Computers and smartphones are messing with our memories
In particular, they are making it less likely we will pay close attention in the first place.
Huh? What’s that you said?
Simply put, it’s the idea that we’re literally outsourcing our mental capabilities to computers. In 2011, the journal Science famously published a study that found when people are told a computer will save a piece of information, they’re less likely to remember it for themselves. That experiment only had 60 participants and was conducted on a sample of college students, so its conclusions may have limited value. But you don’t have to look too far to find clear examples of cognitive outsourcing. How many people’s phone numbers do you have memorized?
Because of calculators, and registers that tell us what change to make, simple math seems harder for younger people. Those of us who are of a certain age had to learn these skills just to get along in ordinary life, but no more.
When was the last time you memorized a phone number? I recall the numbers of a great many of my childhood friends—their childhood phone numbers, that is, not their phone numbers now. Now, I don’t even remember the numbers I phone often.
How to get from here to there without a navigator? We can still do that, for the small everyday trips. But looking at maps and figuring out a longer trip (even a half hour or so) for ourselves, and then remembering for next time? Those skills are starting to atrophy, too.
On the other hand, song lyrics remain.
And I finally—after years of having to look it up—remember the number of my most-used credit card. However, I don’t trust that memory completely, so I always look it up anyway before I plug it into some website or other.
Speaking of which, about a year ago I put an alert on my credit card that messages me if there are any charges made outside of its physical presence. I’ve been impressed by how instantaneous it is. I no sooner press the “order” tab on my computer when it seems that simultaneously my message tone comes on to tell me that the transaction has gone through.
And as a group, we—especially urbanized people like me—have lost a host of folk wisdom about plants, animals, tools, sewing, crafts, and herbs. If disaster came and I had to live by my wits and rely on my own skills and resources, I doubt I’d survive unless one of you—or a whole bunch of you—took pity on me.
Cursive is dead. Letter-writing is dead. Thank-you notes are dead. It is all keyboards and emails now.
With voice recognition software, soon keyboard use will plunge. We will become like the Middle (?) Kingdom Mandarin Chinese, with very long fingernails which were proof they did not use their hands for anything, had servants for everything. Except we will be the willing servants of machines and their programs, not their masters. We’ll have a new oligarchy of young, ever-and-all-wise geeks like Zuckerberg, who will set the standards (e.g. Tee shirts for all) for conduct, ethics and morals. They are putting each of us into ever-smaller boxes labeled “individuality”, isolated from one another except via Facebook, etc., the allowed content of which the Zuckerbergs and Cooks will solely determine.
Frog:
I also feel sorry for biographers of the future. No more letters, just emails. Very few people have emails of any interest to rival what used to be contained in letters.
And messaging—who on earth has a memorable message? Twitter isn’t much better.
Blogs, on the other hand…
The first time we humans encounter a situation that we have never before experienced, and which requires a solution, we have to “reason it out.” In order to do so, we have to remember earlier situations, from which we try to discern a pattern that will solve the current problem.
But what if we have nothing in our memory?
Before my kids got drivers’ licenses, they would ride in the car while we drove to various places, places which we visited frequently. When they did get their licenses, I was surprised that they did not know how to get to some of those places. Why? Because they had gotten there without memorizing the route.
Now I watch children find the answers to every question, simply by using their mobile devices. They get to the “destination,” all destinations, without ever having to memorize the route.
If we get all of our answers from our machines, if we never memorize anything, we will lose the ability to reason.
Jerry Pournelle (RIP) said that the Dark Ages will not be a time when we no longer know how to do some things. The Dark Ages will be when we no longer know that we used to do them.
Neo,
Some of our best understanding of history has come the diaries of people like John Quincy Adams, Queen Victoria and Theodore Roosevelt just to name a few. JQA and Victoria both have surviving diaries which they wrote in virtually every day from their youth until their death or in JQA’s case his loss of sight. This will be a great, great loss.
One of the great untruths of our time is that the younger generation, millenials I guess, are better with technology. They may be able to navigate instagram and snapchat and nonsense like that but my experience is they have no more understanding of how to make or fix anything than any other age group.
And as has been mentioned my observation is that people under about 35 can barely write and the spelling is borderline mentally challenged without spellcheck. It really is frightening the degree to which some are becoming dependent on technology.
” I doubt I’d survive unless one of you–or a whole bunch of you–took pity on me.”
As we learn in the Holy Book of Mr. T,
“I pity the fool.”
Griffen
That REALLY shows up in YouTube threads dedicated to WWII history.
The younger set, above average in intelligence, obviously, is astoundingly clueless — pretty much across the board.
They are anti-informed due to Russian deceits emanating from Moscow even unto this hour.
It’s SHOCKING how many Russians don’t even know their own WWII history… and they are totally anti-informed about their Western Allies.
The typical modern Russian actually believes that Stalin paid in GOLD for LendLease aid.
He welshed on the whole ‘debt’ — as was expected from the first.
No Allied nation was actually expected to pay back LendLease aid.
FDR & Company figured that the debt was paid in Blood.
&&&
The other historical blind spot for receiving nations: they don’t comprehend that when debt was involved, the US charged WELL below the going rate, well below the inflation rate. After 60 years, the fantastic erosion of buying power made the debts evaporate in real terms — as was the original intent.
The LendLease Act was pitched to the American taxpayers as a lie: that the Allied Powers would actually, COULD actually, pay the loans back. In real terms, no nation paid back their LendLease aid.
Need I say it? The nations that received this largesse hold a boiling anger against the USA. It skips their notice that NO OTHER NATION in the history of the world EVER extended such aid to an ally.
The closest might be Great Britain’s aid to Prussia during the Seven-Years War// French & Indian War. But that was to just one monarch, not a general gifting to all comers — most notably the ever hostile USSR.
Amazingly, Great Britain received more LendLease aid than the USSR, IIRC. The Western Allies fought a VERY EXPENSIVE war.
The Soviets fought a VERY BLOODY war.
Modern Russians point to their casualties, and close their eyes to the astounding contributions made by the UK and USA.
Stuff like pulling the Luftwaffe away from the Eastern Front — almost entirely by August 1943. August 1943 also saw Hitler shift a panzer army and an infantry army OUT of Russia — and off to Italy. ( And in a total panic.)
[ By designation, the divisions involved were identical to those lost at Stalingrad… plus the 1SS Panzer Corps… Plus the Sicilian (German) formations. ( The latter had to be re-blooded and re-built largely from scratch.) This shift entirely explains why Kiev was liberated in late 43. Hitler was actually winding down his campaign in the east. He then prioritized building two panzer armies and two new infantry armies for the defense of France. All of the gear came at the expense of the Ostheer and its Luftwaffe support. ]
Modern Russians’ without exception don’t know ANYTHING about these ‘missing’ armies. They continue to believe that the West didn’t do squat until June 6, 1944.
This is evidence of state sponsored amnesia.
Thank you Putin.
Didn’t the same sort of thing happen when writing was invented?
bof Says:
March 30th, 2018 at 9:24 pm
Didn’t the same sort of thing happen when writing was invented?
* * *
Bradbury riffs on that in Fahrenheit 451.
neo-neocon Says:
March 30th, 2018 at 7:04 pm
Frog:
I also feel sorry for biographers of the future. No more letters, just emails. Very few people have emails of any interest to rival what used to be contained in letters.
And messaging–who on earth has a memorable message? Twitter isn’t much better.
Blogs, on the other hand…
* * *
The Russia-scandal has quite a few memorable emails and Tweets; just not anything with a comprehensive narrative.
However, you are right about our heirs who will never experience the nostalgia of actually holding a paper-letter by one of their ancestors. Even photographic copies aren’t the same as having the originals.
CapnRusty Says:
March 30th, 2018 at 7:10 pm
Jerry Pournelle (RIP) said that the Dark Ages will not be a time when we no longer know how to do some things. The Dark Ages will be when we no longer know that we used to do them.
* * *
That’s already happening in a micro-fashion.
Ask your grandkids about dial phones.
There’s that classic Star Trek movie back-to-the-past vignette when Scotty tries to talk to the computer.
And everyone knows milk comes from the store.
What’s a cow?
blert Says:
March 30th, 2018 at 9:07 pm
* * *
Useful history lesson. Some of it dove-tails with current affairs, if you look at these opening grafs from the Vox article:
“Though they may appear crystal clear in our minds, our memories are not a carbon copy of the events we witnessed.
Every time we recall a memory, we may accidentally alter it or diminish its accuracy. Even trivial memories are easily corrupted with mere suggestions. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus once found that when people are told cars “collided” instead of “hit,” they recalled a car accident as being more severe than it was.
Most frustrating of all: change these details and reconstruct reality without being aware we’re doing it. And the seams of our edited memories are silently sealed; we often can’t remember what we can’t remember.
As a journalist who covers psychology, I’m constantly reading about the mind’s failures of accuracy. And it makes me nervous.”
The phenomenon he mentions is very well known in both psychological and legal circles. The worst evidence (short of lying) is a first-person witness account.
(check out the gorilla in the court videos)
The ”’satanic child care cases” are perhaps foremost among others in demonstrating how easily memories are manipulated.
AND the main payoff is that THIS is the reason why “fake news” from any faction is so dangerous. People who hear or read distortions of fact (or outright lies) have different memories about events even if they were there. We’re all familiar with hearing commentary after a speech and thinking: did we listen to the same text?
There is a research center in Denmark that studies life during the iron age (and 19th century farm life) that allows families to spend time living in straw huts as people did then. One of the things researchers learned was that bread was probably eaten far less often than previosly thought becaue it took too much time to grind the wheat. Instead grain was put with water into pots that stood on the firestone, meaning that mush was the most common food.
Lots of families take their kids there in the summer to learn what life used to be like. Perhaps we need similar projects, especially since kids today don’t read about the past or even watch Little House on the Prairie.
And I thought it was because I was 71.
Wait, did I just type something?
Perhaps we’ll keep mentally fit by battling the whims of our errant machines.
If not, I suppose we can enjoy a disaster movie based on losing a smart phone because we have become so stupid and dependent.
blert:
thanks for the wwii material, some of which I didn’t know or hadn’t put together.
bof Says:
March 30th, 2018 at 9:24 pm
Didn’t the same sort of thing happen when writing was invented?
* * *
Socrates famously criticized written texts and defended oral culture. His main points were
1) Writing is a crutch for memory. Instead of aiding our memory, writing disables our latent ability to know something within ourselves.
2) Writing is not dynamic. It cannot answer questions, but must resort to its author to resolve any difficulties brought about by its misuse or misunderstanding.
3) Writing is not personalized. Writing has no detailed knowledge of the soul of the listener, and therefore lacks the requisite adaptation to this soul that speech requires. (source)
However, we presumeably wouldn’t know about it if Socrates disciple Plato wouldn’t have written about it in his dialogue Phaedrus around 370 BC.
Here is another blogpost on that old lament:
http://wondermark.com/socrates-vs-writing/
Here is a case in which reader commentary substantially increases the value of an already interesting post. Thank you all for your contributions.
This phenomenon is another consistent step in the ongoing degeneration of our species. Our growing dependence on complex large-scale technology marches in lockstep with our growing dependence on complex large-scale social institutions. The trend diminishes our capacity for individual growth and expression (no future Leonardos?) but does make us more malleable and easily manipulated.
Others have noted that many of our recent technological developments seem modeled on Star Trek’s vision of the future. There’s a curious irony in our social development that likewise seems right out of Star Trek: we’re becoming the Borg.
zat,
there is wonderful irony in the written record of Socrates’ demeaning of writing. Plato’s writings have exposed Socrates and the Socratic method to many, many people over the centuries, which Socrates could never have done with an oral tradition.
Just because I cannot remember every one of his words does not mean that Shakespeare should not have written! We would be forever poorer.
Tech giveth and Tech taketh away.
Neo and Frog:
I too feel sorry for biographers of the future. Letter writing seems to have gone out of style, and we are all the poorer for it.
Recently my 90-year-old father-in-law passed away and in going through his things we found a letter written to his mother from when he was part of the Japanese occupation force shortly after World War II. In the letter he was describing a visit to Nagasaki two years after the bombing. We never knew him to be very articulate or emotional, but we were astonished at how well written the letter was and its depth of feeling. My wife and her brother now cherish that letter.
On the other hand, during our son’s tour in Afghanistan all we received were a handful of emails for the year he was there. He later told us it was because he was almost always outside the wire without access to a computer. He’s an excellent writer (he’s now an attorney) but it never seemed to have occurred to him that he could have written some letters.
I used to have deep mail correspondences. Getting a letter and sending a letter were no small things! I saved those letters.
With two friends I now exchange emails of similar depth but that’s it.
Another factor is that long-distance phone calls are just part of some service package. Back in the day you might have to see a loan shark if you got carried away on a phone conversation.
zat Says:
March 31st, 2018 at 8:09 am
* *
The article you linked was quite interesting, and had this delightful comment:
http://wondermark.com/socrates-vs-writing/#comment-396820615
“Of course, what Socrates is really saying is that books are no good because they don’t have comment threads…”
The Latter Day Saints and Amish keep a significant amount of written journals and records for the family line.
Even I’ve lately started writing down my dreams and visions, since I often forget about them a day later.
Socrates would have hated that we all accept Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Copernicus without any questioning of the wisdom of the so called wise. Socrates himself was not interested in passing down some kind of sophia he himself obtained from his muse, but in getting people, including his student Plato, to question if something was what it said it was.
Plato ended up with the Platonic Ideal vs Shadows on the cave, otherwise known today as the Matrix. Today, people say this reality is a simulation not because they are copying Plato but because of quantum mechanics. Plato bridged more than 2000 years of human history because he had a teacher like Socrates, and obeyed the teachings of QUESTION EVERYTHING.
However, we presumeably wouldn’t know about it if Socrates disciple Plato wouldn’t have written about it in his dialogue Phaedrus around 370 BC.
Socrates was pointing out that writing is a telephone game. It’s not an internet social media thread.
For example, let’s take this question. Why do you believe the Earth is a globe?
In Socrates’ day, that question would utilize many writings, but it would not get to the heart of the problem. That is because many things have to be tested, peer reviewed, probed, and QUESTIONED.
And people now a days don’t question much of anything. So even though they read something in writing, they cannot understand it. It’s a telephone game. They heard from someone who heard from someone that the earth was x. That’s all the reason they have for belief now a days.
An elementary or junior high kid asked me “Do you believe the Earth is on the back of a turtle”.
I had to think about that for a minute or two. If I said I believed in X, what reasons and justifications did I have to believe in it? That is the Socratic method.
Then he said that pictures from space was A. I doubt that for a moment and asked if he had been in space and seen it for himself. He of course said no, and believed in the authorities of the world.
I eventually told him the story of the telephone game and asked him if he used that in class. And he understood it.
In epistemology, to ascertain the truth of things, 2 or more independent sources should be used as primary sources to verify the authenticity of a claim or statement.
The statement “I believe in X, because people in the world said X is true” is not a valid source.
The statement “I believe Socrates was X because Plato wrote about it in Y” is not a valid source. Writings can be changed and misinterpreted, even more so for the bible.
AesopFan Says:
March 30th, 2018 at 11:28 pm
blert Says:
March 30th, 2018 at 9:07 pm
I best not start on the whole Satanic Ritual Child abuse thing, because there’s so much data it would go on and on here.
As for memory manipulation, I started studying that in 2007. Of course i wasn’t stupid enough to come right out and say that was what I was doing, since people claiming to research “mind control” stuff about the Leftist alliance in 2007 wasn’t treated quite well.
Apparently my persona was so consistent online that people who knew my writing in 2007, said they never figured it out in 2016. They just thought I was being frivolous researching Neuro Linguistic Programming for Pick up Artists…
Hah, what a conclusion, researching NLP to pick up girls. That’s very funny. No, no, I research things to learn how to kill mortals, not to pick up girls. Probably also something that is best kept well hidden back in 2007.
Mind control in psychological warfare is very effective utilizing Sun Tzu’s doctrines and concepts of deception in warfare. Why kill your enemy when you can delude Othello into killing your target and then just tell them him the truth so he can kill himself. Romeo and Juliet would be excellent Byzantine politics if somebody had manipulated them into doing so. Then it wouldn’t be a tragedy, it would be a Sun Tzu grand masterpiece of operational security and psych warfare.
This is how you kill people, after one has obtained a certain level of mastery or proficiency in hand to hand arts.
Okay, so the fruits of my work in mind control was my own personal defensive measure and firewall. Can’t attack if you can’t defend yourself first after all.
I learned how to create memory backups and to use adrenaline and other triggers to create data backups to check my memory. That way distortion or alteration of memory and emotions could be detected and then cleansed via virtual simulated operating systems inside my actual operating system of underlying premises and beliefs.
In short, I learned how to think in parallel qubits (quantum processing units). Which, conveniently, had a lot of basis on learning a foreign language and thinking in it. Because a foreign language is a “new OS” installation, which I used to check my old OS which was hopelessly ridden with trojans, viruses, and back door root hacks the Leftist alliance and others had put in without my realizing it. (Kids, don’t sit in front of the idiot indoctrination box like I did)
Every year I started pulling out masses of mind control tentacles and purging my system. Now a days my OS is pretty clear, but only because I run multiple operating system installs parallel and they all are told to check up on each other in case a virus infiltrates through my firewall. The Gnostic Gospels were pretty powerful, I don’t know exactly who created them, but they are quite potent.
For the past few years, the Holy Ghost has upgraded my capabilities, and I have started throwing out 50% of what I know to be true, every year. The gains are phenomenon, even for my up to 8 cores of parallel qubit thought lines. Very unstable since things are overheating, but that’s okay. Things will overheat if the frame is stressed.
One of the reasons why the Enlightenment philosophers became smart or polymaths was because of the number of languages they had to learn and use, since many of the things they wanted to study had no translations. This required them to not only speak Greek but to learn how the ancient Greeks thought, because if they didn’t do that, they couldn’t understand the context of various medical texts.
This was their first creation of a separate and parallel OS installation.
Re tech in general and calculators, so-called “smart”-phones, GPS, and computers in general, surely they have positive sides.
Still, Everything has a downsideâ„¢.
I worry about exactly the same issues that Neo brings up. In fact, Neo, you grabbed my attention right off the bat with your first sentence:
I wouldn’t be at all surprised. It would explain a lot of misapprehensions that seem to occur here at home, as well as the apparent inability for offices to keep their records straight and for the various staff to communicate with one another.
Woman (shouting): “I’ll bet you haven’t heard a word I’ve said!!!”
Man: “Well, that’s a pretty obnoxious way to start a conversation!!”
}}} Thank you Putin.
Nahhhh, “Thank you, anti-American liberal twits, at home and abroad.”
Put the blame where it belongs.
I wonder, did the same problem occur when we humans started using paper to augment our memories?