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Gadgets Have Taken Over For Our Brains
skotte writes "According to a Trinity College survey released Friday, the boom in mobiles and portable devices that store reams of personal information has created a generation incapable of memorizing simple things. In effect, the study argues, these devices have replaced our long-term memory capabilities. 'As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes. When it came to remembering important dates such as the birthdays of close family relatives, 87 per cent of those over the age of 50 could remember the details, compared with 40 per cent of those under the age of 30.'"
...but I forgot what it said.
Here, let me pull it up on my iPhone.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I've got no problem letting a device remind me when my mom's birthday is. That's what it's for.
Maybe we're forgetting al this stuff because
a) we know we don't need to remember it
b) we've displaced the storage space with the massive variety of passwords we need to remember these days
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
People can't multiply four digit numbers together in their heads anymore either. They don't have to. Einstein didn't know his phone number either, he said he could look it up. Who cares if you can't remember your Aunt Trudie's birthday? We have technology for these things.
It's important to remember that the brain can only retain so much. When overloaded, a new fact replaces an old one. Do you all forget the episode of Married With Children, when Kelly went on a sports trivia show? The only thing she knew before she prepared for it was that her dad scored four touchdowns in a single game. She crammed all sorts of knowledge into her head, and was totally kicking butt in the competition, until the final question. "What local hero scored four touchdowns in a single game?" She had forgotten.
It is important to realize that we have a limited number of brain cells. With technology, we can use fewer of them, and this is how it should be.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Fortunately for us, the brain is fairly adaptable, so losing the capacity to remember phone numbers might mean gaining in other capacities--capacities that can't be replicated by technology yet.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
These gadgets are doing exactly what they are supposed to: they are freeing us from the tedium of having to memorize and keep track of meaningless numbers, dates, and times. I don't see why that's a bad thing.
It is sad that people have to consult their freakign cell phones to recall their HOME PHONE NUMBER. My god.. I just wonder what is wrong with the parents who buy their eight year olds cell phones.. Make the kid get a job and buy their own phone. If that means they're eighteen before they get a phone, so be it. I am only nineteen and I am disgusted with my generation's lack of... well, everything.
They have no problem remembering them - after all that's what they use the devices for. Functionally it's the same thing as carrying them in your head, but now you can use the neurons for other things.
This is only going to get more extreme over time, bring on the implants already.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
"when it came to remembering important dates such as the birthdays of close family relatives"
what is important?
maybe that changes (too)
... it's merely that we don't need to memorize phone numbers and such. Personally, I'd rather focus my memorization on things that are more important than a 7-digit number that I'll only use once a month, at best.
I don't consider birthdays to be as important as my parents (and my parent's parents) do - so I don't bother trying to remember them.
If I know something is recorded somewhere else, I am less likely to remember it - why try to remember something that is easy to find?
No, I haven't rtfa, but what controls are in place to separate the conclusion of 'kids these days don't remember stuff good' and 'kids these days have different priorities'?
I find it debatable that such a loss actually exists. Their evidence seems a bit flimsy. The study only highlights that people are using their memory for different things, not that they have somehow lost it. I hope our ever-diminishing funds for basic scientific research didn't end up funding this crap. We're having enough of a problem funding science that needs to be done (thanks to our current president) without bozos like this cutting into our funds.
Sure...they can't remember their friends' phone numbers, but they memorize celebrities' hairstyles, dress, relationships, offspring, drama, and favorite brands of tampons?
That's nothing new. I totally stopped using calculators years ago when I caught a friend of mine adding 2+3 up on the command line of an Apple II, mid conversation. No, I kid you not, two plus three, and he'd only realised it when I pointed it out.
I think he's done me a favour , it made me aware very early on that the brain is like a muscle and needs exercising.
There is a sort of fast food trend in the media which mirrors this problem. Let's just believe the headline without spending any critical thought on what lies behind it - that's like hard work. The result is fairly evident..
Use it or lose it - in more ways than one..
Insert
My high-school English teacher made the same point back in about 1991 - there are three categories of information; things i know, things I know where to find out, and things I have no need to know. Only the first category is carried in the head.
The second category has grown enormously across time, and not just since the advent of computers and mobile phones. In the same way that books and other records eventually replaced oral history, people are simply choosing where to keep information
In fact, the process is largely unconscious, the brain manages its own chacheing..
The amount of information that people need to remember on a day to day basis has also grown quite a bit. So as to not be overwhelmed it's fine to keep devices to remind us of things, in fact they were created because of the rise in information in the first place.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Ok, so their study shows... ummm.. damn, I've forgotten. Just a second, I'll get my Blackberry...
This sig left intentionally blank.
Not enough sleep. The lack of sleep causes memory problems and insomnia is a growing sleep problem. I believe the average number of hours of sleep per night has been decreasing the last 50 years. Can't prove it. Although, look at the popularity of the latest sleep drugs.
Camping on quad since 1996.
...could be the answer. ;-)
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man's mind." - O.C. BibleIt's not that "kids" today have trouble memorizing anything, it's that the amount of data that all of has to sort through has become obscene. Some of my friends have hundreds of phone numbers in their contact book. How many people, aside from high profile Hollywood agents/actors/directors had hundreds of phone numbers for all of their friends/contacts? I think this new "memory loss" can be attributed to information overload more than people getting stupider.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
I don't understand the concept of needing to remember somthing that gadgets have been designed to remember for me.
We don't expect farmers to plant crops with their bare hands.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I'll just state the obvious by saying that they're comparing apples and oranges. They should be comparing today's Professor Roberston, who oversaw the research to mark the launch of Puzzler Brain Trainer Magazine, said that a series of five simple exercises a day can help to increase memory capacity. So the guy who's doing the experiment/ study is launching a magazine that aims to improve the memorization ability of its readers... Hmmmm.
"87 per cent of those over the age of 50 could remember the details, compared with 40 per cent of those under the age of 30"
Wow you mean the extra 20 years of repeating the same birthday dates helped them remember them, duh no surprises there really.
Excuse the language, but this thread has me both in stitches, and extremely worried indeed.
... so even if my Nokia does die on me, I can at least withdraw money, pay for a cab, and even call my wife from a payphone to tell her I'm going to be late.
So you "don't need to remember your home phone number" ?
And when the battery runs down on your portable "brain extension", wtf do you do then ?
Tech can be useful, but it's never going to be a replacement for the human memory, merely an aid.
I can rattle off my bank account, credit card, pin numbers, phone numbers of all my family and friends
You people need to get some perspective, you're so in love with your PDA's you've forgotten how to use your brains.
I have in my head up to 30 or more password for different emails, forums and other sites, computers, networks etc. Hell it might be even 50. And I keep changing them. So, it really depends on how you work.
Isn't this the issue really? A monolithic brain would be much faster in recollecting and using data. A microkernel brain (relying on gadgets for services) would have to deal with different gadgets to collect the same data and it would be use to access such devices. Not counting that different gadgets would not necessarily share data with each other (your laptop with your mp3 player, or with your PDA), immediately. So according to Linus, the old school of relying on a monolithic brain would probably be faster and probably more efficient, although a bit dirtier (misplaced wedding anniversaries, a known bug in the male population). After all it worked for centuries...
The old folks will obviously be better at remembering birthdays of all their family and friends because they've been to more of their birthday parties! As for the home phone number thing - I never call it and the only reason I have it is so I can use ADSL. Why should I remember it then? If you actually want to talk to me call my mobile, it's always by me.
"Men came off worse than women. Only 55 per cent of men could remember their wedding anniversary, compared to 90 per cent of women."
There are a whole bunch of things in that article that are not necessarily
anything to do with the hypothesis. The above is just a particularly egregious
example. Apart from men not caring as much about relationships, how much thought
does an average man put into thinking about the wedding beforehand compared
to his spouse, 10% would be my estimate, but that's a little on the high side.
In the rest of it, so older people remember birthdays better than younger people,
maybe that's because they have been giving presents for longer etc
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
My bet would be that gadgets haven't changed the chemical process of memory formation. I'd wager good money that people are just choosing to remember different things...but I guess that makes less of a sensational headline.
Even though some things can be easily looked up in a book, having committed the facts to memory gives certain advantages that are not obtained by just having them in a book. Do you want your airplane pilot looking up what the trim settings, or throttle settings are on the plane when he is landing? Do you want your surgeon having to look up where the sciatic or femoral nerve is in the middle of your hip replacement?
The answer is no. The retained knowledge of facts allows for a more thorough understanding of the facts, and allows for easier manipulation. I see this all the time with idiot cashiers who can't make change, and have to look up what the correct change is for something that costs $19.27 after I give them $20.02.
Ir retort to Feynman - I could easily look up F=MA in a basic physics book, as opposed to cluttering my mind with that useless formula.
My arguments will obviously trigger a response in fans of the rote memorization vs those of the concepts(why learn adding - we have calculators). Probably swining too far in either direction is unwise, and a healthy balance between the two is beneficial in learning.
..........FULL STOP.
Knowing all the muscles in a cat isn't pointless trivia. It's important if one wants to understand the evolutionary links between various animal species, as the evidence and basis for comparison is anatomy, in many cases. Just like math is the fundamental language of physics, the basic structure of the various organisms is fundamental to understanding the rest of biology. Even so, those students probably never learned cat anatomy per se, but were able to figure it out pretty easily from knowing the anatomy of other mammals and a little evolution theory.
That said, I agree that we aren't really losing our long term memory, we're just not using it for pointless information.
By "the media" you mean Slashdot? I think you've been here too long. You see, we're getting better; we read the headline AND the summary now!
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
My friends with cell phones, they aren't particularly attached to their phone numbers so each time they renew their contract they just get a new number instead of transferring it. They may even change provider depending on the cost. I'm not going to put the time into learning a 10 digit number that will change in 12 months. Compare that to even my own child hood, to call a friend I had to only remember 7 numbers tops and only 4 most of the time.
The other obvious difference is that prior to getting a cell phone, if I wanted to call someone I would look up their number and then punch it into the phone. With a cell phone, I scroll to their name and hit send. What is it, that term for reading something and then writing it again to help memory, rote memorization?
Birthdays are completely different. I'd forget my own if other people didn't remind me. I can remember the general time of year, sometimes even the week of the month for some people, but anything closer then that is reserved for immediate family only.
The ariticle is total bullsh... wait, what were we talking about again?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I have a pocketPC/cell phone that can do it and asterisk servers can sure do it. I set them up so when I use speed dial, I have the actual number spelled to me before the device or the server dials. It sure helps me remember the numbers just in case they put me in jail without my devices or similar situations ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
No, I might not remember people's birthdays, simply because there's no need for it, my mobile phone tracks it. However I have no problems remembering 50+ passwords, 10+ PINs and usernames and security phrases. I want a study on how many above 50 do that?
If everyone would just use metric (like they did where Einstein grew up) there'd be no use for such pointless memorisation. In fact, the reason why this conversion hasn't happened yet is because so people many people *did* bother to remember it (and are too obnoxious to let go and learn).
This could easily be seen as a trend propagated by large corporations' marketing coups over the past 60 years. Things like MTV promote a generation that doesn't really care about 'thinking' and we have the public consensus in the US that 'Smart people are lame and dorky, let's not be smart'. That certainly isn't something that happen to a species because of evolution - over the thousands of years of our recent development, it's always been the smartest ones that multiply the most, meanwhile the unintelligent ones of the society die out. This is no longer the case since modern society has started to take root in the world. Now, since the world mentality is so socialistic, thinking that everybody has the right to live and the right to multiply that we have our current stage of the human race. This current stage of the human race is de-evolving due to the fact that the ones with the weakest DNA are generally the poorest, and thus have the most children; also its the intelligent humans of today that have the least offspring, this is diametrically opposed to all of evolution of all life up until modern society has taken root. So it really seems that we have a problem in our society right now if this is true, right? Well, not quite. It turns out that it is very beneficial for the wealthier individuals to have around many people to essentially act as consumers to buy the products of the producers/wealthy/intelligent. It is interesting to ponder that this may be the original cause for our mentality of Right-of-Life and Right-of-Reproduction. *Note* I am definitely not saying that the weakest of society should be killed, but rather they should be encouraged to not produce as much for the benefit of the human race - also, there should be more encouragement for the healthiest individuals in society to reproduce. I think that all of the current science that we have been seeing points towards this hypothesis for the current model and stage of Human Evolution. Is anybody else thinking the same thing?
The reality is that the human story is all about using tools and technology to free our minds for more abstract purposes. If we can have the facts written in front of us, we are more likely to be able to draw defensible and novel inferences based on those facts. But the lack of importance of memorization comes directly from the work technology, which is really a systematic telling of how to do something, rather than merely memorizing a myriad of facts.
The truly disturbing thing about this story is that much research into cognitive development indicates that memorization is the lowest level of thinking, yet in average daily life memorization is overly prized and most people likely never advance beyond it. Stories like this, likely written to convince the masses that undated skills is unreasonable as the arbitrary skills of the past are always the best, merely perpetuates the myth that thinking is nor required and technology is something that happens once, and then nothing is ever discovered again. I am always very tickled when people say how fast technology is moving. Do we not consider the steam engine of 200 years ago? Or the printing press of 500 years ago? Or how about the stirrup 2000 years ago? All of these were disruptive influences which reduced the necessity of human effort for survival. Each of these offloaded some of our human effort onto machines, both physical and mental. For instance, the Jacquard loom automated not only the act of weaving, but the need to remember to switch our fibers. I am sure that all the skilled weavers who were put out of jobs decried that such a machine would be the end of civilization as we know it. And it thankfully was. I am very happy to have indoor plumbing and not have to pour my feces into the street.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Eventually, we will reach the point where we can simply implant a device into our heads and access the information that way. The only thing we have to fear is the "Blue Screen of Death", to be taken literally when that happens.
According to a Alexandria School of Business survey released 4000 years ago, the boom in papyrus that store reams of business listings has created a generation incapable of memorizing simple things. In effect, the study argues, these devices have replaced our long-term memory capabilities. 'As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall the amount of items in their store without resorting to their papyrus scrolls. When it came to remembering important dates such as the birthdays of business associates, 87 per cent of those over the age of 50 could remember the details, compared with 40 per cent of those under the age of 30.'
(Our brains adapt to make the most efficient use of our tools. Who would have thought?)
You could make the same argument about writing. If we never learned to write things down, we would probably have much better memories.
You could make a similar argument about any tool. If we never learned to use tools, we would probably all be stronger and more physically adept.
So, taking the article's logic to its (dumb) conclusion, we should never have come down from the trees. (Douglas Adams explored a similar argument about shoes.)
Would I rather be a tool using, literate person or a stone age person? You'll note that I'm past the age ever attained by most primitive people. I'm healthy. I'm comfortable. I think I'm much better off with my tools. The tools (including reading and writing) extend my capabilities, they don't diminish me.
Ahh, lonely ladyboys on /.
Even worse, there's some 'I don't mind' attitude in most posts, it looks like we have already give up the fight for our mental habilities.
What's in a sig?
Of course, Feynman could also have caught up so fast because he was an abnormally smart guy with decades of experience in assimilating and making sense of lots of new scientific/technical information. I generally agree with his point, and I'm against memorizing things instead of learning concepts, but there are times (and fields) when you just have to do a little bit of memorization in order to learn and *use* some concepts.
Honestly, I don't see how it's a big deal that I have a hard time remembering my own phone number. I had the same problem before I had gadgets to remember it for me, since I almost never call it. And somehow I think lots of people have always had difficulty remembering the birthdays of everybody in their family. It seems like me there's a little bit of grumpy old man attitude about the good old days going on here...and get off my lawn!
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
...by those on both sides of the debate.
Those who would decry technology focus too much on (relatively) meaningless data: "these people who have no desire to remember X do not remember X, whereas in the past, we needed to remember X and we did!" and its ilk.
Those who would defend technology spend their time pointing out the obvious flaws in that argument.
Both sides ignore the important question: will this affect us in other ways?
There are many things I do not NEED to do, but I do them because they benefit me in other ways. I do not NEED to be able to run a mile, or perform pushups, or solve Rubik's Cube or a Crossword. However, I do them because in doing so, I prepare myself for things to come.
Likewise, many everyday activities benefit us in similar ways: kids don't walk to school anymore, but the argument "they don't have to, since we have cars" doesn't hold up - walking has benefits beyond getting us somewhere.
The question is, then, whether our memories ARE getting worse. Certainly we depend less on them for certain types of data. Whether we are replacing this practise with other forms of mental exercise is a more complicated issue: is our use of the cellphone and computer to recall this stuff good practice for using tech down the line? I'll bet those people who can't remember their phone number would score better than the oldies in a 'technology competency' test, on average.
In other words, the issue is, as usual, far more complicated than TFA would have you believe. The data they've used to draw their conclusion is LAUGHABLE, yes, but that doesn't mean their claim is false.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
sort of, in his short story The Feeling of Power.
Didn't the 'smart alec' news reporter realise that Einstein had grown up with the metric system? Einstein had never had a reason to memorize how many feet were in a mile, and would naturally look it up if ever he needed it. I presume that the reporter would need to look up the captial cities of German states, but I would be terribly surprised if Einstein would have needed to.
In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. - Ursula Le Guin
Feynman was the most overhyped scientist of the twentieth century. I mean, what has he done that will be remembered in 100 years time? Yet people go on and on about how great he was.
-- Cheers!
Gadgets memorize YOU!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
welcome our new gadget overlords. i look forward to serving under their superior intelligence and memorization abilities and will focus my attention as directed. i just
hope they hold a soft spot in their digital hearts for us as we were the creators (of the first models anyways when we could still remember how to do stuff).
Uhh, lessee...
That bomb thingie
QED/that Nobel Prize thingie
Working with Gell-Mann at Cal Tech, on stuff leading up to those quark thingies
NASA's go-boom thingie in 1987
I'm sure there's more, but it's early and I'm lazy. His lecture series is already at the 30-40+ year mark. It would have been better if he trained the next generation (like Bethe, who (helped) train him). But one can't do everything...
Of course nothing has changed in the mechanics of the biology curriculum.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
When people are solving problems in particle physics in the year 2107, I reckon there are pretty good odds they'll begin by drawing diagrams of the interaction...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
"As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes."
:)
The home telephone number is nowhere near as important any more, simply because everybody has their own cellphone. I know I hardly ever use my landline, so of course it's going to be harder to remember the number.
"When it came to remembering important dates such as the birthdays of close family relatives, 87 per cent of those over the age of 50 could remember the details, compared with 40 per cent of those under the age of 30.'"
Those over the age of 50 have had at least 20 years longer to burn it into their memory
Depends on why you don't mind. I don't mind not remembering telephone numbers and birthdays, because I remember other things that I consider more important. I still do two-digit calculations in my head, but anything longer I'm likely to use dc or the Google calculator for. I can probably do some of these in my head, but I'm more likely to make a mistake, so I just do an approximation in my head and use that to validate the answer the machine gives me.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I don't think they've established a causal relationship here necessarily. I had horrible memory long before I ever owned a cell phone or PDA. I blame TV.
http://consc.net/papers/extended.html
A paper called 'The Extended Mind', much of which is devoted to arguing that there's no important difference between remembering something and using a diary, to the extent that having something written in the diary counts as believing it. (The technical term is 'extended cognition'; it has to do with more than just memory.) One of the questions on my 2nd Year undergrad. Philosophy exams read: '"I didn't cheat in the exam--these notes written on my arm are part of my mind!" Discuss.'
What the study is talking about is not new. As more and more information has been recorded and became more easily accessible the degree we use our long term memory has gotten weaker. In the series "Connections". Oh what now, 20 years ago? It talked about how people could preform long narratives, an oral tradition. It was an important skill to have but because very few people could write or read. Important information was past down orally. Now the show is dated but at the end of the show, He asked a question "how will it effect our memory and how we use information. It was at a time before PCs were a common tool let alone a device that we have in our pocket. His example of a portable computer was this Big 30 pound IBM Portable computer.
The important of knowing facts is totally related to ones profession. Facts are part of a collective knowledge that ones needs in order to communicate with once peers and develop new ideas. If you are having to look up critical facts then you are wasting time, where you could be coming up with new concepts.
A friend of mine once used his GPS handheld to fix the coordinates of the place he parked his car in an unknown city. At the end of the day he said "right, lets go back to the car" and pulled the GPS.. ahem.. actually he never put it down, and I doubt he actually saw much sights. Then his girlfriend said "I know where the car is! It's 5 blocks away from here". But he wouldn't trust her and we split - she said she would go straight to the car while we were waiting for a GPS fix. 20 mins latter we traced our way back to the car. His girfriend was already there - waiting for us :).
I'm pretty sure my gandma had a little book where she wrote down phone numbers, birthdays, etc.
No sig today...
It must be all that Brain Age they're playing in the senior homes.
Go on and laugh, floating disembodied head of Ryuta Kawashima. Laugh all the way to the bank.
I almost snorted tea out of my nose when I read this. Go watch a few hours of reruns of sitcoms from the '60's if you think this is a new phenomenon.
The article confuses "cannot remember" with "cannot memorize." It may be short-sighted to count on your Google calendar to remember your mom's birthday (or it may not--who knows? Perhaps soon it will interface directly with your onboard, subdermal external memory), but it's a long way from proving you've lost your long term memory.
But that's because I never give it to anyone. The only people who ever call me are my parents. I can remember my mobile number. Someone I know with an abysmal memory can remember his. It's about how often this infromation is useful.
I have forgotten my own phone number many times. I don't call it enough to remember, and i don't even have a Cell Phone
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
"It's interesting to note that absolutely nothing has changed in the mechanics of the biology curriculum since Feynman's time."
Well, that depends on what type of biology you are studying. Many of those studying biology have to memorize anatomy because they are studying to be doctors, not scientists. A doctor can't stop in the middle of surgery and say "I forgot which bone this is, wait a second while I look it up". They do have to memorize such stuff.
On the other hand, someone studying microbiology is going to have to focus more on concepts than brute memorization.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Except for the all-important aspect of names.
The hottest girl in the world will never sleep with you even if you can prove that |P(S)| > |S|, that indeterminacy leaves room for God to give us free will, or even that "nobody ever has to know," if you can't remember her name.
Life sucks that way, but I always find that guessing a Jess or Jen early is better than stalling and getting caught later.
(On the flip side, nothing is better than actually remembering a girl's name and knowing she doesn't remember yours and sleeping with her anyway. Who ever said life is fair?)
--
I can't believe the overwhelming defensive tone of the responses. It's as if our parents were chiding us to be more like Lloyd Braun and all we want is for them to either appreciate us or leave us alone. I don't buy the arguments that the younger generation's priorities are different from their parents'. I'm not certain that the increasing reliance on devices for telephone numbers and birthdays is such a big deal, either. During the medieval and Renaissance eras, before paper was a cheap commodity, people memorized things all the time because that was the only medium available to them. Ancient rhetoriticians created so-called memory palaces so they could memorize hours-long speeches. Memory palaces and paper (and electronic devices) are aids for memory, not replacements for memory. We are doing the same thing everyone else has always done; only the procedural details have changed. Still, I think the thing that ought to be considered is an old theme in science fiction. What happens to humanity when we begin to rely on technology a little too much? Prior to Gutenberg's press, literacy was a rare thing, and those who could read were the people in charge--the aristocracy and the church. That is not a coincidence. The printing press is an instance where technology may have meant the end of memory palaces and other systems of memorization, but it also meant that knowledge and learning became much more widespread, and political power followed. But these days, knowledge is becoming more and more proprietary. I might save all my phone numbers in my iPhone's address book, but without a lawyer's knowledge of the EULA, I have no idea if Apple has access to that information, or if they even technically own it and lease me the right to store it and use it. Like I said, it's an old theme, with tons of writers having wondered about the consequences of giving up personal power and liberty for the sake of convenience. I can't help but think of the opening to the Allen Smithee version of Dune, when the narrator speaks of people depending on machines to take care of all the necessities of life, then later becoming slaves to the men who controlled the machines. Frank Herbert imagined a world in which after throwing off slavery to the machines, we concentrated on developing our minds instead of developing our technology. Yes, it's fiction, but the point of good fiction has always been to give us something to think about, to better enable us to make good judgments in real life. I think our typical judgments usually concern the immediate and the short term; how often do we think about long term consequences of our choices?
I view it as memory of phone numbers, etc is less crucial as understanding and memorizing the basics to gain the knowledge needed for everyday tasks such as knowing the fastest way to write down data and the best ways to recall it in a fast, efficient manner. We don't usually need to remember 30 phone numbers etc when we can easily carry a device which will store thousands. It gives us room to remember other things, such as more hobbies etc.
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.
Should we really trust important details on human memory? I mean, even if it was trained and all the average human memory is not worth confidence, if it is weakened the harm is not as much as not being able to store giga bytes of info , cause afaik human memory was always fuzzy and had limited storage space....
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
This is nothing compared to the evil man who singlehandedly destroyed human memory 500 or so years ago... Guten something or other. I'll have to look up the name and date later...
"As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes."
Maybe its because older people are still tied to land lines. They forgot the "I don't have a land line, jst a mobile, you ignorant clod!"
Anyway, to my point: Its like remembering your own postal code - why should I? I never write letters to myself, and I never mail anything any more. About the only thing I get in the mail are bills (hey - I pay them onine, but until they give me $ for saving them postage, paper and printing, let them keep sending them), junk mail, and some print IT trade magazines. If I need it, I can always look on my driver's license.
Better, at least for me, to remember the "break points" in the ASCII table - 65=A, 97=a, etc ...
We remember what's important to US, and forget the rest. Remembering a bunch of phone numbers is no longer important - we have gadgets to do that, same as some people in previous generations had servants to "sweat the small stuff."
Just remember to keep a hard copy of all those phone numbers, for when you lose your cell phone ...
Kevin Smith on Prince
This is an especially relevant topic to me because my fiance and I just had this conversation a few days ago. We marveled over the massive amount of seemingly useless data we are storing and decided to write down as much of it that had to do with numbers as we could. We wrote down all the accounts for which we could recall passwords, pin #s, the television channels we could recall, the radio stations we could recall, the addresses of our family members and extended family members, etc... the list was staggering. You don't really realize how much crap you carry around with you every day until you try to write it all down.
50 years ago...
...a friend and their whole family would share 1 phone number, the dad might have an office #. That's a total of 2. Today, a family of four might have one cellphone for each family member, a house number, and each parent may have a work number for a total of 7. 50 years ago, every person you called had an area code that matched the physical region they live in. Because of number portability, you need to remember the entire 10-digit number.
...you didn't have to remember email addresses.
...you didn't have to remember PIN #s because there weren't debit cards, ATM cards, credit cards, or touch-tone automated phone systems.
...you didn't have to remember which of the 300+ digital cable channels your favorite shows were on, nor did you have to remember which of the 150 satellite radio stations your favorite music was playing on.
...the divorce rate was tiny. A remarriage often introduces twice as many numbers into one's brain. A new anniversary, an additional birthday, each step-sibling adds a new birthday and new phone numbers, as they move out, there are more addresses to remember.
...personal computers didn't exist. For the programmers out there, think about the incredible amount of information you store that's related to programming. For everyone else, consider every URL you have memorized, every password, every command you still remember from your DOS days, every ASCII-character code, etc...
...feel free to add to the list, but it just shows that we remember a lot more than we realize. One can't be faulted for relying on a PDA to keep track of a person's 3 phone numbers, 2 email addresses, fax #, AIM screename, etc...
--Dave
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
I'm afraid that isn't true, Biology has changed alot since Feynmanns time, being one of the newer sciences it has been moving from rote learning of silly things like muscles to more theoretical systems etc, as is relevant to Biology. The curriculum as such has also changed in similar ways including needing to be able to use ever more maths and statistics.
In the case of using digital devices to augment our human memory it is more about memorization than memory. If we see value in remembering a subject we are far more likely to do so - Example: a boy who has chronic problems remembering his homework assignments has near total recall of his favorite team's statistics. Another effect that may come into play in this story is a kind of memory management/data compression. Unlike phone numbers written down in a phone book these digital devices allow us to tokenize our memories. Using voice dialing technology means we may only see a phone number once upon entering it into our device - and never even give it a second thought as that number is now attached to a token like "Jim Smith". The final point is that human memory was doing just fine before phone numbers, passwords or even written language were invented therefore digital augmentation is unlikely to significantly change our basic ability to memorize - but what we see a need to memorize will undoubtedly change.
"The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external characters and not remember of themselves." -Socrates
Gee, I managed to remember that despite my laptop and Treo.
-=Maggie Leber=-
Yeah, but on a test I was taking in College, I did 9*4 on my calculator. Luckily I did that, since the correct answer was 24 (hex), not 36(decimal), and my calculator was set to hex mode.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I wrote them down in my diary so i wouldn't HAVE to remember.
I still think you're probably joking, but after reading so many of the other posts on this topic, it's no longer so obvious. The thing is that us "older folk" remembered phone numbers and birth dates when we were young folk, as well.
This is not without precedence. When books and writing became common place, a similar phenomenon happened. People used to routinely memorize very long stories in their entirety. If you do that today, it makes you a bit of a "freak show".
As others have mentioned, it does free us up to focus on other tasks. However, and perhaps this is because I'm part of the "over 30 crowd", I do feel like something precious is being lost.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Scientists discover that wheels have taken over for legs in the USA.
Tech is tech - we develop it so we don't have to memorize|walk|swim|kindle a fire every time we want to do something.
Left unable to memorize? Bollocks! What's happening is not that people are being mentally crippled. What's happening is that people not longer HAVE to manually enter phone numbers, for instance, and thus do not learn them. If you enter a phone number several times, you will remember it. It is the repetition that forms the memory. Hell, even back in the 80s I never remembered my own phone number because I NEVER CALLED MYSELF. But I knew all my friends' numbers because I called them frequently. Today I know my own phone number because I do not live alone, and call home often.
The basic point of the paper, as opposed to the news story linked or the slashdot summary, is sound but nothing new. If you do not use any mental faculty, not just memory, its performance deteriorates... but if you start to use it again, it sharpens up. Data gadgets do not cause the inability to memorize, they just cause less need to remember, and thus less memory exercise. A list of birthdays pinned to your cabinet door will have the same effect.
I personally experience this quite a bit, especially when coding, but also in other things I studied physics and math (and have a PhD) and was also taught not waste my time memorizing useless facts and instead to know how to look things up (for example, one of my professors (the late Robert Mills of Yang-Mills theory) always set the speed of light c = 1). Indeed, I was never great at memorization, and if I was, I probably would have gone to med school instead of grad school. I have old high school friends, however, who seem to remember trivial from 25 years ago. Consequently, while I code all day long, and have been doing so for many years, but I rely heavily on Google, the IDE, books, and my previous works. Indeed, there are times I can not spit out code details, yet I am very efficient when I need to be. This is because realize that recall and recognition are two different mental processes, and I have an extensive library. Unfortunately, on some contract interviews, as most programmers know, you are sometimes asked to write code on a blackboard or to debug a printed page of code. Indeed, I have actually met CS students who were forced to code without an IDE. That is really shocking to me. I generally find that I am completely incapable of doing these kinds of memory-focussed tasks. These kinds of questions always seem like giving an author a spelling quiz...you can clearly be a great write and not need to know how to spell at all (you have both a spell checker and an editor) I think it is more than the IDE though--I explicitly and actively try not to remember code details bur instead I remember where I can find them, where clearly other programmers must actively focus on the details and be able to retain them. Maybe the CS way of saying this is that I try to remember the index of the data, not the data itself. ( If I do too much of this though, I find that I start to fool myself into thinking I actually know what is going on, and so I try to strike a good balance. )
I am so glad I'm (barely) old enough to predate the notion of PC and cellphone reliance. Nobody could remember this crap before cell phones either; if one takes a look at a sitcom, a the design of personal paper phonebook (they had those before cells,) or even just uses common sense, one will be presented with a world where not a whole lot has changed.
The only difference is that now we're used to being reminded infallibly by our machines, and are aghast at the idea that back in the day, people used to just forget this stuff.
Have we all really forgotten the standard issue sitcom theme where the husband comes home to an angry wife, and starts guessing what he forgot? Birthday? Anniversary? There's a reason that plot goes back past 1998.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Long story short, this sort of thing has been going on for a very long time, and vastly predates the rise of mobile devices. And yet, we still seem to be doing fine.
Your recommended reading on this topic: Things that Make Us Smart, by Donald Norman.
To me it all comes down to relational memory. That is, personally, I don't remember a lot of things exactly, but I do remember how to find them out. To me this is not a problem of not having such a good memory, but more of having so much information pushed at me every day, that I have to find a way to "compress" it in my mind, to remember the relations. At the same time, I must admit, that I do think that I should do some memory practice sometimes, just more as 'brain exercise' than anything else. PS: It's called "becoming a cyborg".
Perhaps because they never give out their home number? Because they prefer to be contacted on their mobile phones?
Honestly, I don't see how it's a big deal that I have a hard time remembering my own phone number.
Practically speaking, it's irrelevant whether you do remember your phone number. I think the point of the study is that it would be alarming if all our devices made it such that people surrounded by such things (who do nothing to compensate) could not remember such things.
In other words, it's not about whether you actually remember a particular piece of information, but whether your overall ability to remember such things has been harmed by lack of use (atrophy). Current brain science suggests that the health of your brain (especially later in life) depends crucially on activity: it's not able to keep functioning unless it gets a certain kind of workout. It would not be surprising to find, correlatively, that if activities aimed at developing and maturing basic cognitive capacities in early life are lacking, those powers will not be as readily available later. That is scary.
Does that mean we should throw away cell phones? Make children memorize long lists of irrelevant items? Of course not. But we should promote the kinds of activities that help develop and maintain cognitive health. The devices and aids we have around do not make this impossible, but the danger is that they make it seem irrelevant. The attitude that people fall into spontaneously seems to be: "Why learn anything when you know (or think) you can get an adequate blast of information about it on Wikipedia?" One answer is "so your brain will work." (Other "answers" are less polite versions of "why are you so damn lazy?")
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I think the focus on what people remember or how much people remember is missing the whole point of the matter.
For me, it all boils down to this: How can I best accomplish my daily tasks?
FTA: As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes.So why would I even WANT to remember phone numbers? It provides no "value" to me, it takes up valuable resources in my brain that I use for comparatively more useful things.
FTA: When it came to remembering important dates such as the birthdays of close family relatives, 87 per cent of those over the age of 50 could remember the details, compared with 40 per cent of those under the age of 30.- Years ago: I'm out shopping and wondering if I need to pick up any greeting cards (birthday, anniversary, etc.) If I do not remember *ALL* birthdays and anniversaries, etc. then I need to refer to my "little black book" OR, not having one with me, waiting until I get home and can look it up on the calendar on the wall. If I forgot a date, then it meant another trip back to the store to get a card. Ouch.
- Today: I always have my mobile phone with me. I look on the calendar page for this month (Menu, 7, 2, Enter, right, right, right, etc.) and can tell at a glance at each of the upcoming days what is coming up, for whom, and how soon.
FTA: Professor Roberston, who oversaw the research to mark the launch of Puzzler Brain Trainer Magazine, said that a series of five simple exercises a day can help to increase memory capacity. (emphasis added)I honestly do not know if there is a connection here, but *I find it interesting there is a financial incentive behind the research's funding. He who pays the piper calls the tune? Hmmm, now who said that anyway? Let me take a look on google... :-)
I don't have to remember birthdays because my girlfriend does it for me.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Ahem.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. - Alfred North Whitehead
Think about it for a minute...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The example I chose was uneven, to display if people had familiarity with figures, however, many people need help even with a purchase of 4.35, and I give them $5 - I kid you not.
..........FULL STOP.
Did you know that when writing first came into wide use, there was argument against it because it would ruin people's memory? I'm not joking, here.
Chris Mattern
"the boom in mobiles and portable devices that accomplish myriad tasks has created a generation incapable of operating the simple devices of daily life."
There. That's better.
Seriously, who funds this crap?
People over 50 are more likely to remember birthdays of "close relatives" than people under 30? Maybe that's because people over 50 have had 20 extra years in which to memorise those birthdays. And maybe it's also because those "people over 50" actually saw many of their "close relatives" being born (children, grandchildren, nephews), unlike the people under 30 (whose "relatives" are more likely to be grandparents, uncles, cousins etc.).
People have trouble remembering their own phone number? Could that have something to do with the fact that it's not a number they call very often, if at all?
The notion that having a cellphone or a PDA somehow influenced the basic abilities of the human brain, reversing in 20 years what took 200 thousand to build, is even more ridiculous. Maybe people just aren't bothering to memorise 100 different things because they know that, by memorising 3 things, they'll easily be able to retrieve all the other ones. And that leaves enough mental addressing space for 97 new things, that the "people over 50" (or without PDAs, or whatever) were never able to learn in the first place (let alone remember).
Here's a thought: if, as this article claims, modern electronic devices are "dumbing down brain power", why don't we forbid scientists from using them? I wonder if the people making this study memorised all the results, or if their "brain power" is so "dumbed down" that they had to write them down on a piece of paper or even (gasp!) an electronic spreadsheet or database.
The article concludes: "Only 55 per cent of men could remember their wedding anniversary, compared to 90 per cent of women."
If we take their previous conclusions as valid, that can ony mean one thing: men use cell phones almost twice as much as women.
Old news - five hundred years old. Find some 500-year-old people if you want to see GOOD memories.
James Burke's great work, "The Day the Universe Changed" (book and TV series) relates how important memory was before paper and writing materials became cheap and printing made standard information cheaper still.
pp 99-102 of the hardback relates such techniques as:
rhyme - French merchants used a poem of 137 rhyming couplets to teach and remember all rules of commercial arithmetic;
"Memory theatres" - a giant mnemonic device in which rooms and objects in a large building were a metaphor for hundreds of memorized facts;
checksums - there are Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven corporal and seven spiritual works of mercy, etc so that you know you still have two to go when you've remembered five;
Those who could read silently were regarded with awe, since most business was oral, and reading was with moving lips. "Auditing" meant HEARING your financiers describe your accounts, as even Kings were illiterate.
In short, we've been losing our memories since writing was invented 5000-ish years ago, and losing them way faster since it got cheap 500 years ago. The additional speedups ~50 years ago with recorded moving pictures and ~5 years ago with popular PDAs & cellphones are minor by comparison.
Memory is also involved in learning how to use a spreadsheet, or how to line-dance or repair a bicycle. *Insane* amounts of memory are involved in learning a language. There's no evidence this kind of 'memory work' is getting less prevalent or people less able to do it.
I was forever and perpetually forgetting the little stuff til I got that first Newton (and later, the Palm Pilots, iPaqs, etc, right up to my current smartphone)
The ONLY upshot of getting a PDA was the loss of the STRESS of forgetting shit I could never remember anyway.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Only old people remember stuff.
Well, with all due respect for Feynman, who was a very smart and funny guy, he sometimes sacrificed intellectual honesty for a good story, and was a bit full of himself (as he easily admitted).
If you're working as a biologist and routinely have to refer to specific muscles, it's not very practical to take 15 minutes off every day to "look up" the names of those muscles. I doubt Feynman had to "look up" Planck's or Boltzmann's constants or Avogadro's number every time he needed to use them. That is why the biology students knew the names of the muscles; because they used those tools frequently, not because it took them 4 years to "memorise them".
The biology curriculum is full of useless "legacy" crap, but so is every other one.
They are citing "after" effects without any "before" status. I only started using gadgets to assist in memorization tasks in the last 2-3 years. Prior to this time if I was asked my home phone I would know it, and now, I still know it. I know my work phone number too, which oddly enough, I have never known at any previous job or prior to my usage of PIM.
If they asked me birthdays of anyone, I would have trouble remembering. I remember about 5 birthdays, and even those I have trouble recalling at will. I don't know why, except that maybe I don't care. I think birthdays are silly things to celebrate except perhaps those of your own children.
The fact of the matter is that the majority of things I can recall by pulling out my smartphone are things I simply would not have known at all before. And there are no cases where something I would've known before is something I do not know now. I have never dialed my wife's cell phone number without the address book but I can recite it no problems, because I've watched the # pop up on the phone screen 10000 times.
And what the article is ignoring, at least in my case, is that some information I actually remember better because of the time I took to acquire it and record it in my database. I felt it would be useful and since I didn't have to try and memorize it, I'd actually save it instead of the usual ignorance of the information. And the result is that I've memorized some of that info on accident. Darn.
Finally, I wonder why, if these effects were real, they would be considered ill? Humans are creatures who define themselves over time through technology. We cannot continue denying that the tech we invent and use to live is not part of our species domain of evolution. As technology becomes more prevalent it becomes part of ourselves. If we have opened our mind for more important tasks by reducing what it must contain by moving that information into portable devices, or highly accessible central databases, then we have evolved as a species. Currently there are "holes" in this plan but as we move forward they will be plugged. Someday when you find yourself stranded in a forest for some reason, you'll be able to subvocalize a request for a map to be projected into your visual cortex and send a request for assistance to the nearest forestry service through satellite links. When this happens, who will care if you could or could not memorize uncle Jim's anniversary?
What will it matter when in your satiating state of serenity you are reminded subconsciously that you decided that you cared about someone's going away party to which you were invited 9 months earlier.
I guess what I'm saying is, let the gadgets take over our menial mental tasks. Let us follow up on the technology to fix its critical flaws so that we can rely on it. Let our minds work on the immediate projects that are of the most importance and leave this obnoxious set of tasks to the domesticated wafers of silicon that we have created.
The fear that this technology will weaken our minds is as irrelevant as the fear that wearing shoes will weaken our feet.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
I don't remember the numbers attached to the names stored in my phone (with the exception of the numbers for my house and immediate family) for the same reason that few people remember the IP address of slashdot. Address books in mobile phones are just a DNS system for phone numbers.
Well... we've games like "Brain Age" so we're acknowledging it at least.
As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes.
Why should I remember it? It's not like I ever call myself! I've had a phone for 8 years, and still have no idea what it is (beyond the area code).
(it was kinda weird calling 911 once---they ask you "and what is your number"... and I replied with "I don't know.")
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
That 40% wouldn't have remembered any of that info in the first place. It's not that these devices are replacing memory, they're augmenting memory for those for whom it's terrible, and assisting those for whom it's not.
I'm a good example. I'm cursed with remembering everything that happens to and around me. However, to make important stuff stick, I punch it into whatever media I have handy, and that cements the fact in my mind. It's a mnemonic device in my case, and an actual memory in the case of the 40% in the article.
In the event you're serious:
The guy's pretty much singlehandedly responsible for the concepts and intellectual tools that describe the nature of reality at our level. Due to his work, we're now to the point of engineering electronic systems from the ground up by thinking about them, rather than getting lucky with a "that's funny" moment and making use of it.
Homer: Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?
Marge: That's because you were drunk!
Homer: And how.
I don't mind that I don't mind :-).
Insert
...is how enormously helpful a PDA can be for someone with cognitive function loss.
--g, with a lot more to say about this but not enough brain to be coherent today
"Music my rampart, and my only one." -- Millay
It bugs me a lot when people can't even remember/recall 1 digit multiplication... To phone numbers and birthdays, of course we can look it up in whatever external storage, but what if we forget the name of the friend?! Would there be one day that we relies so heavy on external storage that we forget who we are?! I'm not that old, only 23 though Here's a theory, young memory, when properly trained, can positively affect the future development. When we are in primary school or junior school, we remember stuff not all because they will be useful, but because it helps us to train our mind to remember thing better when needed. If even this basic mind exercise will not be done properly in the future, I don't know what the next generations are capable of anymore...
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
Manager: "I called this meeting so I could tell you the division's goals for next year."
Alice: "That's a good idea, because we're all so dumb that we couldn't possibly read this in e-mail."
Manager: "Goal one: improve communication."
Alice: "I can't; I'm too dumb!"
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
This "study" is drivel. Bad science.
Gadgets Have Taken Over For Our Brains
... well. Worrying about phone number lists and birthdays will see pretty trivial. And if the thing can store information it can run programs too ... let the implant remind me of my anniversary. Let it do all the grunt work that my merely human brain has to struggle with today. Need to do integral calculus in your head? No problem, anyone can do it. Easy as pie. Just think it.
I'm still waiting for an implantable extension to my brain. I mean, the real complaint here is that our gadgeteering society isn't using our brains to store and retrieve information, instead we're using our fingers and eyes to interface to computers of various types (of course, we had other nonvolatile storage media in the past: the were called "books" or "scrolls", I think.) Well, when I can get a few hundred gigabytes of electronic memory implanted in my skull, directly addressable using symbolic thought patterns
Lots of cool things would be possible. True telepathy would be only an implant and an Internet connection away, and why stop with merely talking to people. Talking to computers and remote data stores would be equally useful. Want to Google the name of the actress you just saw on TV? Just think it and let the implant find the data for you. Hell, if it were done right there would be no perceptible difference between recalling something from your own cortex, or having the machine put information into your brain as if you'd remembered it yourself. Well, probably the implant would be faster, but you wouldn't even have to know that you didn't already know it. Need more processing power? Just talk to a remote system somewhere and have it handle the request. If it's a big job and it takes a while, it'll be just like when you're trying hard to remember something and you can't, and then you stop trying. Eventually, your brain's search algorithm completes and the answer pops into your head. This would work like that, and at that point, the difference between man and machine would be moot.
I hope I live to see it. I've been typing at a computer for a living for too many years: I want a better way.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"I put it in my iPhone so I wouldn't HAVE to remember!"
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
We have just replaced that now useless trivia with other useless trivia like memorizing Guitar Hero licks.
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Modern aircraft are so complex that pilots are required to use a checklist in order preform flight operations. They are in fact looking up throttle and trim settings when landing.
The amount of information required to set all switch positions, radio frequencies, fuel weight, etc, is so large that vital information is written down because NOT doing any one of those things could cause the aircraft to crash.
Trim settings and throttle settings will be different for every landing, depending on altitude, air density, temperature, barometric pressure....
Today's show is brought to you by the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0: 25
This is stupid. Give anyone any arbitrary 10 digit number and ask them to recall it in a year. The difference between then and now is that previously we were forced to type that number over and over. Now we don't even see it. I bet that most other people don't have their passport number or SIN/SSN memorized. I don't consider them stupid, just lucky that they haven't been asked for those numbers over and over again.
Let us start with an Egyptian story, even though one told by a Greek. According to Plato in Phaedrus when Hermes, or Theut, the alleged inventor of writing, presented his invention to the Pharaoh Thamus, the Pharaoh praised such an unheard of technique supposed to allow human beings to remember what they would otherwise forget. But Thamus was not completely happy. "My skillful Theut," he said, "memory is a great gift that ought to be kept alive by continuous training. With your invention people will no longer be obliged to train their memory. They will remember things not because of an internal effort, but by mere virtue of an external device."
Yep. Even Plato was discussing such issues, with regards to the invention of writing. We'll lose some skills which are less important, and replace them with others. That's how it goes.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Ah, yes. Old people remember things better than young people, therefore it's the 'young people gadgets' that causes it. Well, at least it's not the new math anymore.
They're taking a faulty premise, then using faulty data to support a faulty conclusion. Of course, this little statement couldn't possibly be relevant:
"Professor Roberston, who oversaw the research to mark the launch of Puzzler Brain Trainer Magazine..."
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I hear Apple is targeting the iSkrode launch for late 2009.
The obvious science-fiction reference is Isaac Asimov's "A Feeling of Power." It describes a far future where pocket calculators are so ubiquitous that mankind has forgotten the how to do simple arithmetic.
A more amusing instance was in the role-playing game GURPS:Lensman. This game was based on E.E."Doc" Smith's 1950's series written in those days before the invention of the transistor. The Lensman are the next step in human evolution (created by the benevolent alien race on Arisia), and among other things can do advanced mathematics in their heads.
The author of the game had to retcon why the futuristic universe of the Lensman had no pocket calculators, personal computers, the internet, or any electronics better than vacuum tubes.
His retcon was ingenious. He noted that the Arisians were trying to force humans to evolved to the next level. The Arisians could foresee that computer technology would derail this effort. Calculators would atrophy mathematical ability, spell-checkers would become a crutch, that sort of thing. Even worse would be the logical advancement of computer technology into some kind of cyberspace brain-computer interface.
So the Arisians arranged matters so that William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain never met, and subtly influenced Shockley to invent the Ultrawave vacuum tube instead of the transistor.
Except that modern equivalent of Feynman, according to TFA, probably don't know those number, or have never seen them.
They just push the fucking button on the fucking calculator.
Which leaves plenty of room for more useful stuff in their brain that can't be replaced by a simple button.
Yup. That's why nature has given us this nice stuff called "memory". If one takes 15 minute every day to loop up some data, at the end of the week he suddenly realises that he know the answer and doesn't need to look anymore. I'm sure that's the magic behind the biology students knowing the cats' muscles.+
hum... actually that, and logic. Just as some part of some physics formula can be infered using logic and some math, location and/of function of various anatomical features can be infered by their name using some thing called "linguistic". Half of the human anatomy is just plain boring "describing where it, what it looks like or what it does is using Latin". Clearly no need of whole 4 years to learn it. It's only when you want to memorise the eponyms (names based on inventor/descoverer) that it starts to get tricky. And pointless.
(Disclaimer : I have taught human anatomy as an assistant).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm the kind of person who has gadgets and forgets stuff because I know I can rely on the gadgets.
I was in jail two years ago. In this country, we have creditcard-sized telephone cards that have numbers on it, and the numbers are linked with a fixed amount of credit used for making phone calls. Making phone calls is, as you can expect, a huge issue when you're locked.
So, I just saw a number in a card, for just long enough to be able to read it completely. I memorized the whole thing almost instantly. I used the number to call my family during one week. We were in the 'reception' area of the jail, so the person who had the card was a first-time offender, just like me and I never had to see him again.
In the zone I was locked, most people memorize numbers instead of reading them from the cards, as everyone is able to do what I did in the first day, no matter if they used gadgets before being locked or not. I could not see a full number again, as people were very careful about it.
You can remember anything, if that's important enough for you. This article is either bullshit, or those 'facts' are simply not important enough for the people involved.
Right now I am 'forgetting' stuff again. But I know that with just a little of willpower I can remember stuff and with a little more I can memorize more important stuff. So nothing to worry about. Your memory is simply being used in efficient ways.
(Posting as an anonymouse for very obvious reasons)
You just need to find the right LaTeX packages. :)
Of course, depending on how complex it is, you could use built-in features.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It could also be that fewer men who could not remember anniversaries survived to age 50.
Plato wrote about the Egyptian king Thamus lamenting that the invention of writing would hurt memory. If gadgetry and Johnny-Mnemonics hurt memory more, then it's just a continuation of something begun 5000 years ago.
Of course if you have ever been in an argument with a female SO, you'll know that women's brains already perfectly record every ill you've ever done them... maybe it's not such a good idea after all...
Or, quite possibly, if you make a hard record of significant events you may find that the female brain doesn't record with perfect fidelity after all.
Of course, being able to prove her wrong doesn't necessarily make it a good idea either...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
These gadgets have truly become "bicycles for the mind" as one great man once envisioned
If you prefer walking then thats your own problem
"Drawing closer to world domination, keystroke by keystroke."
I suspect that if you saw a simple mathematical formula and a fun abbreviation in your old plate, you'll find one soon enough for your new plate. We humans are excellent at detecting patterns, whether or not they're there. Depending on how secure you feel, you can post or e-mail it to me, and I'll give you a new mnemonic.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Of course, being able to prove her wrong doesn't necessarily make it a good idea either...
:)
Yes... and as much as Dr Phil bugs me, the one thing he says to guys which really rings true is "Do you want to be right, or do you want to be married?"
"I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember!"
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.