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

theguardian.com

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

#21

Post by thenerdhead »

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.

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

#22

Post by jacquesm »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #4

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.

The memory feats of people able to recite the whole of the Quran have always impressed me very much, and it makes me wonder how well they fare on remembering other things.

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

#23

Post by Jensson »

sacrosanct wrote: post #15

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 t…

The ML algorithm that powers you can't work with items in your exobrain. The main reason to learn new things is to add those things to your internal training algorithms, the more good snippets it has access to the smarter your thinking becomes. Your subconsciousness is much smarter than you are and creates links and indexes and lots of other processing that you could never add in an exobrain, and in addition is orders of magnitudes faster than you trying to navigate some external thing.

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

#24

Post by pfortuny »

lordnacho wrote: post #11

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 perfe…

Reasoning cannot depend on “a search”. It is based on memory, on knowledge (not on its accessibility).

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

#25

Post by visarga »

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).

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

#26

Post by amatic »

Joker_vD wrote: post #16

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.

> Plato(?)

Yep, in Plato's Phaedrus. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439

Plato wrote the story, attributing it to Socrates. The story is about the egyptian inventor Theuth who showed his inventions of numbers, leters, etc. to the god Thamus (Ammon). The god liked the numbers, but for writing said:

> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

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

#27

Post by omega3 »

reaperducer wrote: post #7

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.

People nowadays have no trouble remembering the ig, twitter, tiktok, twitch handles of the people they follow.

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

#28

Post by lordnacho »

t_mann wrote: post #17
lordnacho wrote: post #11

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 perfe…

No, you're missing the point. Our brains don't work like von Neumann machines with efficient architecture. What you can and cannot remember is a - still poorly understood - function of many variables, including the various neurotransmitters and hormones that get released when you browse your phone in bed, when you get a reaction to your online posts, when you get a notification,... We might be messing with our brains…

> We might be messing with our brains more than we think, that's the point of this article.

That's simply always true.

Since prehistory:

- We eat foods we never used to eat

- We live in larger groups

- We discovered a whole bunch of drugs/medicines.

- Artificial light

- Artificial strength

Now artificial information. Sure, take precautions, try to think about what you're changing. Try to understand the tradeoffs.

The cat is well out of the bag however.

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

#30

Post by nabla9 »

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.

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