pantsfarm

I saw this article which was published in Wired by way of both Lifehacker and 43 Folders.

The article talks about how as people use technology to store information such as phone numbers and the like more and more, they are getting worse and worse at remembering them.

This strikes me as a pretty obvious thing to happen, but apparently, given the response to the article I saw, it’s getting interpreted and twisted around to imply that by not memorizing phone numbers and birthdays, brains are atrophying because if we’re not using that part of our brain for remembering that minutia, we’re not using it at all.

Much of it seemed like a huge overreaction to not being able to remember a birth date (who cares, seriously?). I was reassured that the whole world isn’t crazy, though, in reading the comments threads where there is a variety of different people explaining that by not filling one’s head with that junk, we can instead spend our time thinking and remembering other more useful things. I’m confident that if I suddenly found myself in a situation where I didn’t have the same access to technology that I have now, I’d still be just as capable of memorizing and recalling things, they’d just be different things.

As for the notion of an outboard brain, I think it’s a neat idea. A quote from the Wired article:

And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I’m using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat. Say you mention the movie Once: I’ve never seen it, but in 10 seconds I’ll have reviewed a summary of the plot, the actors, and its cultural impact. Machine memory even changes the way I communicate, because I continually stud my IMs with links, essentially impregnating my very words with extra intelligence.