How much of your past do you truly remember, and how much of it could be just a figment of your imagination?
We all know that spending too much time online is bad for us, influencing our attention spans and for some leading to social media addictions. But the true, terrifying possibility of being online, is that it could very well ruin our memory.
A 2018 paper raised the hypothesis that the internet serves as an endless transactive memory, encouraging our minds to offload memory functions to our technology (Nijssen et al., 2018). Our brains recognize our phones and computers as an extension of our body and internalize that there is no need to remember certain parts or details – if we can just access that information at the click of a button.
Do you remember the last book you read or do you just think you do? Even if you read it from cover to end, it is entirely possible that your brain decided to forget most of it on your behalf. Because if your brain is acutely aware that you can easily access that information at all times, why bother remembering it?
This phenomenon is not only limited to minor inconveniences but plagues people from all walks of life alike.
Health practitioners are overriding their own correct decisions in favor of erroneous recommendations made by decision support systems (Goddard et al., 2012). People who rely on GPS navigation suffer a deteriorated spatial memory; and taking photos to document an experience, reduces our memory of said experience – referred to as the photo impairment effect (Dahmani & Bohbot, 2020; Soares & Storm, 2018).
Understandably, we give up power to technologies that make our lives simpler, but it is still a pervasive problem in that we can not predict how this symbiotic relationship between man and machine will end. As more and more functions and decisions in society are automated, with more and more information being accessible at all times, are we going to be able to distinguish between ourselves and our technological extension? I remember a time when I had all of my family’s and friends’ phone numbers memorized. Today, I don’t think I know any other number than my own, by heart – and even then I second guess if I truly know it at times.
Nowadays, your average person has easy access to Artificial intelligence(AI) as a form of decision-support system, be it for academic or professional work. I do not see a world where we use less of it as it develops, so it is obvious in my opinion that AI is here to stay. And with research showing that matured technologies have already done their damage, who knows how far this will go with the coming breakthroughs in AI?
I do not think we should prevent the development of technology, but I do think we should refrain from becoming too reliant on them. As in an increasingly automated world, our dependence on technology may very well be eroding our memories and minds in ways we can’t predict.
That is why I find it important that we occasionally ask ourselves this; How much of our past do we truly remember, and how much of it could be just a figment of our imagination?
References:
Nijssen, S. R., Schaap, G., & Verheijen, G. P. (2018). Has your smartphone replaced your brain? Construction and validation of the Extended Mind Questionnaire (XMQ). PLOS ONE, 13(8), e0202188. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202188
Goddard, K., Roudsari, A., & Wyatt, J. C. (2012). Automation bias: a systematic review of frequency, effect mediators, and mitigators. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 19(1), 121–127. https://doi.org/10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000089
Dahmani, L., & Bohbot, V. D. (2020). Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation. Scientific Reports, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62877-0
Soares, J. S., & Storm, B. C. (2018). Forget in a flash: A further investigation of the photo-taking-impairment effect. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 7(1), 154–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2017.10.004
