DIGITAL BRAINS

Did we learn to develop technologies that think for us and now we use them so much that we cannot do it ourselves anymore?

Since the beginning of human existence, brain development has differentiated us from our primate cousins. We have always thought of our human brain as an organ which continues to grow, from birth to death, and from generation to generation. 

But in today’s digital world, our brain power is being used differently than before. We used to regularly learn, store, and retrieve information in our brains. Sometimes we would use other people’s memory to help us remember something, such as the way older couples will remind each other of events; they rely on one another’s memory. This is referred to by psychologist Wegner as “transactive memory”. But now it is more common for us to rely on digital technologies to store information for us and help us remember things.

 

Studies show that people can learn new information easier if they are able to forget old information. This is called “offloading”, think of it as similar to the pensieve in Harry Potter’s world. The idea is that offloading frees up brain space for other activities; “…by saving or ‘offloading’ information on to a computer, we are freeing up cognitive resources that enable us to memorise and recall new information instead” (Noreen, 2015). Whether we realize it or not, digital technologies now do this for us.

Knowledge is power, but are we doing ourselves a favor by offloading information to learn more, or are we short-circuiting our memory?

Researchers Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner show that people who use the internet to seek and retrieve information are much less likely to recall the detailed information they read. Interestingly, however, they do remember where they can return online to look up the information later. In essence, we are using digital technologies, such as the internet, as a place to store information for our brains.

The Atlantic published a fascinating article about how the internet is changing the makeup of our brains. The article discusses how today the internet is commonly the main channel of information to our brains. Using the internet as an information source is shown to affect our overall attention span, especially in terms of learning information from reading. Information online is presented in short snippets which are often easy to browse and usually have running text and hyperlinks, as opposed to print format which requires our brains to focus on long passages of text. Our attention span is shorter than it used to be before online reading became our primary means to information.

But will our increased reliance on digital technologies for memory assistance affect our ability to remember information for ourselves?

We offload a lot of information to our “smartphones”. For this reason, Chalmers, a philosophy professor from Australian National University, refers to our smartphone as an extension of our brain. Our smartphones help us remember a variety of things: from alerting us to people’s birthdays and appointments, to correcting the spelling of words we can’t remember how to spell, to reminding us to take medications or set a wake up alarm. More so, smartphone’s navigation apps remember our favorite places and remind us how to get there. Smartphones even store people’s phone numbers and email addresses for us and encode that information under the person’s actual name. I don’t even have to remember when I’m traveling on a plane. When I book a flight, my Gmail automatically recognizes the event details in my email and adds it to my calendar, accounting for travel time to the airport. The list could continue endlessly.

The extent digital memory assistance plays in our lives is only expected to grow as Artificial Intelligence systems like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, or smartphone processors continue to develop. But has this offloading caused us to be dependent on these technologies and damaged our ability to focus and remember? I’d like to think my brain could learn and remember something as trivial as a new phone number if I wanted to… but could I?