, phone numbers of those I use often are remembered. Why, off the top of my head, would I need to know my college roommate for a semester's telephone number off the top of my head? I don't. That's why it's in my PDA. I have better things to remember.
And just because a trend of memory lapses happens to coincide with the increased usage doesn't mean anything. Before Palms, Visors, et al, they had their little day runner planners and such. It's a very flawed cause and effect statement. It's almost like taking the information that killings and ice cream in a 3 month period in New York increased at the same rate, leading someone to believe that ice cream induces homicidal fervor. Who cares if those 3 months are June, July, and August. Utter BS.
BigCat79
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
It's not just kids' memories, though they're the ones who are feeling the brunt of it, having spent the most time in the environment our society has created for them and for us. People everywhere have been experiencing deteriorating memories, and I'd say it has to do with how we teach them in school.
It used to be that you'd learn facts in school. You'd get a big textbook or two and carry it around in your burlap sack, go to classes and get orally quizzed on your ability to recall facts, and go home and get the snot beaten out of you if you didn't show any progress. You had to learn how to recall trivial things, because it was the only way to survive and prosper. The best minds of my day were like that.
Today? The emphasis is on task-based learning and goal-oriented teaching. Kids are being taught how to think, instead of what to think, out of some liberal notion that we shouldn't make their beliefs conform to our own experienced ones. It sounds great on paper, but in reality, kids are not only failing to learn how to think, they don't even know what to think about anymore. This is why you see much greater emphasis on arts and other trivial applications of human talents, instead of engineering and classical studies. For better or worse, we're breeding a generation of mental invalids.
You can't teach a whole generation to drive society by encouraging them to feel about driving. You have to give them rigid rules and test them on their grasp thereof. And if they don't conform, then you make them conform. It's not totalitarianism; it's just common sense.
What's needed is a better combination of the two methods. We should insist that our children learn both what and how to think. Only that way can we insure that the new generations can learn from my generation's mistakes and fulfill our promises of greatness.
Read the rest of this comment...
Things I sometimes can't remember:
My age, my phone number, peoples names.
It's true. I have incorrectly given my age when asked, several times. If not for my wife standing there to correct me I would have been oblivious to the error.
So I forget some stuff, big deal. All of those things are unimportant to me anyway, so who cares?
I think that most of you will agree that this type of attitude is common in the geek community. Of course the doctor blames this on the first thing he thinks of, namely PDA's. Newsflash: I don't use a PDA and never have. I never use my computer or any tech gadgets to store information because I'm not that organized, I usually just forget the info, heh.
Hrm... you know, doctors these days are getting really stupid.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Really, is this any different than having a high end graphics card offload processing from the CPU so that it can concern itself with more generic processing? Yes, one could consider personal information management software as a memory sink for the human brain; however, one could also contend that such artifacts abstract the more trivial elements of our lives out of our cognitive processes thereby providing more time to the mind to deal with more important matters. Rather than worrying about when to walk the dog or the time of your next meeting, you now have time to post comments /. or contemplate the cultural ramifications of PDAs and PIMs upon society.
;-)
RE: above
Don't you love self-referencing arguments?
Sure as hell has affected your memory of how to spell words! (headline has since been corrected :)
--
--hongpong.com
1) I don't see any data here on how many people historically had memory loss problems at that age. Maybe I missed it, but I only saw one anecdotal mention of a person "seeing an increase" in the number of such problem. Perhaps 1 in 10 people have been having severe memory problems between the ages of 20 and 35 since the dawn of time. God knows, I was born with them.
:)
2) If people are relying on their PDAs, then why is being unable to remember a phone number causing people to lose their jobs? Didn't they have the number in their PDA? No, seriously.
-Puk
Computers extend my memory. Computers remeber all of the stupid stuff I don't have to. Computers do all the stupid stuff I don't want to do. Example: I don't want to remember everyone's phone number in my department, nor do I have to thanks to the computer. I Don't LIKE to do taxes by hand, what does it? A computer. Does that mean my memory has gon to pot? Nope! I remember weird stuff like how to get out of a current recurrent bug in Linux or at work on a computer until it's fixed. I remember things like my son's birthday, my wife's birthday, our anniversary, my dad's birthday and all of my family's b-days. Now quick, ask me what year! I have NO idea when my dad was born. To me, no matter how old he is he will be dad. I remember things that MATTER. Why should I remember how some obscure command works when I always have a reference and when I look at said command it lights up in my head and I say BINGO! Books, computers and calculators are extension of my mind and help me think and analyse better. I guess that means anlysis is more important than rote learning huh? (They finally get it eh? :))
Gorkman
Have you seen the movie Memento? Plot Outline: A man, suffering from short-term memory loss, uses notes and tattoos to hunt down his wife's killer. Leonard's story is one of paranoia, vengeance and repetition. He has facts tattooed on his body to remind him. He has Polaroid photographs in his pocket to put names to faces: "Teddy. Don't listen to his lies. He's the one. Kill him." http://www.insideout.co.uk/films/m/memento.shtml
I ... can't ... remember!
As far as I remember, computer freaks are also people enclined to exhaust themselves and spend sleepless nights on their computer. It is a well known fact in neurobiology as well as neural networks (since it had already been proven): The brain, or any neural network, needs some inactivity time to reorganise itself properly, in order to optimise its selfconnectivity, thus making the equivalent of a garbage collection+defragmentation+relinking etc. This is critical because otherwise the "buffers" (actually there are no buffers in memory, because everything is stored in an holographic sort of way, i.e.: everything is superimposed -in this case, "buffers" refers to short term memory-) have to be freed up in order to be able to continuously be able to absorb data. Whenever the neural interconnectivity exceeds a certain level (that's when "buffers" are full) the ability for the brain to store info vanishes, and the neural network reaches a state of "catastrophic oblivion". Morality: geeks, jerks, nerds need to sleep a natural amount of time in order to achieve decent human performances. Also, it is good to consider spending some days/weeks of vacation without any computer on at least a yearly basis. You'd be suprised to see how you brain seems to work better after a few days out without these devices (looks like it exercise itself without letting you know about it). This is exactly the same thing for musicians: you need to give up your work from times to time to avoid saturation ;-)
PDAs have nothing to do with this. However, it is not bad to try to improve your memory, as well as you mental calculation abilities (especially in hex).
BTW: we already saw an article related to this a couple of weeks ago, which dealt with the lack of sleep and the performance decreasing that this caused.
I think the article should be retitled to "Using Microsoft products causes memory loss..." :-)
We have a well defined culture that is starting to revolve around technology. These tools are changing the way we choose to exist, and in a generation or two people will not understand how an individual could exist with out these tools. It is evolution of a sort, and is not much of a concern to me.
Another way to look at this is that as these tools develop people will either use them and benefit by their use, or not use them and not benefit by their lack. In the end if the tools make the people better able to function in the environments they live and work in, who cares what side effects the tools may have on a psychological level? It is simply Darwinian evolution in the modern world, deal with it.
There is growing evidence of Aspertame (main ingredient of Nutrasweet) affectting short term memory.
Search Google for Nutrasweet and memory loss and you'll get a huge listing. Not just health-food stores either, several university studies come up too.
This is not just a conspiracy-theorist, natural-foods idea, the evidence is compelling. Researchers are linking consumption of nutrasweet to the rise in Alzheimers disease and it would also justify the research in this article.
How much diet coke do you drink?
This is like "nine out of ten doctors recommend..." which usually means nine out of THESE SPECIFIC ten doctors recommend...
Sure there are some out there who might say that in their opinion, PDAs are making people dumber. That doesn't make them right. These are just unfounded scare tactics.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Was chronic marijuana use considered as a factor? What cultural characteristics were prominent in these people studied?
Goat sex free since 2001
From sitting in front of a monitor all day at work, to the tv at evenings in the home, to the cell phones we carry with us at all times, we are constantly surrounded by new bleeding edge technology. Most of the information we have on how techonlogy negatively effects our lives in anecdotal at best.
And even worse, any damning evidence that comes out is largely ignored by the media and the press, when it's not actively suppressed by the companies that make the techonology.
At a company I was consulting for, everyone was using instant messaging to talk with each other and their friends. At the direction of my employer, I started capturing and analyzing all the traffic.
The results were in one way startling, and in others exactly what you'd expect. 90% of the messages were not work related. Several people actually lost their jobs based on some of the things they were talking about.
Additionally, we realized that people were losing touch with their coworkers, because they can just instant message them a question instead of talking to them in person. This kind of distancing is not good in a work place, when you should really rely on your other coworkers.
I'm happy to say that instant messaging is now banned at that particular company. I like to feel like I made a positive difference. But that's just one damaging technology -- what about all the others?
Ben Schumin :-)
but don't forget that this is part of an ongoing process that we can trace back to the invention of the written word, and later, the rise of literacy. I can't remember phone numbers worth a damn, but I have developed the abililty to sort through a phone book pretty fast by way of ennumeration. There are draw-backs, but the incredible value of being able to store thoughts somewhere other than inside our heads is one of the foundation stones of Civilization. (yes, with a capital C, if I may) Also, these draw-backs are fairly minor, in the sense that idea storing devices haven't been around nearly long enough for them to have any effect on our evolution.
Instead of coming up with a novel linkage to PDAs and/or computers, a simpler explanation is that the people suffering memory loss are victims of sleep deprivation. Any number of factors could result in the loss of the crucial REM phase of sleep where memories are more permanently processed for retention. (For example, people might simply not be allocating enough sleep time to even reach the proper dream phase.) Notice that the observations were about a specific range of ages, people in their 20s and 30s. The only contribution of modern technology might be in the increased temptation to sacrifice sleep time for entertainment, a phenomena I suspect would hold true for television as much as for computers.
Having read a subset of these comments, it seems very much like programmers are using anecdotal evidence to refute doctors who are using anecdotal evidence
Can anyone please provide some URLs to actual research on memory, intelligence, and the links between the two?
Ah, fuck off. Go annoy someone else.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
Those Pocket PC's Running scheduling programs on CE (when they should be running pocketlinux, or better yet, running on palms) are the whole problem here. They BSOD and lose all of the data, and because the whole "microsoft conspiracy" (boogie boogie BOO!) is controlling the mass media, it's being blamed on people's memory. So blame microsoft, blame people's memory, because I'll blame anything that moves!
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
As one doctor succinctly put it, 'Young people today are becoming stupid.' I agree, and I'm a "young people"! I see it as an unfortunate sign of evolution. We're approaching a time when we don't have to remember anything on our own because everything is stored for us and the web will soon spawn walkthroughs for even the most simple tasks like feeding yourself or wiping your ass. Sure it's difficult to accept. You think cave people took it lightly when their toes shrank and they couldn't climb trees (at least that's my theory as to why we still have toes. They're just not as large and functionable any more) I bet they were pretty mad when Gronk couldn't scale that tree, but they lived on. Now it's little Steve who can't be separated from his palm pilot that society is complaining about. They're just jealous because THEY have to still think for themselves. I know I am. I don't want to think. It's my human nature to take the easiest way out, and I want someone else to do the thinking for me dangit!
I can only show you the door, you must be the one to walk through it.
First of all, you need something before you lose it. Lots of people these days are completely clueless, computer or no. Look at how many people don't know how to cook, instead just shooting radiation at their meals or going to a fast food place so they can have heart attacks in their 50s. Etc.
Me, I'm almost 18. I have some short term memory loss, had it for some time before I started using computers other than my old C64 (which is useless for storing info, IMHO, but a hell of a toy =). The only bad things that have happened to me because of computers is that my eyesight isn't perfect anymore, and my wrists are sore a lot (from typing, that's all...).
The idea that we are losing our memory from using computers is completely laughable to me.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
In 3rd grade I was required to memorize my multiplication tables to 20 * 20. Because I have this foundation knowledge my method of solving the sample problem is somewhat different from yours. By simple doubling of 7 * 12, then 7 * 24 (and the rest of the sample problem: 24 * 17) is trivial to do in my head, exactly as it would be done on paper.
The more foundation knowldege you can have in your head, the greater the range of how you can solve a given problem. Even though I could construct a method to solve this particular problem (as you did), it is more workable for me to apply an already existing method (the pencil and paper way) and use knowledge already existing in my head.
By foundation knowledge of course I mean things like the alphabet, powers of 2, multiplication tables, common logs, stat bonuses from the D&D 1st edition rules, etc. Data and simple methods for producing data.
I have hundreds of books, MSDN library CDs, features in my editor, web documentation, etc. that contain knowledge external to me that I can access as needed. Who wants to remember the order of fields in a struct tm. Who remembers all the args and their order to every win32 API function.
I also have plenty of information in muscle-memory: Telephone numbers, passwords, greetings, commonly used commands, etc. but a lot of this is now on a PDA. This information is never really possesed by me anyway. For example I have to listen to myself say a phone number and write it down to become aware of the contents of the number.
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The government is not my daddy.
I dunno, I dropped my visor a few months back, and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how life was without it. Result, I'm creating little databases here and there to try to keep myself in synch. It's time to get the thing repaired.
vsurfer
The words you're using are pretty powerful. Make sure you know how to use them. I'll deal with them in order.
racist I made no comment regarding the abilities or qualities of any races. That western classics are the foundation of our civilization, can you deny that? Did not the Turks and the Mongols invade Europe (the former stopped only at the gates of Vienna)? Are Chinese not the fastest growing ethnice group in Vancouver today? Chinese is now offered in the schools. And are not more than 1 out of 10 new tech. start-ups in Silicon Valley founded by Indians? They are here.
nazi I do not identify with that political fossil, one that fostered hate and committed murder.
anti-immigration Have I recommended that we close our borders or kick certain people out of this country?
conservative If by conservative you mean that I support corporations, am Christian or that I support the status quo, you are sadly mistaken.
anti-asian I have Asian friends -- my first fuck was a Korean girl studying German at my university. Don't preach to me. But you cannot deny the growing mongrolization of our culture - the greater asian, hispanic and african influences. To each his own ... they have their place. But to discount the achievements of our fore-father merely because they were white! What sort of racist trash is that, I ask you.
Feel free to elaborate upon your "good deal of experience both on the Web and in the real world." I think you probably need to gather a little more experience before you try to run with the big dogs. Try out the ESU (link below) and get that PC garbage out of your teeny teen mind.
Fight for Euro-American Student Rights!
Was this a peer reviewed study? What journal did it appear in? Was a coorelation between PDA use and memory loss found, or were the findings correlated with age. Was there a control group?
Newspapers should print proper citations...
No, they don't research new methods before implenting them. Do you know why? Because they don't implement new methods, nor are they given the time by the school administration to properly research new methods, anything new a teacher does is almost always on their own time. You have no idea how much inertia there is in the world of teaching. If you don't believe me, I have a whole slew of former National Science Foundation Teaching Scholars, who, upon entering their first year of teaching were chastised, written up, even fired for trying something new, something that educational researchers have shown to work! Insult or not, that is the way things are. And the idiot parents often lead the charge, because their kids aren't being taught the same way they were!
I do agree with your last statement, but sometimes the teachers themselves and the system they have to work in is their own worst enemy.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
I clicked on the hyperlink to read the article, only to find that I had forgotten what I was going to do with the jumble of text before my eyes! After this problem surfaced, a landslide of technical problems arose. Where's the 'back' button on my browser? What's this 'Slashdot' website thing? Who am I? How did I get here? What day is it? Help me, for I am stupid! DocMarten 'The vastness of space and time, and I end up here?!'
// the vastness of space and time, and I end up here?
See, older folk just don't recognize lazyness when they see it; they think it's just that we have bad memories. hah.
Now where did I put the upc for adultcheck.com...bah...I knew I shoulda organized these.
This is someone's idea of a story? There's nothing but anecdotal evidence here.
I could maybe see information overload. Over reliance on PDA's and computers and car navigation systems causing memory loss is a pretty stupid idea. One lady forgot how to remember what she read? Sounds like she has a visual learning problem to me.
Then again, who can forget that freaky kid from Tom Sawyer who memorized the entire Bible...
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I consider non-stupidness or wiseness (how ever you define it) as the ability to use references and search the correct data and use it in the best way possible. Ofcourse basic knowledge requires some memorising but still, true ability to use brain is to explore and use stored data internal or external of our brain capacity.
And yeah, i do have really bad memory but i still can get past mensa tests. But sometimes forget my cow-orkers names. Am i stupid ? I dont think so...
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yush
The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! What if they become ruffians? -- Bill Hicks
the vast amounts of information that we have to keep track of nowadays. With the fast-paced society we live in and all the bazillion little schedules and meetings and numbers and [dizzying amount of other trivial things], it's no wonder things get forgotten. It's not our lack of retention, it's that our memories haven't caught up with the influx of data. Plain and simple, we have a lot more things to remember than we used to, and it just doesn't all fit. Damn 640K limit.
This is not a Fugazi
I was interested in reading the article but figured I probably wouldn't be able to, since it was attributed to The Sunday Times, and I won't register for the New York Times site. Imagine my surprise when I clicked on the link anyway, and reached the article. Then I checked the single e-mail link on the piece and discovered we're talking about the London paper.
Specify the source, guys.
The shocking results of a new study announced today reveals that the youth of today have no ability to hunt and kill their own food.
One researcher was quoted as saying "How will the human race survive if they can't catch their own food?"
The results of the study point to the alarming increase in the use of technology and organized farming to reduce the reliance on hunting.
"It's like they expect they can just walk into a store and buy their food." An awestruck scientist noted.
Where are we headed to? Our own demise.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Memory loss isn't caused by PDAs. Just have to lay off smoking all the crack...
Every day, many poor slashdot readers are posting, but forget to read the article first!
Never seen it, but for about three minutes the other night and as always, K.R. was totally unimpressive. But the whole concept has suddenly become chillingly prophetic. (I've had serious forgetfullness my entire life, even before I became a cyberphilliac at 18. For instance it took me three minutes to remember the word "prophetic" above, even though I could flash on just about every scene in my life in which I'd used the word. I've always been labeled an absent minded professor.) It may not just be facts that are forgotten, but the ability to know or conclude that may be threatened. A great story in Analog many years ago (again, can't remember the title or author) featured a youngster who saved the tide of war, because he had rediscovered from scratch the art of mathematic, which had so long been handed over to the computers and hand calculators that humans could no longer even add two and two in their heads, nor imagine it to be possible. Electronic countermeasures didn't work on human brains, thus giving the advantage to those who knew their multiplication tables. There, two nice cautionary tales on this subject. But, does anyone ever even read this crap? Or will these words sit on the server or float through ftpspace until all the power goes down and the cockroaches are all that is left to read it?
I also disagree with the stipulation that because there is a finite amount of teaching that can be done in a school day, that art should be eliminated.
If mathematics, sciences, and literacy were taught in a more capable fashion, there would be room for the teaching of art. Our schools' problems are not primarily matters of limited funds or wasted time spent on art.
Having worked and volunteered at K-12 schools in Pittsburgh and DC, I can say that the quality of education received depends on ONE thing: Expectation
If we expect that our students will fail, if we don't set them up to succeed, if we don't push them hard and set high standards for them, they will fail.
Parents expect that their children will fail, and they fail. Teachers expect that the children in their classrooms will fail, so they fail. Our society as a whole says that our schools are terrible, and yet we do nothing to change the expectation for students and the schools they're in.
If we teach our children how to think critically, they will be able to adapt and learn throughout their entire lives. If we teach them the arts, they will be able to create. If we drill them to remember the exact date of the sinking of the USS Maine, or pi to the tenth digit, that may make us think we've taught them something, it may make it easier to quantify education, but it won't make them any smarter, nor will it make our society any better.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ