Thanks for the memories Ð stored in the computer

Date Published: {J}

There must be a mathematical sum that proves that, the more memory you have on your phone and computer, the less memory you now have in your head.

Because God be with the days when you could remember someone’s phone number by heart or read a map to find your way from A to B – now it’s phone contacts and sat navs to save you using your noggin. 

Equally, you don’t need real friends any more when you can acquire thousands of them – ones you’ve never met, mind you – via Facebook. And through the same medium, you can share the sort of innermost thoughts that you wouldn’t share with your own kids.

If the average family home suffers a power cut these days, they no longer worry about the fear of frozen chickens defrosting in the deep freeze – they’re too busy fretting that the memory will be wiped on their laptop.

Because we remember nothing any more – not when it’s easier to store your brain in a laptop.

And this isn’t just some bizarre theory – because new research carried out at Columbia University no less has found that people are adapting their ability to remember because of the formidable power of search engines such as Google to remember things for them. In other words, people no longer always need to know stuff; they just need to know where it can be found.

The research, published in Science magazine, involved a series of experiments. In one, participants were given pieces of information to type into a computer. Half were told the computer would retain the information and the other half were told it would be erased.

Participants "did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statements they had read," the researchers reported.

In another experiment, when participants were given information and folder names in which they were stored, they were better at recalling the folder names than the information.

"The results ... suggest 'where' was prioritised in memory, with the advantage going to 'where' when 'what' was forgotten," the researchers said.

It all started when we grew to depend on calculators to add up, multiply or subtract – but then our forefathers probably did the same with an abacus.

These days, you don’t need to know anything – you just need to know where to find it. Which is all very well until the power dies in your phone and the only numbers you can remember are your own and 999.

It’s the equivalent of an external drive for the brain – don’t clog up your grey matter with stuff that you can log on to when and if you need it.But does all this mean our brains will turn to mush? Should we not know things by heart like everyone did in the past?

Indeed the world has now gone full circle in that we have computer games designed exclusively to help us exercise our mind and memory – by answering questions and solving puzzles they randomly toss in our direction.

Which all means we depend on computers, google and Wikipedia to remember the things we should remember in our own brains – and we turn to Ninetendo games to exercise those same brains in case they log off from the lack of something to do.

God be with the good old days. And if you can’t remember them, just look it up.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.