Are our memories suffering from our reliance on gadgets?
Jeff Hawkins
Creator, PalmPilot PDA and Treo smartphone; author, On Intelligence
I don't think so. I never learned my daughters' cell phone numbers because I don't need to - I entered them into my Treo, and there has been no need to refer to them again. In the past, I would have remembered one or two dozen phone numbers, but today I have instant access to hundreds of numbers and actually know very few. But our brains aren't wasting away. We use our mental ability to remember new things. Using the Web or smartphones requires learning a whole new set of skills.
Kaja Perina
Editor in chief, Psychology Today
Yes. Digital tools foster perennial "tip of the tongue-ism." Because random facts are always at your fingertips, they can always be on the tip of your tongue, but not fully retrievable. People used to pride themselves on mnemonic devices like word association and mental snapshots to commit things to memory. I certainly don't hear people discussing how they memorized three pages of directions now; they just use MapQuest. Also, we see more data in one day than our ancestors were likely to see in a year. We have no choice but to filter some of it out.
Tom Stafford
Coauthor, Mind Hacks
I deliberately don't put certain numbers in my mobile phone, so I'm forced to learn them. On the Web, the situation is reversed. URLs and email addresses change often, so remembering them isn't very useful.But if you know how to use Google, you can find a person's details in seconds. Information-processing prosthetics let us forget implementational details.
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