The New York Times has a great column today called The Outsourced Brain (PDF). The columnist bought a GPS device which enabled him to forget any and all geographical knowledge. An exaggeration, sure, but how many of us remember phone numbers anymore when we have them all in our cell phone? I only remember a couple – the rest are in my phone and on my computer. I’m guessing that most people are the same way.
I often have this discussion when I teach Long Term Memory in my Cognitive Psychology class. My students worry about whether our LTM is not as sharp because we don’t have to remember as much information anymore. It’s a valid concern, I think. With pervasive access to Google and Wikipedia, who needs to memorize facts? It’s the difference between a closed-book exam and an open-book one!
I don’t know of any research that has shown that our memory has gotten any worse over the past 10 years, or that our students are getting dumber because they do not have to memorize as many facts. The argument that I make is that our memory is just as good as before, but the skills related to memory have changed. We may not be as good at remembering strings of arbitrary digits, but we can remember the many confusing steps for programming a new number into our phone. And in today’s world, what’s more important: remembering a bunch of random characters, or being able to deftly navigate through new user interfaces?
This is all about offloading menial cognitive tasks that we’re not very good at and replacing them with tasks that we are good at. Not so good at random numbers, great at visual search, problem solving, and decision making. This principle is taken advantage of by David Allen, the Getting Things Done guru. Instead of tying your brain up with menial tasks like remembering a small to do item, the goal is to write them down. And anything that can be done in less than 5 minutes should be done immediately so you can check them off. It’s about giving your brain tasks it’s good at by offloading tasks that are too simple and breaking down tasks that are too complicated. Well, David Allen can probably explain it best:
Outsourcing Your Brain. Don’t think about it. Write it down.
#1 by Max at October 28th, 2007
I’ve had the “phone number memory” discussion with friends before, but my answer, while similarly optimistic, usually takes a different spin. When people talk about our memory “getting worse”, there’s the perception that the cognitive techniques we’re losing–such as the ability to remember many 10-digit numbers–are important somehow: They have a high degree of influence on our quality of life, or at least a somewhat significant degree. But my contention is always this: Before telephones were INVENTED, who needed to remember many 10-digit numbers? No one! So, the need to remember these numbers was introduced by technology, and with the INVENTION of cell phone address books, is now being withdrawn.
Technology created a problem, and then solved it. In terms of phone numbers and their impact on our lives, we’re back to square one–unless your cell phone dies and you need to use a land line! The technology isn’t pervasive enough for us to REALLY be back at “square one”, but that’s the direction we’re headed in.
#2 by jasonwong at October 28th, 2007
That is an excellent point! There are cetainly more examples in the past; anything involving less-advanced technology that required a more basic representation such as numbers, Morse Code, etc. It’s interesting that technology created the problem, but better technology solved it. With bigger systems, we don’t need numbers anymore. We have e-mail addresses and URLs, for example.
Of course, now we run into problems at the other end, when URLs or e-mail addresses are too long for us to remember. Though it all gets stored in our computers anyway. And as you said, it all works until our cell phones run out of batteries. Ah well!