I strongly suspect the article's title should replace "we" with "I" and ought to be an introspective on the process of aging.
Actually a good point!
Are we losing our ability to remember?
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Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#32I 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 with content depending on the context. E.g. before giving a talk, an engineering meeting or leading a training session you can use flash cards to warm up the cache and strategically dump what is not important to remember.
Not exactly sure how I feel about that.
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#33My brain is basically a cache for pointers at this point. I always know where to find something I'm trying to remember and I always have my phone on me.
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#34Wasn’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?
How do you know he wasn’t right and writing indeed worsened our memory? Maybe you’d remember who it was if not for knowing it is written down somewhere.
And that's the question.
Is there more value in being able to remember who the specific philosopher was, or more in knowing how to find that information quickly and easily?
To take it a step further - is there more value in individuals remembering the specific philosopher, or in society, anyone in society being able to find out that same information?
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#35During the pandemic, spending more time at home and less time having real social interactions has lead me to beleive I am forgetting some of my vocabulary or at the least not practicing it enough to keep it in what you describe as "Working memory". Zoom and the like is far from natural and I find myself searching for words during sentences that I know I would not have in the past.
Can you expand on that? And can you describe your living circumstances. I'm relatively isolated due to rural life, and I haven't seen any of that in my life. I tend toward isolation naturally, so maybe that has something to do with it.
But I'm fascinated by your statements. Can you go more in-depth, please?
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plato's Phaedrus (c. 360 B.C.E.) > ... If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written ... http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html
The irony of reading this, over two thousand years later, translated into a different language, presumably by someone who is, even after all this time, still able to read the original--it's almost like writing helps us remember, as a species, in ways that would have otherwise been almost completely impossible.
If there's one thing technology is good at disrupting, it's tradition
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#37> 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…
Sometimes not remembering the content of a meeting has to do with no important content in a meeting.
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#38We are really good at adapting. Today I and my phone can do better at remembering stuff I need, than me without phone 10 years ago. Is this really a problem if you think about it from the standpoint of human evolution?
Well, it could be a problem if we are aiming for human happiness. If there is natural selection going on here, then it would be pushing the people to actually become less able to think for ourselves in terms of creative solutions. Sort of like how bird species on islands sometimes lose the ability to fly.
If that is the case, it may be really hard for us to actually reverse our destructive trend against the natural world and then we are really in trouble.
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#39Wasn’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?
Plato's Phaedrus (c. 360 B.C.E.) > ... If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written ... http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html
If only they could solve a simple challenge, like summing all letter codes (and one free letter) in a particular way, to find a number with least significance, and the next document would include it. Then tampering with history would be infeasible and easy to check.
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#40> 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…
Yep, I've found I'm less effective at remembering fully detailed information but more effective at remembering 'bread crumbs' which let me quickly find the information in documentation or online. It's sort of like I store the index internally and the data table externally.
Thank you for saying this - that is what I experience (sub thirty) and I never thought of it that way...
It even comes to inbox organization. All the older team members her have folders etc to organize everything. The younger ones - we have one large inbox with everything and just search by remembering how to look for it (“oh yeah, that email had the word “altruistic” in it and it Jeff was involved)
If you think about it, that’s just how Google and constant internet connection programmed us... knowing how to find information became more valuable than knowing information.