Quick: Can you do long division? Probably, though you’d have to concentrate to remember how. Odds are you learned this years ago in grade school, but in a modern world filled with Excel and calculators, who needs to actually perform long division by pencil? Almost no-one. And if you stop practicing long division, maybe eventually you sort of forget how to do it. You’ve outsourced it to the machines around you.
This is subject of my latest column in the current issue of Wired magazine: The fate of human memory in a world where we’re increasingly reliant on machine memory. The piece is online for free at Wired’s site, and a copy is also permanently archived below:
Your outboard brain knows all
by Clive ThompsonWe’re running out of memory.
I don’t mean computer memory. That stuff’s half-price at Costco these days. No, I’m talking about human memory, stored by the gray matter inside our heads. According to recent research, we’re remembering fewer and fewer basic facts these days.
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.
