It's worth remembering

Why technology advances mean we are remembering less than ever, and what we can do about it.

Good morning. Happy Monday. I hope the coffee’s hot and the toast is brown.

Now…

What I was saying?

Memory is one of those funny things. You don’t know how good it is until it’s going, going, gone.

I chose it for today because I listened to a fantastic podcast series called ‘Brain Rot’, by Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC.

The episode that caught my attention the most was called ‘Is tech making your memory better or worse?’.

I’ve always assumed that tech would make our memories better. This was based solely on the fact that I have about 6 photos of me as a child and my kids (based on current count on my iPhone library) will have about 450,000.

Surely the number of images aid the memory, no?

Apparently not.

But in the mid-2000s, as the pace of technological change really got going, a new field of research sprang up.

Dr. Julia Soares, an assistant professor of psychology at Mississippi State University tells the Brain Rot podcast:

“There was a lot of concern about the extent to which people are kind of offloading the responsibility of remembering onto our digital devices and the internet and concerns about the extent to which we might be sort of dumping our memories into these devices and concerns that we might not be remembering things as well”.

So people talk about like how Google has changed the bar room debate about some trivia fact, right? Like you would be having a debate about who that actor was that you can't remember the name of or who was actually in that movie or what date this thing actually happened on. And you can look it up now. So you have lost a little bit of that debate and maybe the next time you have to look it up, you won't remember it as well as if you and your friends had really worked to come up with that actor's name.

Some of the researchers who put out those studies have argued that people can almost fail to distinguish between their knowledge in the head and their knowledge that they can access with Google, even if they ask them really carefully, what do you know? Like what is in your brain? What do you know on your own without Google, without using any type of internet search? And that people can sometimes overestimate what they know as a result of using internet search.”

So what does Dr Soares think about photos on the phone? Helpful to memory or not?

“I have a couple of studies where we've found that taking photos can impair memory.”

“And it's not clear exactly what causes people to have impairments associated with taking photos or benefits. Ultimately, you have a photo at the end of it, which has been shown to be a very effective memory cue. But if you take so many photos that you can never go back through your photos again, it's too daunting, it's too unpleasant. There are some surveys showing that people really don't review their photographs as much as they could or maybe should. If you take so many photos that you don't go back and review them, then you could be experiencing impairments associated with that photo taking”.

So what can you do to aid memory?

Dr. Julia Soares, again:

“I still take photos. I still take photos all the time but I do try to be mindful about what I choose to photograph and how many photos I take. When I take a photo I'm in the mindset of thinking about how is this going to cue my retrieval later on. Like this is this should be something that I want to remember alongside the photo as opposed to I got it. I got the photograph and the point is getting the photograph as opposed to using the photo to help myself enjoy things in the moment.”

I don’t know about you but I hardly ever go looking back at photos unless I need to remember a specific ‘something’.

But I have an idea.

How about once a day replace a doom-scrolling moment with memory-scrolling moment?

Going back over old photos of family, friends, events that you intentionally want to encode into the deep memory of your brain.

I’m going to start today.

If I remember to do it.

See you next Monday Morning,

Wade