In the digital age, we have the technology to document our lives in extraordinary detail via photographs, voice recordings, and social media posts. In theory, this ability to effortlessly capture the important moments of our lives should enrich our ability to remember those moments. But in practice, people often tell me they experience the opposite.
I study the neuroscience of memory and one question I hear again and again is whether technology is making us “dumber”—or, more precisely, whether it’s hurting our ability to remember. For some, the question is motivated by worry about the amount of khbrknews their children spend on screens or mobile devices. For others, it reflects concerns about their own memory problems.
A common fear is that there might be a “use it or lose it” principle at play—that an increasing dependence on our devices for reminders will lead us to lose our own capabilities to remember. This might be true for certain skills. If, for instance, you always rely on navigation apps in new or unfamiliar neighborhoods, you might not attend to features in the environment to create a mental map that would allow you to learn to navigate on your own. However, there is no reason to think that relying on technology to store important information will somehow lead your brain to wither in ways that are bad for memory. In fact, I’m all for outsourcing mundane memory tasks, like memorizing phone numbers, passwords, email addresses, and appointments. I don’t have a photographic memory—but my phone does.
So, if technology can help us “free up space” for the things we want to remember when we need to remember them, why do so many of us feel like its presence in our lives is leading us to form blurry, fragmented, and impoverished memories?
The short answer: technology isn’t the problem—it’s how we interact with it.
To form lasting memories, we need to focus on what is distinct about the present moment, those immersive sensory details we can…
