Does technology ruin your memory?
Writing at Wired, Clive Thompson says humans are remembering fewer and fewer basic facts. Gadgets do the remembering for us. At my age, that’s probably a good thing but Thompson says it’s affecting the younger generation:
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.
He goes on to discuss how we are remembering fewer and fewer facts because we can always find them on Google. This brought to my mind something I read somewhere about Harvard students complaining about courses where they had to remember facts. They claimed that they didn’t have to know facts because they could always look them up. I wondered then and I wonder now how you can look up things whose existence is unknown to you.
Actually, the decline in knowledge is not really technology’s fault. Our schools are teaching less and less. If you believe the polls and surveys, Americans’ general knowledge is alarmingly low. A problem is that without general knowledge you can’t correlate things or see the connections. You can’t put two and two together.
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