The downside of the outboard brain
Submitted by Merlin on October 11, 2007 - 2:19pm.
Clive Thompson writes on a phenomenon I think about constantly: if you really do start entrusting all your ephemeral memory work to external systems, might your wetware start to atrophy?
Apparently, yes:
This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.
Haha, big joke, right? Not for me. Between me and TextExpander, only one of us knows my new VoIP number by heart. Without TE to paste it anywhere on command? Yep, I’d have to look up my own phone number. Sad.
But, Clive goes on:
My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.
And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I’m using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat…
And, in closing…
At the very least, I’d like to be able to remember my own phone number.
Now thinking that’s something I might want to work on too.
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Re: The downside of the outboard brain
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…”)