gali

I’m just about old enough to have spent my teenage years being schooled without the disruption of mobile phones. They spread across the country something like wildfire just as I was finishing my secondary education and moving towards University. In fact, my first mobile (a Philips C12, oh to be ignorant of how technology would change) was something I bought in the summer before University primarily as a means to maintain contact with friends moving to progress their educational careers around the country.

Back in those days, I had a little book with a load of phone numbers noted down in it, for when I wanted to make contact with friends, though I rarely used it. I could remember the 6 digits I needed to contact most of my friends, or for the place I worked. Certainly I could recall numbers I needed at will.

Now I could recall my own number without hesitation, and only then because its a very easy to remember number. The modern requirements of remembering a number have been made harder by the prevalence of mobile phones, which require the ‘area code’ part of the number to be retained in memory too.

My point is that if we want to remember anything in this modern day, our gadgets can provide a replacement for our memory. There is no need for committing information to memory for those that carry a mobile phone with the capability of taking notes, and I’ve seen people with the most basic of handsets do this by simply storing text messages. Why make the effort of keeping something in your head if you can write it down and carry it with you without adding clutter to your person?

A few more examples of the way I use my gadgets and technology in place of my memory:

• Shopping lists are still a necessity when you want more than a loaf of bread. Rather than peruse my cupboards, pen and paper in hand, I just use Shopping List Lite on my iPod touch to make the list. I don’t even go to the kitchen to remind myself what I might need to buy as the application retains sufficient detail of what I’ve bought before to build the list as I walk to the supermarket.
• Sat at work, should a colleague comment to me something unrelated to work that I wish to look at later, I don’t need to remember it – I simply switch to the ‘Personal’ tab in Microsoft Onenote, and jot down a quick note. This is almost instantly synchronised with my online storage provided by the good people of Dropbox, and is already on my personal laptop (and desktop) for me to see by the time I get home.
• Talking to a friend with Windows Live Messenger, they offer a recipe that I like the sound of, and am keen to try at a later date. I could scribble it down, or even print it. But why worry, when the history of my conversations is stored in a folder that’s once again stored within my Dropbox account, which I can readily access from my mobile phone a fortnight later while walking to the supermarket. In fact, I could transpose the ingredients onto the shopping list on my iPod touch as I walk…

Of course, the side effect is that our minds may get lazy if we rely on technology. Without constant practice, the mind’s ability to retain information can reduce, if only because it gets used to the fact that it doesn’t need to remember a number of things.

When taking notes on paper was the main way to retain information, the human brain’s memory was exercised regularly. Paper notes took time to write, took up physical space even when organised, and even then were easy to leave behind or lose, such that the memory was required as something of a redundancy to fall back on. Despite complaints about losing such notes, the human brain would usually come through.

This carried over somewhat into the digital age. Backing up data is something that is considered crucial in the professional world, but individuals are notoriously bad at backing up their own files. While careful with my own content, I would be lying if I claimed I had never lost something on a computer – be it an email, a document or a piece of code I’ve written. Memory sticks and even mobile phones are still lost by individuals frequently, albeit less so than a scrap of notepaper, perhaps due to their increased monetary value. This reduction in the risk of loss nonetheless leads to a reduction in the urgency to retain things in memory.

With services like the aforementioned Dropbox becoming more and more popular, even the risks associated with note taking personal backups fade into the background. Data and files can be immediately copied from your computer to the online ‘cloud’, backed up in the event of any problems with the computer where the file is saved, and available at any time for someone with access to an Internet connection – something that is available to many 99% of the time thanks to the all-encompassing nature of wireless and cellular data networks in many of our lives.

Perhaps it is a good thing that our minds don’t need to retain some of the smaller things. Notes, shopping lists, phone numbers, and so on, can be stored for near-instant recall without using our brains. The odds are the methods of digital storage and recall of small, random nuggets of information are more reliable than the human memory anyway. Our minds can instead focus on more important things – our day jobs, our educations, and matters that require more qualitative reasoning and understanding. Our memories can focus on things that matter towards the ‘bigger pictures’ in our lives, rather than trivial little details.

Or perhaps it is a bad thing, and deprives our minds of the much needed practice at retaining information that it needs for the times when we need to remember something that really matters. It’s not the end of the world if we forget to buy some milk one Sunday afternoon, but if there’s no need to remember to buy that milk thanks to our gadgets, might this one day lead to someone forgetting something vitally important to their – or someone else’s – life?

Perhaps this is why the various casual games for training your mind have grown in popularity over recent years, available for pocket sized devices like the Nintendo DS and mobile phones. Perhaps the success of Sudoku owes itself to a subconscious urge for the public to keep their minds active?

Personally, I’m going to keep my gadgets and the conveniences that come with them. But I’m also going to keep playing the memory games, and taking every effort to avoid my brain getting too lazy, for when it matters.