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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’

#31

Post by lordnacho »

pfortuny wrote: post #24
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).

False. You can search for the arguments in favor of evolution, or some explanation for the fall of Rome, or why you should prefer composition over inheritance. You just have to remember that they're things people have thought about and roughly the outline. Doing a search will let you fill out the skeleton.

Previously if you were to opine on those subjects you would either need the information to hand, or look it up in one of a few books you happened to have near you.

The search will in all likelihood lead to better reasoning than if you did not have the internet to hand, assuming you know how to critique sources. For instance you might have forgotten some supporting evidence. This is a big assumption but it's pretty much what people should be practicing during education.

The thing you really need to practice in the modern world is judgement. You go online, read some sources, and now you have the problem of deciding which sources are worth listening to.

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

#32

Post by taylorportman »

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.

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

#33

Post by t_mann »

lordnacho wrote: post #28
t_mann wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, and countless people since prehistory have died or been significantly worse off because they simply didn't know better. Now we have science to help us figure things out before natural selection drives us away from unhealthy behaviour.

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

#34

Post by blaze33 »

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.

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

#35

Post by nabla9 »

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.

It was true then and it's true now.

If you have to remember things from spoken world only (or if books are rare), you memorize things. You get better at memorizing and your memory becomes good.

You can remember what you read but you must read properly.

It's amazing how many people don't know to how to read (non-fiction) books or take notes that make learning and remembering easy. They start from beginning and go to the end. They take notes that are neat and follow the organization of the book.

Proper active reading means that you interrogate the book. Skim and skip. ask questions, write answers, check what the books says, look at other books of the same subject, disagree. Read only first paragraphs. Go back and read again the whole chapter. Again and again. If you own the book you make notes into the book until it becomes an artifact that works as a memory aid.

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

#36

Post by Forge36 »

blaze33 wrote: post #34

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 s…

This sounds like my connection. I still travel with a camera so those photos are more organized.

Time to take a few days to organize my photos.

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

#37

Post by legalcorrection »

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.
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