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.'"

Comments

I was going to comment on that article...

[tinrobot]

...but I forgot what it said.

Here, let me pull it up on my iPhone.

err obvious point

[timmarhy]

study shows people who have had longer to remeber things, remeber more things!

Re:err obvious point

[panaceaa]

I wholeheartedly agree. People over 50 have had 50 years of repetition to remember birthdays. In addition, they're more likely to have bought homes, and therefore to have had their home phone number remain the same for a longer period of time. The study also doesn't take into account how young people tend to use home phones less than older people, and tend to provide their cell phone number instead of their home phone number more often than older people. Perhaps I have my own assumptions in the previous sentence, but the study didn't quantify them in either direction.

A more useful study would be to give people in each group a list of numbers to remember. Have them study it for a couple days. Then take it away for a week, and have them come in to recite it. Which group does better? My personal guess would be that the results would match the historical learning capabilities of a person's age (which I personally don't know). I doubt there would be a significant difference between results in a study 20 years ago versus a study today. But it would be nice to have a control group of people who don't use gadgets to compare to.

Re:err obvious point

[TheRaven64]

Not even that, it just shows that people in different age groups remember different things. Einstein famously said that he never bothers to remember things that are easy to look up. There is no point cluttering your brain with useless information. Do you know your PC's IP address? Maybe if you don't use DHCP and you've had to re-install the OS a lot. What about the IP of google.com? Of course not (for most people), that's what we have DNS for. Do you remember your phone number? I don't often give people my phone number these days; I just bluetooth my vCard over to them. They never see my phone number, they just see my name in the address book. A phone number is something that the calling telephone needs to know, not the calling person.

Birthdays? I remember some. I generally remember which part of the year they fall in, but since they're in my calendar, I don't need to remember them.

There's also the question of where you remember things. I don't remember the spellings of many words with my brain, for example, I remember them with my spine. My brain sends a signal to my spine encoding a word, and my spine translates this into a sequence of motor impulses that cause me to type the words in this post. If you asked me to spell some words aloud though, I would have problems, even though I can type them easily. The same is true of dance moves; when you're learning you remember things like 'step cross reverse step etc' but after a while you forget this and just remember the muscle movements, leaving your brain free. Before I had a phone with an integrated address book, I used to remember telephone numbers like this; I could type my friends' numbers into the keypad easily, but I couldn't tell you what most of them were if you asked.

Einstein couldn't tell you how many feet in a mile

[MarkEst1973]

A smart alec news reporter once asked Albert Einstein how many feet were in a mile. Einstein said he had no idea. The news reporter then berated him, because he didn't know. Einstein said that's what he had books for, to look up things like that. He didn't want to clutter his mind with facts.

I've got no problem letting a device remind me when my mom's birthday is. That's what it's for.

Passwords

[tttonyyy]

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

and this is a bad thing??

[nanosquid]

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.

Insignificant details

[Ethanol-fueled]

Sure...they can't remember their friends' phone numbers, but they memorize celebrities' hairstyles, dress, relationships, offspring, drama, and favorite brands of tampons?

I think it's somehing more simple than gadgets

[lena_10326]

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.

Re:Einstein couldn't tell you how many feet in a m

[Bamafan77]

"A smart alec news reporter once asked Albert Einstein how many feet were in a mile. Einstein said he had no idea. The news reporter then berated him, because he didn't know. Einstein said that's what he had books for, to look up things like that. He didn't want to clutter his mind with facts."

Exactly. Richard Feynmen enrolled in some biology classes(he wasn't strictly a biology guy, but needed to understand some concepts) and asked some biology students about a "map of a cat".

" When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.

The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"

"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes. "

It's interesting to note that absolutely nothing has changed in the mechanics of the biology curriculum since Feynman's time.

Re:So?

[ameoba]

...and you're using yours to remember episodes of Married With Children?

Extra 20 years to remember repeated event. duh!!!

[lordperditor]

"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.

Silly article

[joss]

"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

Re:Silly article

[Joebert]

"Men came off worse than women. Only 55 per cent of men could remember their wedding anniversary, compared to 90 per cent of women."

It's alot easier to remember a date when you're the one getting gifts every year.

Knowledge in memory vs in a book

[spineboy]

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.

Re:Knowledge in memory vs in a book

[professionalfurryele]

No physicist learns F=ma by wrote. They learn it by applying it. Your other situations all have time criticality. I don't want a surgeon looking stuff up mid op because it takes longer. I don't want a pilot looking up how to extend the landing gear mid landing because he should be paying attention to the ILS.

I can think of two situations when one might memorise material by rote. The first is when it is time critical. The second is when for the forseable tasks one intends to undertake it is faster to memorise the material than repeatedly look it up. In the case of Feynman and the biologists, Feynman is correct because he was able to do actual interesting biology without needing to memorise the material, catching up four years of real biology in no time. It is the equivilant of a physics degree comprising in no small part of memorising the lagrangians of condensed matter systems. Physics, certainly. Useful, sure. The most productive use of a students time, hell no!

The reason your retort to Feynman is specious is that Feynman would have no problem with you looking up Newtons laws, or the formula for the Ricci Tensor, or any other formula (heck I study quantum gravity and I don't know what the formula for the Ricci tensor is) like that the first 20 or so times. After you use a formula that often you will memorise it anyway. You might get a complaint if you don't know what the Ricci tensor is, or what a force is, because knowing what concepts are and how to use them is more important than knowing their precise form. It is the difference between knowing what the kidneys do, and knowing what each individual part of a kidney cell looks like under a microscope.

In reference to the article, I cant remember my own phone number, heck I forget how to spell my own middle name. These facts are not useful or relevant, so I don't bother to learn then. Not to mention they are stored somewhere else. The learn by rote generation is just pissed because mass storage has rendered most of the stuff they spent ages memorising obsolete.

We choose what to memorize...

[Caine]

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?

I never call my home phone

[fermion]

It amazes me how technology magically appeared just recently. For instance, I hear that schools should use more technology, as if pencils and paper and mass produced books are not amazing learning tool in their own rights. I hear how no one can remember a telephone number, even though for years we have had these things called address books in which we wrote these things down in specifically because we could not, in general, remember all the information for all the people we knew. In fact the only reason we knew certain phones numbers was because the horrible user interface on the communication technology forced us to waste time memorizing numbers for all of our friends though the repeated dialing of said numbers. The reason many people no longer remember these anachronistic digits is because they are no longer slaves to the machines that force them to repeatedly dial numbers. Now we have a more friendly interfaces. Complaining that we don't know a telephone number is like complaining that we don't know how to use a quill pen, or we no longer know how to set a speed on a record player, or remember to yell gardy loo before emptying our chamber pots into the gutters on the streets below.

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.

The real issue is being avoided....

[grimdawg]

...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.

GPS

[John Boone]

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 :).

Re:Sad..

[munpfazy]

Oh, please. Is it also sad . . . most of us use a car to drive to town instead of walking like they did in the "old days?" Well, it's mighty far off topic, but since you brought it up -

Walkable communities, particularly those with decentralized mixed-use zoning, *are* associated with all sorts of social benefits, from lower incidence of several chronic diseases to higher rankings on self-reported happiness surveys. And, personal autos do contribute to a bunch of social problems: global warming, the geopolitical struggle for access to oil reserves, and personal injuries.

So, yeah, actually - it's sad that most of us use a car to drive to town. We'd be better off walking like they did in the old days.

But, not *because* they did it in the old days. On that point, I agree with you completely.

The problem isn't that people don't remember their friends' birthdays. The problem is that the article is using an obsolete and artificially restrictive definition of "remember."

A more appropriate question is, "are you able to access or be reminded of your friend's birthday whenever it would be useful?" When the date is bit of ink on page 73 of an address book, the only way you're likely to remember to say "happy birthday" is by lugging around redundant copies of that information in your brain. But, when the date is a entry in a calendar application (with appropriate backups), then by any functional definition, it has already been remembered. No need to bother saving another copy in your head.

We only remember what's important to US.

[trolltalk.com]

"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 ...