This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.
That reflexive gesture — reaching into your pocket for the answer — tells the story in a nutshell. Mobile phones can store 500 numbers in their memory, so why would you bother trying to cram the same info into your own memory? Younger Americans today are the first generation to grow up with go-everywhere gadgets and services that exist specifically to remember things so that we don't have to: BlackBerrys, phones, thumb drives, Gmail.
I've heard this argument before, usually accompanied by frowns and shakes of the head. When I was young, the parallel was calculators versus rote memorization of multiplication tables. I'm curious what people think about this. 1) do you think it's true? and 2) If it is, is it a big deal? Remember that we are talking about personal information here, not random historical dates.
8 comments:
Well, the article fails to mention the fact that since us young people aren't using those memory cells to remember this type of information, we may have more "room" so to speak for other information. That we are not losing our memory, as it says, but reassigning memory to different things than in the past. I myself think it has to do with the amount of usernames and passwords we are required to remember for all of the different web sites we visit. Our email accounts, bank accounts, payroll systems, personal entertainment websites- It's impossible to keep them all straight.
The question is both what we are forgetting AND what we are now remembering. Maybe new media is re-classifying information as more or less important as our mind's memory is challenged and changed.
Will it make us smarter or dumber in the end? People critized TV strongly when it first came out because people thought it made people dumber-- they saw the written word as requiring more mental capabilities. I don't know if we've come to agree or disagree with that argument even today.
I'm glad Cristina brought up the point that we are remembering different things, not just forgetting entirely. Why would we remember birthdays when we can program them into our blackberries or palm pilots or computers, and set reminders? Or, better yet, when Facebook tells us on our home pages? The funny thing is, though, that if a friend doesn't list their birthday on Facebook, people forget. Just a personal aside: one time I listed my birthday in March, as a joke (it's really in October), and my best friend of 4 years called me to wish me a happy birthday, in March!
But it seems we only remember what we want to remember. This somewhat ties in with Maynard's argument about customization. It seems as though in the present we are customizing our memories. We know that we don't have to remember birthdays and phone numbers, so why would we waste time and energy doing it? As Cristina said, it's the numerous passwords and usernames and account numbers that we have to always worry about remembering, so that is what we focus our time and energy on.
-Abby R.
I'll buy into Robertson's idea that we don't worry as much about dates, phone numbers (though you should ALWAYS be able to remember your own!!), etc because we have technology to do it for us. Like Abby said, why worry about it when you get messages on Facebook, an iCal or Google Calendar message, etc.? Like the readings we had earlier on social interplay and interdependence, it is society's natural progression to rely and use these new technologies.
Furthermore, I would agree with the idea we have more passwords, usernames to remember, but I'm thinking of even more. I have to remember my Student ID Number, SSN, Employee ID Number, Checking Account Number, and Credit Card Number. You can't say that those, among everything else we're learning, are not an indication we're exercising our own memories. Ask me, I'll be able to recite all those on command.
I agree with the article's claims, but I do not think that it will completely negatively affect us. Although we may not remember some information, like phone numbers, because we have them programmed, I don't think we'll lose the ability to do so. I fully agree with Cristina, that our minds just focus on other types of memorization. Before the Internet, people didn't have to remember countless passwords and personal questions and usernames. With the freeing up of one form of memorization came another.
However, I will also say that I do think it's extremely useful to keep practicing the memorization skills that we've lost. As we enjoy the convenience and help of facebook, we should also be physically writing birthdays on actual calendars. Memorizing important phone numbers serves a clear purpose. In emergency situations where we may not have our cell phones, knowing people's numbers will prove extremely necessary. Just as math teachers require students to solve equations mentally or on paper, rather than on the calculator, to gage a deeper understanding of the material, so should we put effort in remembering important information stored on our technology. Doing so may actually give us a better sense of personal organization.
-Elli
I completely agree that young people's memories are increasingly lapsing in certain bits of information due to new technological innovations, but also see absolutely no problem with this statement.
I know that, before I had a cell phone, I was able to memorize many of my friends' numbers and now know practically zero of them. I do not, however, see any problem with this, because whenever I need to know any of these numbers, I will be using my cell phone to call them, and my cell phone has them all stored.
We're not ever going to get quizzed about something such as a friend's phone number, so why should we waste our memory on such things. I remember once learning that Leonardo Da Vinci wrote down all the dates, numbers and codes that he came across so that he didn't have to waste his memory on them. Though I still doubt the truth of this, I was once taught that he couldn't even remember his own birthday without looking at the sheet.
Though the Da Vinci case is clearly an extreme one, it proves the uselessness of wasting our memory on certain facts that can be easily documented and accessed elsewhere.
At first glance, this modern "memory lapse" does not seem all that worrisome. As Danny posted above, how important is it to know someone's phone number if we have it stored in our cell phones? Is it really a problem to not have birthdays, anniversaries and the like memorized? After all, all of this information is not lost, but only stored somewhere else.
While all of this is true, it also seems important to consider not only how technology is changing our reliance on on memories but also how technology is changing the way we actually view this progression and others like it. As Postman wrote in Technopoly, it is simple, even comforting, for society to automatically associate technological advancements with ideas of progress, freedom and triumph (45). But as technology continues to assert its dominance, we are losing our more traditional world view. Eventually an entire thought-world is obliterated (48). In this way, the trouble with our increasing reliance on technology does not lie so much in the memories we are losing but rather in entire thought-world we are losing. As Postman writes: "Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. ... It makes them invisible
and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy."
Although my comparison might be a bit extreme, I do think new memory devices are changing, to some extent, the way we look at relationships and even society at large. Institutions, I think, are being redefined by a new, technologically created definition of "personal" and what it means to personally interact with others.
Having read through these comments there seems to be something missed in each one. What happens if your storage site is wiped out, is lost or any of the other events that could prevent access to the information. As far as I know there is not a file folder of any kind that can replace the human mind.
They have yet to come up with anything equal to the memory of the mind; therefore the mind needs to be used for the purpose it was intended. Health may affect it a machine cannot replace it.
Post a Comment