My wife still has to ask me our new home phone number, and we moved over a year ago. I only know it because I fill out all the Publisher’s Clearinghouse entries.

Is this something new with the internet, or just another technology where we can outsource some brainpower? Did people have these same conversations about calculators, lamenting the sad demise of long division?

“…sometimes I have to search my inbox to remember an associate’s last name…”

What’s-his-name needs some Inbox Zero zen.

There’s a story that says Einstein was once asked for his phone number. He walked over to a phone book and started to look it up. When the questioner expressed surprise that someone so smart wouldn’t know his own phone number, Einstein said he didn’t want to clutter his mind with information he could easily look up.

Back when I had a landline, I knew all of my friends’ numbers by heart. Today, I know only one of those numbers, and that’s because it’s the same as it was back when I had the landline.

I think there’s something to be said for relegating rote data to a trusted technological medium (backed up/synced in at least four other places, of course), but I don’t think rote memory abilities have totally fallen by the wayside. Sure, I don’t remember phone numbers, but that’s because I never have cause to interact with them after initially entering them into my Crackberry. A birthdate, however, is initially in my Tickler, but then I write it on that day’s Action Card + actually do something (call, wall post, email, text) related to the date. That makes it easier to at least remember the general vicinity of someone’s birthday (“I was driving in a snowstorm when I called AJ to wish him a happy birthday…”)

I think there’s something to be said for giving yourself a minimal amount of stuff to remember at all times even to flex the grey matter in other ways. Girlfriends phone numbers and birthdates are a good place to start. My GF likes to give me pop quizzes from time to time just to keep me on my toes ;)

Merlin’s original question (“if you really do start entrusting all your ephemeral memory work to external systems, might your wetware start to atrophy?”) is an interesting one, but this study does nothing to answer it. It would be good to know if ability to remember useful info deteriorates from lack of use.

I’m reading a book right now (Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin) that’s chock full of people spouting off snippets (or whole scenes) of Shakespeare from memory. I’d hate to think that having a reliable reference system is damaging my ability to maybe do that if I spent the time to fill up the wetware with such trivia.

This doesn’t tell us anything about either age group’s ability to remember anything but the specific set of information that the researchers decided was worth remembering. I’m going to go out on a limb here to suggest that research neuroscientists probably aren’t in the MySpace generation, so of course that information is going to skew to information that’s more worthwhile for people in their age group to remember.

This is such poor experimental design, it’s not even worth keeping this study in your outboard brain.

It isn't a contradiction to learn from The David And His Teachings but still value this wetware you speak of.

The Greek orators had a system for memorization, Method of Loci, which was pretty damn amazing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

I can probably still list all of the songs on Elvis Costello's first six albums in order and have no idea what my phone number is.

Of course I had the albums on vinyl, so I might switch up the A and B sides, but that is another digression.

I was thinking somethign similar myself the other day. I had called a bodyshop to get them to come out and look at a dint on my car. The chap I needed to speak to was not in and as I was about to leave the house, the garage asked me for my mobile number. I had no idea what it was. In fact I have no idea what any numbers I use regularly are. They are all stored in my phones’ memories and not mine. Strangely enough I know numbers I used to use a lot 20 years ago.

I am worried about that? No.

What does worry me is that the quality of my spelling has deteriorated. I put this down to spell checkers. It used to be I would think about the spelling of certain words as I wrote them out, not all words, but a good proportion of fairly complex words. Like “deteriorated” for example, it’s easy to spell but I suppose somewhere in the back of my head I am using methods I learned as a kid to get the letters out in the right order. Well with spell checkers there’s no need. You can bash out the forst approximation of the word that might be in your head and have the machine do the rest for you. Without use the old spelling methods and routines kind of fall apart.

It isn’t just about convenience. It’s also about the increase in the kinds and quantity of information required to function. Who wants to memorize the land line, work line, mobile number, fax, AIM, email and VOIP of every contact?

And anyone worried about getting important info into wetware should try using Mental Case. It’s made just for that purpose.

Now here is something to be truly concerned about. Wonder what percentage of the 40% who could not remember are over 50? ;-P

Consumerist: Doctors Say Too Many Patients Can’t Name The Drugs They Take

But how many of the over 50s could remember their email password?

This is something that I’ve heard discussed in a historical context, conjunction with the shift from an “oral-memory” society to widespread literacy, way back in the Middle Ages. The long and the short of it seems to be that people raised in an oral society (see Solo’s comment about Greek orators above) tend to have much more highly developed mnemonic skills, and literacy allows written information to become a crutch in place of those feats of memory. Just a different way of organizing information in relation to yourself and the world, I guess.

I am not being ironic…..just a terrible typist and proof reader.

manganese is correct. I saw a documentary on memory many years ago—forgot the title, maybe the Interweb will help me find it—that maintained that unlettered Medieval shopkeepers kept upwards of a hundred running accounts in their heads. It wasn’t because they were trying to impress people with their memory skills. It was because they needed to remember this stuff in order to survive. As soon as they could put these numbers somewhere other than their own head, they did. Flash forward 800 years and you’ve got business software and GTD. Getting stuff out of our heads is good for us.

For a while I was carrying a Palm with all that info on it. Then it went dead, for some unknown reason, and I lost it all. Well, everything I hadn’t backed up for 6 months.

In any case, I called it my “digital stroke”. But the info was lost forever. I wasn’t sure if I knew everything I needed to do for the week, what my friends’ updated emails and addresses were, etc.

It was weird. One of the reasons I stopped carrying a Palm.

I think this is bogus science. The kinds of information that people have to know today is much different than two generations ago. I am glad that I don’t have to remember phone numbers because it frees my brain up to learn more important stuff like Ruby on Rails, or Joomla. I know all the keywords and syntax of 3 different languages by memory. I can remember the URL of almost any site that I really find interesting. So what if I can’t remember phone numbers and dates. I think it’s less important to remember things than it is to be as fully creative as you can be at any given time. Personally I take the side of David Allen on this one, carrying around unneeded stuff in your head robs you of the focus you need for any given task.

I have a pretty poor memory anyway, and as a scientist I’m in the habit of writing down lots of minutia. This way, I can look up details of experiments later. This has transgressed into other facets of my life as well - keeping a log in my kitchen of ways I’ve tweaked recipes to improve them, things that didn’t work well, ideas of how to alter recipes in the future, and so forth.

My dependency on writing information down is increasing, and this regularly frustrates my wife. It usually goes something like, “What time are you scheduled to give that lecture tomorrow?” My response: “Hold on, let me look it up. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t have to remember!”

Until my lack of ability to remember a telephone number, or the time of an appointment, really affects my life, I’ve decided not to worry about the fact that I don’t memorize as much as I used to. The fact that I back this information up so I won’t ever lose it all is quite comforting, as this seems to be the main scenario brought up in this thread in which not having Your Favorite Information memorized seems to have negatively impacted people.

My take on the issue: I don’t memorize phone numbers because that is what a phone book (or Address Book) is for. I don’t see the argument for spell-checkers being responsible for a perceived decrease in spelling ability, because a spell-checker is merely an electronic dictionary. Instead of spending time pulling a tome off of the shelf and looking up a word, you do it more efficiently by using a computer, and you get the same result. Whether you then take the opportunity to commit the correct spelling of a word to memory is up to you, regardless of whether you saw the correct spelling in a physical dictionary or in your word processor’s dictionary.

You see, with phone books and dictionaries, we’re already slaves to looking information up. We’ve been doing it for a long time, and now we’re just doing it in different (more technologically advanced) ways. Good for us! There has always been too much information to remember, and I think we’re just dealing with that more effectively now. I don’t see reduced mental capacity, I see an increase in the amount of information. I guess my glass is half-full.

I don’t think this is really anything new. What’s different today over, say, twenty or thirty years ago is the sheer amount of data we offload. Address books and to do lists have been around forever. We just have more stuff to fill them with.

I think the trick to dealing with this is figuring out what’s the important stuff you need to keep in your head and offload the rest. After that, you just need to remember where you put it.

Does anyone know of a way for Textexpander to function correctly in Vim, if you’ve used them together you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I say these words, or a variation, all the time.

Other attorney's I know have code sections and this and that memorized. I can't do that so I have everything I need to know in Yojimbo on tabbed in the books around my office.

So, I'm with Einstein. Why dedicate memory space to things you can look up quickly and easily?

However, I am looking into using MindCase to hold bits of info that I should have committed to memory.

Ethan had a nice article on it over at Kinkless:

http://kinkless.com/article/getting_things_remembered

It should work well for bits of info like phone numbers that you want to have a permanent place in your brain.

You said:

“I don’t see the argument for spell-checkers being responsible for a perceived decrease in spelling ability, because a spell-checker is merely an electronic dictionary. Instead of spending time pulling a tome off of the shelf and looking up a word, you do it more efficiently by using a computer, and you get the same result. Whether you then take the opportunity to commit the correct spelling of a word to memory is up to you, regardless of whether you saw the correct spelling in a physical dictionary or in your word processor’s dictionary”

That’s a great point.

I was referring to words I know and know well.

Maybe I am not too bright and getting duller by the moment is an explanation. However, I was an okay/decent speller as a kid and it was as a kid that I developed certain practices and methods that caused me to do well in exams and the like.

I am not blaming my computer for this sudden deterioration. Nor am I seeking excuses for geting stupid. However, a good few people I know and who are not utterly stupid, have noticed something similar.

My own take is that my typing is so quick that I am, almost, verbalising stuff. Unfortunately, my rapid typing is often of poor quality and I am not going through routines that were once embedded in me after hours of learning, to spell those words. I am quite simply out of practice.

Perhaps, I also rattle off “shit” because I am disengaged from the subject I am typing about.

I recently started having the same worries after I had an idea in the shower and by the time I got out I went immediately to write it down after I got out. However, it was already too late.

I still write down everything however I try to play brain age (1 and 2) once a day which keeps my memory lively for those short term things

I find this post uncanny, because it is exactly why I started developing Mental Case around 18 months ago. I was frustrated that I would forget things like my phone number, and have to fiddle around in my wallet or mobile phone to find it whenever I needed to give it out (which is quite often).

But that wasn’t all I was forgetting: I would find myself constantly rediscovering useful information. To give an example, I’m a software developer, and I would frequently read about a useful programming library or web site, then forget about it. At a later date, I would need that information, and would waste time looking for it, only to realize I had already stumbled across it in the past.

And so it was that Mental Case was born. It’s similar to other ‘drop box’ like applications, but with a twist: the things you put in are sent back to you. You can use this to help you commit the info to memory, or simply to remind you of it at some arbitrary moment in the future.

Another way I like to think about it is as a knowledge feedback loop. Everyday we are bombarded with information, most of which is useless. The trouble is that this influx dilutes the useful stuff. Mental Case feeds back that useful information, to reinforce it against the background rubbish.

Drew McCormack
Mental Case Developer