Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 91 posts

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

#41

Post by gopher_space »

thenerdhead wrote: post #21

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 le…

The other way to look at it is that there was a sixty year span when memorizing many seven to ten digit numbers was important to us, and so that's exactly what we did.

I didn't lose the ability to memorize entire books like my grandfather did, I'm just not isolated for months on end in winter like he was. It's also not the babe-attracting party trick it apparently used to be.

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

#43

Post by undersuit »

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.

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

#44

Post by gernb »

imapeopleperson wrote: post #38

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

You can make all the same arguements about the invention of paper and books.

> So what happens when we outsource part of our memory to an external device?

You mean like a paper notepad, paper calendar, paper daily planner?

> Does it enable us to squeeze more and more out of life, because we aren’t as reliant on our fallible brains to cue things up for us? Are we so reliant on smartphones that they will ultimately change how our memories work

Yea, I used to have a little black book (that was a thing) and I wrote down people's addresses and phone numbers instead of memorizing them.

Even with smartphones it's still super popular in Japan to use paper daily planners. You don't memorize all your activities, you write them down. Been happening for centuries

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

#45

Post by gernb »

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…

> 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.

Um, ok. Did the tech do that to you? I download my iPhone photos to my desktop every 2-3 months. I then organize them into folders by events (loosely). Names like

    2022-02-08 Mom's Birthday
    2022-02-13 
    2022-02-14 Valentine's Day Dinner
    2022-02-20
It takes only 10-20 minutes.

The folders with only the date are basically uncategorized photos from the date of the previous folder to the date on that folder. (eg, 2022-02-13 holds random phots from 2022-02-09 to 2022-02-13)

It sounds like you stopped doing that. I didn't. So I'm not sure why you think the phone made you stop rather that you just deciding to stop and me not deciding to stop.

Note: I also auto sync all my phone photos to Google Photos but I only use that for easy access, not for backup.

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

#46

Post by gernb »

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.

why would you need to remember your own phone number. I talk to almost no one via my phone number. I can't think of a single friend I've needed to share a phone number with in ~10 years. Most of them I contact via FB Messenger, some via WhatsApp, others via Line, none of them do I call on via their phone number

Maybe phone numbers are just old crap best left in the past

Yes, I get we still use them for registering accounts but they suck IMO and need to be phased out. People move countries, numbers change or get stolen or get revoked.

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

#47

Post by kayodelycaon »

pmg102 wrote: post #42
crooked-v wrote: post #40

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

How do you know?

For myself, I have limited working memory and time blindness. No amount of practice can fix the brain malfunctions that cause them.

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

#48

Post by crooked-v »

pmg102 wrote: post #42
crooked-v wrote: post #40

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

How do you know?

Because my memory was just as bad as a child, well before I ever had any personal electronic devices.

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

#50

Post by wahern »

amatic wrote: post #26
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 t…

As far as I understand, this contention goes to the heart of Plato's epistemology. Platonic forms have their reification in the mind and, in particular, in memory. (As opposed to existing in some separate abstract universe.) IOW, quite literally if you haven't memorized something you have no possession of the truth. At best you enjoy a shadow of it, just like in his allegory of the cave where the physical world that you see with your eyes is merely a shadow of true reality. It's only people who have memorized something (i.e. can turn it over in their mind as a whole) who can see and understand it for what it truly is. To see reality is to quite literally possess it in your conscious mind. If all you possess are fragments, or merely knowledge about how to acquire it (i.e. know of it by reference), you possess nothing--you know nothing.

EDIT: It's a little more complex than that. I think Plato identifies the "soul" as where the forms maintain their persistence. So in a sense everybody possess reality within them. Memory is a portal into the soul; it's how you "see" it. Notably, the Christian (and especially Augustinian Catholic) concept of conscience is derived from this Platonic model. That's why Christians say that knowledge of right and wrong--as well as God, etc--is imbued within every person from conception. I doubt that that's a particularly novel idea among world religions, but the way it plays out in Christian theology is heavily derivative of Plato's model.

Post reply on HN