Is your phone ruining your memory? A report on the rise of ‘digital amnesia’

Nicholas Carr explains many different examples(wayfinding, maps, memory, etc) in his book “The Shallows”.

There’s also that book “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer where the author becomes a memory champion by embodying themselves in the competition space having never practiced it prior.

While we can put blame on technology for hurting our abilities to further form certain skills, it has also allowed us to learn skills we would’ve never been able to learn in our lifetimes.

The brain is plastic and will reshape as needed. If you moderate your tech usage, you may start to notice your attention and memory to improve gradually from doing nothing but that. The mode we put our brain in from over-consuming has its purpose. It’s to scan information and process it quickly. Not to store it for long term purposes.

But the real test is to try this for yourself. I’ve been experimenting with this over the last 5 years and have found this to be true for me.

One time I was even found in Montreal with no phone which meant no maps, no way to understand French, and I had to quickly develop all these skills in a week to get by. It’s not the end of the world by any means. Life finds a way.

Space-time tradeoff: I have an index deeper than I'd ever imagined when I started university, but everything is a search away and thus it takes time to find things and it won't be possible at all if I'm away from the internet. Cache is precious.

Of particular interest is languages. You really do need to have certain things to hand when you're talking to someone in a foreign language.

For most other things, it's perfectly fine to look it up.

This is a bit like complaining the kids aren't learning how to make a fire, or how a sliderule works. If you're conscious of the tradeoff you're making, it's ok.

Is your GPS ruining your spatial orientation skills? Etc. Etc.

Most of these articles are pure clickbait designed to trick ageing people whose skills naturally degrade into an non-old-age related explanation for such degradation.

Memory is OK its the concentration. I just can't read a whole novel now, its too long. Sitting down and doing work is ridiculously hard to concentrate.

On one hand, I am tempted to quote Plato(?) on how books ruin people's ability to remember things. On the other hand, if you don't regularly exercise your facilities, physical or mental, they do deteriorate, no question about it.

Personal anecdote, but one thing that I noticed last year while reorganizing all the digital photos I took over the last 17 years is how technological change shaped my digital archives and subsequently how well I remember my past.

With my old dedicated digital camera and sd cards, I got nice folders with meaningful event names and dates and clear of the useless stuff not worth keeping around. Obviously, it required some work to be able to watch the pictures on the computer,let alone share them, so it was easy to spend a few more minutes to have nice digital archives.

Nowadays, the smartphone took over: click, ok nice picture, click click, and shared! It's nice and practical but now my picture collection of the past few years is a bloated and unorganized stream of nice and bad pictures mixed with of paper document copies and other random stuff I no longer care about.

And guess what, I still have quite a good memory of 10-15 year old events and their timeline while it's much fuzzier for the last few years. Got to talk about it with my therapist at the time and he said it's quite probable that taking some time to organize your digital stuff along the way may help you form better memories you'll have an easier time to remember later on.

Same thing with music or movies I guess, odds are you may have this neatly organized old hard drive full of mp3 that'll tell you what you liked in 2012... Nowadays we can stream everything and are pushed to act in a fire-and-forget way without a single debrief in sight ;)

Anyways, smartphones are wonderful tools but I feel like the danger is in the subtle psychological and behavioral changes they introduce and that we too often don't or won't notice until it's too late.

Nothing wrong with some externalism[0].

I have an ‘exobrain’, which houses countless notes and snippets of information I’ve gathered over many years. I’ve offloaded passwords to my password manager, use a piece of software called Standard Notes for note taking, and screenshot anything I find interesting for perusal at a later stage.

The trick is to revisit your notes, which means you make a small pact with yourself to execute on those notes and make them actionable.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalism

I don't agree with this point. We have to remember a lot more stuff these days just to exist. We retain much more information and skill than we ever did in the 80s. I remember that.

Not to say there aren't other issues but for me at least it augments my capabilities rather than reduces them in any way.

> “Young children who use more tech had a thinner cortex, which is supposed to happen at an older age.” Cortical thinning is a normal part of growing up and then ageing, and in much later life can be associated with degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as migraines.

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/features/story/bill-gat...

> Then, there are studies saying that overuse of the smartphone can lead to sleeplessness, depression, amnesia and other brain-related issues in children and teenagers.

I’ve spent a lot of time in front of the computer since before I started school. I’ll say, I’m bad at memorizing lists of facts. But I’m great at remembering things once I understand them with context. So, memorize the 50 states and capitals, hopeless exercise. But teach me about a state and it’s capital city, and I’ll never forget it. I wonder if this is naturally how I am or whether constant internet use from a young age makes me mind dismiss the need to memorize bare facts that can always be looked up, and that don’t actually enhance understanding of anything by themselves. See Feynman on knowing what something is vs. just knowing it’s name.

“There are studies showing that, for example, it is really hard to get dementia when you are a university professor, and the reason is not that these people are smarter – it’s that until old age, they are habitually engaged in tasks that are very mentally demanding.”

That’s an interesting point. I wonder if that applies to any knowledge work in general. As a developer I do feel that I engage my memory pretty often but I’m not sure it counts as a wholistic exercise including spatial memory, recalling events, reasoning, etc.

I've always had memory like swiss cheese, so I doubt a smartphone is making it any worse.

I don't think of our memory as a storage device, but more like a compression algorithm, that forgetting is important. We don't need to memorize several math textbooks to know algebra - if you can generalize the quadratic equation, are familiar with Pascals triangle, the unit circle - that's several compendiums of knowledge. For our short term memory, improvisational music is a good workout. If you are well read but struggle to find the right words to say then you are not writing enough. Or so it seems to me, most people here are way more educated than I am. There was a time for me after years of occupational lobotomy doing construction work when I attended a community college where I felt like a complete vegetable for about 18 months before I regained some neuroplasticity, and another time when I had serious depression that lasted for about a year before I emerged feeling like a stranger in my on home surrounded by all these tools, computers, musical instruments... it was a very long time getting reacclimated with it all. There is no respite, when we stop - starting back is difficult, like getting in shape or breaking destructive habits.

This is not surprising. Memory works best with spatial association within spatial framework in physical world.

- it's easy to forget stuff when walking into different room, then remember it again when walking back.

- having messy physical desk where every paper is "in it's place" underlined, full of doodle and remarks in the margins is physical "method of loci".

- having a physical library where every book is "consumed and almost destroyed", means it's not neat but pages are full of notes and signs of use. Everything comes into mind when you take book and flip trough because you are handling physical object, smelling and seeing the traces of you reading it.

- learning to write in hand for notebooks and not trying to be too tidy and organized is great for learning. You get both motor memory and spatial memory working.

Contrast all this with sitting motionless in front of smartphone or laptop that is always the same. You see information trough window but are not interacting. Digital notes are just text you can read again with less association.

We could still all dial phone numbers by hand... now 10 digits instead of 7 in the US, now spread across all the area codes, instead of mostly local, but why?

If you dial wrong, you'll sometimes get an angry person wondering why you disturbed them, who now has your number, and surplus rage. That risk is too darned high for me to deal with, so I have about a handful of numbers I actually know.... Mom, Me, Wife, Home, Friend, and that's it. All the rest are written down in a few places, and never dialed by hand, ever.

On the other hand, I know how paper maps work, and can get anywhere in the US without relying on Google maps for real-time directions. (Though...really... traffic info is SO handy)

Thinking is expensive as is memorizing things, so if there's no benefit, we won't do it. Noticing that things have changed since you were a kid, can be shocking, but it's not a sign of permanent decline.

I have had multiple head injuries that have hurt my memory.

I was a mess of notes and reminders before a smartphone with a calendar, searchable email and photos for quick image reminders have allowed me to be fairly normal.

I however use my phone as a tool, and work hard not to use it as a time sink.

Fascinating. I've been experiencing this but related it possibly to growing older or lack of sleep or lack of motivation/time to read. Might need to pick up a dumb(er) smart phone when I need to next upgrade my phone.

We're still learning ... how to Google anything efficiently and how to filter the crap. I think we're good with search as a part of our extended cognition. One advantage is the ability to quickly dive into any topic and learn what we need on the spot.

As a student I was cramming before exams and forgetting everything almost as fast, to make space for the next batch. And that was before Google.

To make a parallel - we have pure language models, and retrieval based language models that have access to a search engine. Retrieval LMs get a 25x boost in efficiency (DeepMind RETRO).

This isn't an idea I'd just dismiss out of hand, but I would note that it is exactly the same complaint people registered about the technology of writing.

when i was young i didn't like carrying a watch, because somehow i noticed that relying on a watch made loose my sense of time.

i don't know if it was my imagination, but i guess without a watch i was forced to pay more attention to my surroundings to see how much time has passed.

i still don't carry a watch, but now i carry a phone, so there is that...

Not surprised to see the FAANG crowd defend the castle. But would be more interesting to see a new castle built

I've been trying to not use my phone to look up every little factoid I might have read. If I'm in a conversation with someone it keeps me focused on topics I can speak ofb unassisted without derailing everything to wait for a Google result to return some scraped answer from Quora.

Digital generation Is getting old enough to realize memory becomes pretty shitty if you arnt cautious

It's ok, we will be forgotten in history as humans at the very brief between stage of humans with no tech enhancements and humans with computer brain enhancements. Much like Uber drivers are between regular old taxi drivers and autonomous driver less taxis.

People used to easily remember dozens and dozens of phone numbers, because that's just what you did.

Today, people Google phone numbers they use regularly. I've had interactions with people who have a hard time even remembering their own phone number.

Hundred percent yes it is. It's really easy for me to replicate by getting rid of internet distractions for a week or so.

Same for maps screwing up spatial memory, despite the sarcastic comment below.

When I was a kid I used to know 20-30 8 digit phone numbers by hard, not sure I miss those days

Digital amnesia is indeed a thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/well/mind/memory-loss-pre...

i dont use my phone except to make calls and texts and lookup maps.

i meditate when standing in lines or in waiting rooms.

"Our data indicate that regular practice of meditation is associated with increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to somatosensory, auditory, visual and interoceptive processing. Further, regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex." [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361002/

Is your supermarket ruining your hunting skills?