Are we losing our ability to remember? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#131

Post by soulofmischief » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:01 PM UTC

jraph wrote: post #7

> So I wouldn’t say we are losing our ability to remember, as I posed at the start of this post. I think people (me included) just don’t do enough work to move stuff from our working memory into our long-term memory. I'd say we could be better at remembering that some piece of information exists and where to find it instead of having to memorize it. This seems more powerful. And for things you do often, you will prob…

> I'd say we could be better at remembering that some piece of information exists and where to find it instead of having to memorize it

This approach is called Transactive Memory, and you do it with Google, with your note-taking software, with your friends and colleagues. You do it with your pet.

One of our biggest employable strengths as hackers is that we know where to find information. We make a habit of learning where to find different kinds of knowledge, then do a deep dive into a particular subject. We are masters of transactive memory.

We as a species are rapidly shifting to a more transactive memory in general as it further compresses our knowledge into a small space by storing metadata instead of the knowledge itself, allowing for rapid acclimation to a given task based on the wealth of knowledge around you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactive_memory

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#132

Post by asdff » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:18 PM UTC

ohduran wrote: post #121

pessimizer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that the most terrifying thing in the book 1984 (and the most relevant to the pending future) was that people weren't allowed tools to write anything down, they had to use the "speakwrite," which would monitor the user and refuse to write things that weren't allowed to be written. Orwell wasn't prescient enough to imagine the type-remember, where you kept your entire perception of the world on machin…

I always thought that Brave New World was more prescient than 1984: you won't be forbid to write, we'll instead give you something more fun and distracting to do instead.

So many parallels between Brave New World and our current world. It's honestly disturbing. The class divide between rich and poor is in there. The intellectual divide between knowledge workers and laborers is in there. The dopamine consumption cycle that stymies creative thought of the masses is in there. The willful ignorance of there being any problems at all is in there. That book is disturbingly prophetic.

It's honestly worse in real life, because in the book the savages and intellectuals on islands live peacefully outside the regime. There is no option to not participate in our world, given that climate change will affect the entire planet; there is no safe refuge from the regime because it directly affects even those not participating in it.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#133

Post by asdff » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:23 PM UTC

allenu wrote: post #124

spicymaki wrote: post #32

I feel that in general we are consuming a lot more information than we really need. I am not sure the human brain was evolved to handle a large amount of information that does not have any physical references. I find myself not only forgetting myriad facts and figures, but also mixing up information or having false memories. Many of my memories have nothing to anchor on. I think the trend today is to prime the brain…

I also think we consume more information that we need. I think we also tend to overvalue getting that information and retaining it. The HN crowd is biased towards analysis and information, but just look at the abundance of note-taking systems posted. I used to store as much info as I could somewhere (a personal wiki) but over the years I realized there's just too much there and most of it I never need, and if I do ne…

The fetishism with notetaking is rampant, both on here and online. People make good money writing articles about the latest notetaking app and serving ads. Personally, I've never needed to crack open an old notebook after the relevant project has passed. I have a stack of them from college at my parent's house and they are simply collecting dust. Even if I had everything digital I would never feel the need to go back and sift through them since they are no longer relevant.

The act of taking notes with a pen and paper, to synthesize thoughts into symbols and sentence structures, is far more meaningful than looking at the note again imo.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#134

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

ohduran wrote: post #121

pessimizer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that the most terrifying thing in the book 1984 (and the most relevant to the pending future) was that people weren't allowed tools to write anything down, they had to use the "speakwrite," which would monitor the user and refuse to write things that weren't allowed to be written. Orwell wasn't prescient enough to imagine the type-remember, where you kept your entire perception of the world on machin…

I always thought that Brave New World was more prescient than 1984: you won't be forbid to write, we'll instead give you something more fun and distracting to do instead.

[deleted]

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#135

Post by asdff » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #4

Wasn’t there a Greek philosopher who lamented how the youngs are losing their ability to remember because this newfangled invention called “writing” is making them lazy?

In a way Socrates was exactly right. Consider Buddhism, a philosophy that lasted orally for hundreds of years before the first texts were written. Even today, buddhist monks use chanting and repetition to memorize these teachings, internalize them, and live them.

Sure, you could read these teachings and move on with your life, but can you recite what you just read, or even what you just wrote? Not a chance. Your memory of text is fleeting compared to if you gave focused mental effort committing that text to memory through oral repetition.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#136

Post by sixdimensional » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

BitwiseFool wrote: post #74

sixdimensional wrote: post #61

I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”. Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains. We evolve with technology, and it evolves with…

For me personally, the internet has made my brain better at remembering associations between ideas, but worse at free-recall of factual information. It's like my mind got better at indexing at the expense of storage.

Perhaps the information "explosion", "deluge" or "overload" is part of it. There is so much - or too much - information, we can still ingest a lot, maybe we rely on making the connections and finding the generalities/mental models because there are too many specifics.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#137

Post by asdff » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #49

I honestly fear what will happen when we attach more directly to the brain/eye the type of infrastructure and capabilities of a modern smartphone / search engine / assistant device that we now carry in our hands. Like Google Glass or whatever, but more invisible and immersive. I already feel so distracted; memory and focus and analysis sideloaded onto devices, and I'm not even a big phone user. Kids in school are alr…

Considering how many children and adults have undiagnosed ADHD, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest that advertisers are exploiting these pathologies to great effect. Sidetrack and distract to draw eyes to your product, and with smart glasses you always have that opportunity to introduce an advertisement or track gaze on advertisements ("please watch the ad to continue playing the video!" and pausing the ad when you look away is incoming, I assure you).

Personally that sort of stuff is where I draw the line, since it's a redundant consumer product with things I already own. Technology in recent decades has shown that the only utility it provides is analogous to something that already exists and works fine, because companies would rather ship something fast and 'new' than something clever that took time to think about. Like the smartwatch: $300 to poorly replicate half the things your phone in your pocket can already do, oh and you have to charge it every day unlike your automatic watch that was powered by your moving wrist alone. Or smart glasses, which would only serve to distract me in the middle of whatever I was doing at the time (probably with increasingly intrusive advertising like we see in every piece of technology in recent decades), and once again, is entirely redundant with 1/10th of the functionality that my phone in my pocket can do (including AR).

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#138

Post by asdff » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

shrugthug wrote: post #54

For anybody interested in diving deeper into this subject, I would recommend reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. It was written in 2011, but is still very applicable today. Brain plasticity is a real concept and our constant connection to the Internet affects us. https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...

Very scary and I do get a sense that my recall ability and general focus is severely diminished after a decade of being active on reddit and other places like here. The problem is I'm on this dopamine treadmill. I see a thread with an interesting topic and a lot of comments, and I want to dive in and spend an hour sifting through it. I check my subreddits and HN every day.

And for what? I get nothing out of it, maybe a little pissed off every now and then. Most articles I read are forgettable and have no impact on my life. There is literally nothing that I've learned on the internet over close to two decades of use that I couldn't learn more thoroughly with a book or by looking at a newspaper, and in recent years it's been getting impossible to find actual factual subject information on the internet that isn't some half assed SEOified article that doesn't even have my answer.

I think I'm just gonna pull the plug and block these websites with some browser extension, because I am just too compulsive at this point, too engrained into this automatic unconscious action of cmd+t->news.y->tab->enter to do it under my own volition. Sometimes I sit down and I don't even remember opening HN, but there I am scrolling through the front page.

I still need the internet for emails, stack overflow, or finding articles in my field, but that sort of use I will allow because I take that information and synthesize it into something novel and useful. I'm going to pull the plug on being a mindless internet consumer, who leaves no time for actual thinking in between the rampant consumption.

Good bye, HN, hopefully for good but we will see how long I'm able to remain disciplined. I'm kinda excited about what sort of mental clarity this might bring me and how much that will improve my life.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#139

Post by SonnyTark » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

spicymaki wrote: post #32

I feel that in general we are consuming a lot more information than we really need. I am not sure the human brain was evolved to handle a large amount of information that does not have any physical references. I find myself not only forgetting myriad facts and figures, but also mixing up information or having false memories. Many of my memories have nothing to anchor on. I think the trend today is to prime the brain…

You just made me realize how confusing it must be for our brain to receive a high density of pointless information projected into it when we binge-watch a TV show through a weekend.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#140

Post by Buttons840 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

sixdimensional wrote: post #61

I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”. Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains. We evolve with technology, and it evolves with…

"Are we losing our ability to walk?"

Yeah. Kinda. Not really. I bet people had to walk more before cars though.