Gadgets Have Taken Over For Our Brains 311
skotte writes "According to a Trinity College survey released Friday, the boom in mobiles and portable devices that store reams of personal information has created a generation incapable of memorizing simple things. In effect, the study argues, these devices have replaced our long-term memory capabilities. 'As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes. When it came to remembering important dates such as the birthdays of close family relatives, 87 per cent of those over the age of 50 could remember the details, compared with 40 per cent of those under the age of 30.'"
Einstein couldn't tell you how many feet in a mile (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got no problem letting a device remind me when my mom's birthday is. That's what it's for.
Passwords (Score:5, Insightful)
a) we know we don't need to remember it
b) we've displaced the storage space with the massive variety of passwords we need to remember these days
So? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's important to remember that the brain can only retain so much. When overloaded, a new fact replaces an old one. Do you all forget the episode of Married With Children, when Kelly went on a sports trivia show? The only thing she knew before she prepared for it was that her dad scored four touchdowns in a single game. She crammed all sorts of knowledge into her head, and was totally kicking butt in the competition, until the final question. "What local hero scored four touchdowns in a single game?" She had forgotten.
It is important to realize that we have a limited number of brain cells. With technology, we can use fewer of them, and this is how it should be.
and this is a bad thing?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Insignificant details (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sad.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Silly article (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a whole bunch of things in that article that are not necessarily
anything to do with the hypothesis. The above is just a particularly egregious
example. Apart from men not caring as much about relationships, how much thought
does an average man put into thinking about the wedding beforehand compared
to his spouse, 10% would be my estimate, but that's a little on the high side.
In the rest of it, so older people remember birthdays better than younger people,
maybe that's because they have been giving presents for longer etc
Knowledge in memory vs in a book (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is no. The retained knowledge of facts allows for a more thorough understanding of the facts, and allows for easier manipulation. I see this all the time with idiot cashiers who can't make change, and have to look up what the correct change is for something that costs $19.27 after I give them $20.02.
Ir retort to Feynman - I could easily look up F=MA in a basic physics book, as opposed to cluttering my mind with that useless formula.
My arguments will obviously trigger a response in fans of the rote memorization vs those of the concepts(why learn adding - we have calculators). Probably swining too far in either direction is unwise, and a healthy balance between the two is beneficial in learning.
Re:err obvious point (Score:5, Insightful)
A more useful study would be to give people in each group a list of numbers to remember. Have them study it for a couple days. Then take it away for a week, and have them come in to recite it. Which group does better? My personal guess would be that the results would match the historical learning capabilities of a person's age (which I personally don't know). I doubt there would be a significant difference between results in a study 20 years ago versus a study today. But it would be nice to have a control group of people who don't use gadgets to compare to.
Re:Einstein couldn't tell you how many feet in a m (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Knowledge in memory vs in a book (Score:2, Insightful)
It might scare you, but the first thing a pilot of a large airliner does when there is an emergency conditition is to pull out her flight manual to follow the detailed instructions on how to proceed with this particular emergency. There are too many different scenarios to know the rules for them all.
I never call my home phone (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality is that the human story is all about using tools and technology to free our minds for more abstract purposes. If we can have the facts written in front of us, we are more likely to be able to draw defensible and novel inferences based on those facts. But the lack of importance of memorization comes directly from the work technology, which is really a systematic telling of how to do something, rather than merely memorizing a myriad of facts.
The truly disturbing thing about this story is that much research into cognitive development indicates that memorization is the lowest level of thinking, yet in average daily life memorization is overly prized and most people likely never advance beyond it. Stories like this, likely written to convince the masses that undated skills is unreasonable as the arbitrary skills of the past are always the best, merely perpetuates the myth that thinking is nor required and technology is something that happens once, and then nothing is ever discovered again. I am always very tickled when people say how fast technology is moving. Do we not consider the steam engine of 200 years ago? Or the printing press of 500 years ago? Or how about the stirrup 2000 years ago? All of these were disruptive influences which reduced the necessity of human effort for survival. Each of these offloaded some of our human effort onto machines, both physical and mental. For instance, the Jacquard loom automated not only the act of weaving, but the need to remember to switch our fibers. I am sure that all the skilled weavers who were put out of jobs decried that such a machine would be the end of civilization as we know it. And it thankfully was. I am very happy to have indoor plumbing and not have to pour my feces into the street.
Re:Knowledge in memory vs in a book (Score:5, Insightful)
I can think of two situations when one might memorise material by rote. The first is when it is time critical. The second is when for the forseable tasks one intends to undertake it is faster to memorise the material than repeatedly look it up. In the case of Feynman and the biologists, Feynman is correct because he was able to do actual interesting biology without needing to memorise the material, catching up four years of real biology in no time. It is the equivilant of a physics degree comprising in no small part of memorising the lagrangians of condensed matter systems. Physics, certainly. Useful, sure. The most productive use of a students time, hell no!
The reason your retort to Feynman is specious is that Feynman would have no problem with you looking up Newtons laws, or the formula for the Ricci Tensor, or any other formula (heck I study quantum gravity and I don't know what the formula for the Ricci tensor is) like that the first 20 or so times. After you use a formula that often you will memorise it anyway. You might get a complaint if you don't know what the Ricci tensor is, or what a force is, because knowing what concepts are and how to use them is more important than knowing their precise form. It is the difference between knowing what the kidneys do, and knowing what each individual part of a kidney cell looks like under a microscope.
In reference to the article, I cant remember my own phone number, heck I forget how to spell my own middle name. These facts are not useful or relevant, so I don't bother to learn then. Not to mention they are stored somewhere else. The learn by rote generation is just pissed because mass storage has rendered most of the stuff they spent ages memorising obsolete.
Re:err obvious point (Score:4, Insightful)
Not even that, it just shows that people in different age groups remember different things. Einstein famously said that he never bothers to remember things that are easy to look up. There is no point cluttering your brain with useless information. Do you know your PC's IP address? Maybe if you don't use DHCP and you've had to re-install the OS a lot. What about the IP of google.com? Of course not (for most people), that's what we have DNS for. Do you remember your phone number? I don't often give people my phone number these days; I just bluetooth my vCard over to them. They never see my phone number, they just see my name in the address book. A phone number is something that the calling telephone needs to know, not the calling person.
Birthdays? I remember some. I generally remember which part of the year they fall in, but since they're in my calendar, I don't need to remember them.
There's also the question of where you remember things. I don't remember the spellings of many words with my brain, for example, I remember them with my spine. My brain sends a signal to my spine encoding a word, and my spine translates this into a sequence of motor impulses that cause me to type the words in this post. If you asked me to spell some words aloud though, I would have problems, even though I can type them easily. The same is true of dance moves; when you're learning you remember things like 'step cross reverse step etc' but after a while you forget this and just remember the muscle movements, leaving your brain free. Before I had a phone with an integrated address book, I used to remember telephone numbers like this; I could type my friends' numbers into the keypad easily, but I couldn't tell you what most of them were if you asked.
Re:Knowledge in memory vs in a book (Score:1, Insightful)
it's - it is
its - something belonging to it
Re:and this is a bad thing?? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the 19th or 18th century everyone with a good education was able to talk fluently in six or seven languages. It is no longer necessary. Most educated people today know their own language and english (even the U.S. americans as the British would point out
And phone numbers are an arbitrary way to remember people anyway. They were a necessity when the first self dial systems were coming up. They aren't a necessity anymore when you can identify people with their name again. There is actually no point in remembering phone numbers except for self dial phones with a 10 number block. And if they die out, we don't need phone numbers anymore.
Grandma's dirty little secret... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Knowledge in memory vs in a book (Score:3, Insightful)
First, he would only be correct if the biologists had memorized the muscles of the cat before needing to know them. Spending an hour memorizing the muscles of a cat would pay off rather quickly if those names were needed for communication, for example when listening to a lecture about feline locomotion, performing a cat autopsy in coordination with other students, or reading a paper about muscle activation. Having simple facts down cold is sometimes a huge advantage that frees your brain up to think about important things. It makes sense to invest in rote memorization to avoid struggling through a particular situtation where specific knowledge is needed.
Second, when the student said, "We know all that already," Feynman could have been going over aspects of anatomy that are common to most mammals. Graduate biology students have read enough papers and been in enough labs to have used those terms hundreds of times. They might have learned those things in a non-rote way.
Third, Feynman was a very fast and talented person, so his optimal balance of knowing things vs. generating knowledge on the fly would have been extremely skewed compared to the normal person.
Re:Knowledge in memory vs in a book (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course not, but I'd rather have the surgeon set reminders about his Mom's birthday rather than have a sudden realization he needs to send her flowers during my operation.
Secondly, (and on a more serious note) most of what you are discussion isn't fact memorization but more or less pattern recognition. As in a Taxi driver remembers streets by visualization rather than remembering English words in a set pattern of directions.
Both the pilot and surgeon see there instruments and results and have sort of zen moments in which they simply know that it is right or wrong. Almost like natural instincts or reflexes due to the course work and hands on training.
I mean... Would you trust a surgeon who hasn't practiced on a cadaver but simply read a book? How about a pilot who has never flown a flight sim much less had logged actual flight time and simply sat down in the cockpit for the first time with nothing but memorizations from a hand book.
Of course they do need to study the texts, but again... These particular jobs require a great deal of practice which no memorization can assist you 100% of the job.
Now other professions like lawyers and researchers do need a great deal of memorization but I don't generally have to worry about trusting my lives to them on a daily basis.
We only remember what's important to US. (Score:4, Insightful)
"As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes."
Maybe its because older people are still tied to land lines. They forgot the "I don't have a land line, jst a mobile, you ignorant clod!"
Anyway, to my point: Its like remembering your own postal code - why should I? I never write letters to myself, and I never mail anything any more. About the only thing I get in the mail are bills (hey - I pay them onine, but until they give me $ for saving them postage, paper and printing, let them keep sending them), junk mail, and some print IT trade magazines. If I need it, I can always look on my driver's license.
Better, at least for me, to remember the "break points" in the ASCII table - 65=A, 97=a, etc ...
We remember what's important to US, and forget the rest. Remembering a bunch of phone numbers is no longer important - we have gadgets to do that, same as some people in previous generations had servants to "sweat the small stuff."
Just remember to keep a hard copy of all those phone numbers, for when you lose your cell phone ...
At first I assumed you were joking... (Score:3, Insightful)
I still think you're probably joking, but after reading so many of the other posts on this topic, it's no longer so obvious. The thing is that us "older folk" remembered phone numbers and birth dates when we were young folk, as well.
This is not without precedence. When books and writing became common place, a similar phenomenon happened. People used to routinely memorize very long stories in their entirety. If you do that today, it makes you a bit of a "freak show".
As others have mentioned, it does free us up to focus on other tasks. However, and perhaps this is because I'm part of the "over 30 crowd", I do feel like something precious is being lost.
Re:Knowledge in memory vs in a book (Score:2, Insightful)
It's actually a good way of looking at memory in general. There are things that we memorize because we use them (phone numbers), things that we actively memorize because we might urgently need the information someday (first aid), and there are things we can just look up (cat map). If the conveniences of electronic devices cause items on the white pages to move to the yellow pages, I don't see the problem.
Re:Knowledge in memory vs in a book (Score:2, Insightful)
If you had given them $20.00, they could probably have calculated that the result would be 73 cents. To do this, they use the method of nine's complement:
remove 1 (cent) from the total, then the difference becomes obvious:
19.99
19.27
-----
00.72
Then re-add the cent removed at the beginning -> 73 cents!
When giving the cashiers $20.02, it means that they cannot use the usual method so they prefer to rely on the calculator machine.
Re:Einstein couldn't tell you how many feet in a m (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, I don't see how it's a big deal that I have a hard time remembering my own phone number.
Practically speaking, it's irrelevant whether you do remember your phone number. I think the point of the study is that it would be alarming if all our devices made it such that people surrounded by such things (who do nothing to compensate) could not remember such things.
In other words, it's not about whether you actually remember a particular piece of information, but whether your overall ability to remember such things has been harmed by lack of use (atrophy). Current brain science suggests that the health of your brain (especially later in life) depends crucially on activity: it's not able to keep functioning unless it gets a certain kind of workout. It would not be surprising to find, correlatively, that if activities aimed at developing and maturing basic cognitive capacities in early life are lacking, those powers will not be as readily available later. That is scary.
Does that mean we should throw away cell phones? Make children memorize long lists of irrelevant items? Of course not. But we should promote the kinds of activities that help develop and maintain cognitive health. The devices and aids we have around do not make this impossible, but the danger is that they make it seem irrelevant. The attitude that people fall into spontaneously seems to be: "Why learn anything when you know (or think) you can get an adequate blast of information about it on Wikipedia?" One answer is "so your brain will work." (Other "answers" are less polite versions of "why are you so damn lazy?")
There is no before for this after (Score:3, Insightful)
If they asked me birthdays of anyone, I would have trouble remembering. I remember about 5 birthdays, and even those I have trouble recalling at will. I don't know why, except that maybe I don't care. I think birthdays are silly things to celebrate except perhaps those of your own children.
The fact of the matter is that the majority of things I can recall by pulling out my smartphone are things I simply would not have known at all before. And there are no cases where something I would've known before is something I do not know now. I have never dialed my wife's cell phone number without the address book but I can recite it no problems, because I've watched the # pop up on the phone screen 10000 times.
And what the article is ignoring, at least in my case, is that some information I actually remember better because of the time I took to acquire it and record it in my database. I felt it would be useful and since I didn't have to try and memorize it, I'd actually save it instead of the usual ignorance of the information. And the result is that I've memorized some of that info on accident. Darn.
Finally, I wonder why, if these effects were real, they would be considered ill? Humans are creatures who define themselves over time through technology. We cannot continue denying that the tech we invent and use to live is not part of our species domain of evolution. As technology becomes more prevalent it becomes part of ourselves. If we have opened our mind for more important tasks by reducing what it must contain by moving that information into portable devices, or highly accessible central databases, then we have evolved as a species. Currently there are "holes" in this plan but as we move forward they will be plugged. Someday when you find yourself stranded in a forest for some reason, you'll be able to subvocalize a request for a map to be projected into your visual cortex and send a request for assistance to the nearest forestry service through satellite links. When this happens, who will care if you could or could not memorize uncle Jim's anniversary?
What will it matter when in your satiating state of serenity you are reminded subconsciously that you decided that you cared about someone's going away party to which you were invited 9 months earlier.
I guess what I'm saying is, let the gadgets take over our menial mental tasks. Let us follow up on the technology to fix its critical flaws so that we can rely on it. Let our minds work on the immediate projects that are of the most importance and leave this obnoxious set of tasks to the domesticated wafers of silicon that we have created.
The fear that this technology will weaken our minds is as irrelevant as the fear that wearing shoes will weaken our feet.