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.
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.
As I recall even Carl Sagan commented on it at depth (and how it was good thing).
For as long as people have existed we've built tools to remember things for us so we can remember other things better/learn other skills. It was a "complaint" about paper, that writing things down softened our memory skills. (People would lament about the lost traditions of storytellers that had to memorize entire stories and pass them down orally.) It didn't soften our species' memory skills, it externalized memories we didn't need in long term storage so that we could learn other things. We ended up with more stories, and arguably, better stories from paper.
Just like paper, modern systems externalize memories so we can focus on other stuff. That's a feature, not a bug. Knowing we've externalized those memories we move on with our brains and use the graymatter for other activities. That's also a feature, not a bug.
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 perfectly fine to look it up.
This is a bit like complaining the kids aren't learning how to make a fire, or how a sliderule works. If you're conscious of the tradeoff you're making, it's ok.
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 more than we think, that's the point of this article.
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.
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.
Is your GPS ruining your spatial orientation skills? Etc. Etc.
Most of these articles are pure clickbait designed to trick ageing people whose skills naturally degrade into an non-old-age related explanation for such degradation.
I love using Google Maps but I always use it with a North-up orientation with a 2-dimensional slightly-zoomed out view, so I can have context about where I am and where I'm going, so even though it's telling me where to go, I have an idea of the path I'm taking.
I used to have a strong opinion that spell check was harmful, but I've relaxed on that somewhat.
I wonder how language geeks feel about the recent rise of inline grammar checkers like Microsoft Editor or Grammarly.
Memory is OK its the concentration. I just can't read a whole novel now, its too long. Sitting down and doing work is ridiculously hard to concentrate.
1) Read on a Kindle or any other e-ink reader. It's always just in the spot you left it in and it's light enough to carry around everywhere. I usually read while I eat and continue to the end of the chapter after I'm done eating. Try to open a book instead of Reddit/Instagram/Facebook/HN
2) Read something fun. You don't need to pick stuff that's super-deep or insightful or productive. Pick a simple "Main character is really good at $thing but doesn't know it yet" -book. Skip the 1000 page monsters. My suggestions: Bobiverse and the Murderbot series.
One of my issues is grabbing the phone to kill time while waiting even for a small amount of time.
Ordered a bagel? Let me grab my phone for the 2 minutes it takes for them to call my number.
In an uber ride? Turn on the phone...
Waiting for a deploy? Let me scroll through reddit a bit.
I love the kindle, but reading a page at a time here and there isn't appealing to me, personally.
Instead, I've been trying to make a conscious effort to just be aware of my present physical space instead of grabbing for my phone during those little waits. I'm old enough to have grown up without a phone until after I graduated. I /know/ that I'll be perfectly fine without picking up my phone... but this habit of constant digital information ingestion is hard to break.
I put the Kindle app on my first page of apps and all the time sink apps deep inside a folder on the last page of apps. I even named the folder "No". It's still hard to stay away, but I am definitely reading more often.
I actually took stress-management class at an old job. It was taught by 3 actual psychologists studying stress and it's effects on people.
The main thing I retained from that was that your body has power over your mind.
I, for example, tend to _always_ grab my phone when waiting for the elevator. Now, as per their instructions, I take 3 deep breaths first and then grab the phone.
It's amazing how much that changes the way you use it. You relax a bit and don't get the urge to doomscroll on Twitter or Reddit.
It also shows you how bad you are at breathing. Modern humans tend to breathe fast and shallow and it signals "emergency" to your body. Deep breathing or box breathing completely changes your mindset. No need to do any fancy mindfulness or meditation, just breathe.
The book “The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains” [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)] by Nicholas G Carr discusses this as well. Essentially, the content we consume is just one part of the picture if you think about how our minds are shaped, the medium we consume that content through also shapes how we think.
Many of us don’t read left-to-right top-to-bottom anymore, we skim over blog posts and articles looking for keywords and then read the paragraphs or sentences around those keywords.
I had the same problem and I was able to solve it by timeboxing reading as if it was work, even though it's a hobby. I get comfy, but on some ambient music, and set my little desk timer to about 40 minutes. It's set to not beep when time runs out. I'll start reading, and for the first 20 minutes or so I'll still feel kind of antsy and keep looking at the clock, but 9/10 times I end up finally getting engrossed in what I'm reading and I don't even notice that the timer ended. By then I'm in the groove and am good to read for a couple of hours.
I wasn't trying to prescribe that everyone do this, I just tend to post the methods I've come up with to deal with my ADHD because sometimes it helps people. Obviously it won't work for everyone, which is why I only used "I" statements in my original comment.
Walking around with a notebook (the paper kind, I like the small pocket sized ones with no rules so you can write music and draw things too) instead of a phone and then coming home and typing what you wrote into a computer is awesome. I wrote a memory allocator and a long form blog post while I was out the other day this way.
For a while I was writing a program to recognize a special kind of rune-like manuscript so the typing part is unnecessary but I realized it's less work to just sit down and type the stuff in. That's not too hard to get distracted from and it gives you way more flexibility.
I upgraded my notebook to a disconnected iPad Mini with great results. The iPad is my read and write device. It's not for work or media consumption. It does not get notifications.
You're right, having just you and a blank page is a great way to work. I try to start the day with just coffee and my iPad. No internet.
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 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."
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.
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.
> 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.
My photo stream is a much better timeline than my well-organised photo collection. These pictures of food, acceptable landscapes, random dogs etc. describe my everyday life a lot better.
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 to execute on those notes and make them actionable.
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.
I don't agree with this point. We have to remember a lot more stuff these days just to exist. We retain much more information and skill than we ever did in the 80s. I remember that.
Not to say there aren't other issues but for me at least it augments my capabilities rather than reduces them in any way.
We have to remember a lot more stuff these days just to exist.
We have to know more, but not necessarily remember more.
You don't have to know how to take care of a horse, grow your own food, preserve different foods for the winter, how to get from a hundred places to a hundred other places, or any of the dozens of methods of mending your clothes, or how to clean various dirty things since we now have all-purpose cleaning methods.
People used to have to both know and remember way more than we do today. Today, we mostly just need to know how to search for things online.
I'm sure people back then would have loved a vast information repository on taking care of horses too, and would have farmed external storage of lots of that information off of their minds. And at the same time they were taking care of horses, they were not taking care of whatever vast information processes their job requires.
Oh, and their information likely went stale much more slowly than things we deal with these days.
> “Young children who use more tech had a thinner cortex, which is supposed to happen at an older age.” Cortical thinning is a normal part of growing up and then ageing, and in much later life can be associated with degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as migraines.
> Then, there are studies saying that overuse of the smartphone can lead to sleeplessness, depression, amnesia and other brain-related issues in children and teenagers.
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.
“There are studies showing that, for example, it is really hard to get dementia when you are a university professor, and the reason is not that these people are smarter – it’s that until old age, they are habitually engaged in tasks that are very mentally demanding.”
That’s an interesting point. I wonder if that applies to any knowledge work in general. As a developer I do feel that I engage my memory pretty often but I’m not sure it counts as a wholistic exercise including spatial memory, recalling events, reasoning, etc.
I have similar issues. Recently my conversation with myself around this has shifted from "how do I fix the dysfunction" to "how do I reroute around, and build systems that compensate for it?"
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.
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.
We could still all dial phone numbers by hand... now 10 digits instead of 7 in the US, now spread across all the area codes, instead of mostly local, but why?
If you dial wrong, you'll sometimes get an angry person wondering why you disturbed them, who now has your number, and surplus rage. That risk is too darned high for me to deal with, so I have about a handful of numbers I actually know.... Mom, Me, Wife, Home, Friend, and that's it. All the rest are written down in a few places, and never dialed by hand, ever.
On the other hand, I know how paper maps work, and can get anywhere in the US without relying on Google maps for real-time directions. (Though...really... traffic info is SO handy)
Thinking is expensive as is memorizing things, so if there's no benefit, we won't do it. Noticing that things have changed since you were a kid, can be shocking, but it's not a sign of permanent decline.
I have had multiple head injuries that have hurt my memory.
I was a mess of notes and reminders before a smartphone with a calendar, searchable email and photos for quick image reminders have allowed me to be fairly normal.
I however use my phone as a tool, and work hard not to use it as a time sink.
Fascinating. I've been experiencing this but related it possibly to growing older or lack of sleep or lack of motivation/time to read. Might need to pick up a dumb(er) smart phone when I need to next upgrade my phone.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Note that memorizing the Quran is a cultural feature that depends on writing; oral works are not memorized word-for-word but produced improvisationally on demand.
when i was young i didn't like carrying a watch, because somehow i noticed that relying on a watch made loose my sense of time.
i don't know if it was my imagination, but i guess without a watch i was forced to pay more attention to my surroundings to see how much time has passed.
i still don't carry a watch, but now i carry a phone, so there is that...
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
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.
It's ok, we will be forgotten in history as humans at the very brief between stage of humans with no tech enhancements and humans with computer brain enhancements. Much like Uber drivers are between regular old taxi drivers and autonomous driver less taxis.
Uber drivers are just taxi drivers but with worse labor conditions that backslided because of late stage capitalism. If they are a stepping stone to anything, it is to a miserable future.
I still remember lots of phone numbers, but they're all from the days before the contact list in my phone. Besides those the only new one I remember is my own.
So? People just use that memory to remember something else. I don’t think technology has made anyone smarter or dumber. It just changes what you think and remember, often with minimal real effects on society (at least due to changes in how your brain is used).
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.
i dont use my phone except to make calls and texts and lookup maps.
i meditate when standing in lines or in waiting rooms.
"Our data indicate that regular practice of meditation is associated with increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to somatosensory, auditory, visual and interoceptive processing. Further, regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex." [1]
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.