Last week I missed a real-life date because I hadn’t set a reminder on my smartphone, leaving someone I’d never met before alone in a coffee shop. But that same day I remembered the name of the actor who played Will Smith’s aunt in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air in 1991 (Janet Hubert). Memory is strange, unpredictable, and not yet fully understood by neuroscience. When memory lapses like mine happen (which happen often), it feels both easy and logical to blame the technology we’ve so recently adopted. Does having more memory in our pockets mean less in our heads? Am I losing my ability to remember things—from meetings to what I was going to do next—because I expect my phone to do it for me? Before smartphones, our heads would contain a cache of phone numbers and our memories would contain a cognitive map built over time that would allow us to navigate – for smartphone users this is no longer true.
Our brains and our smartphones form a complex web of interactions: the smartphoneification of life has been increasing since the mid-2000s, but was accelerated by the pandemic, as was internet use in general. Prolonged periods of stress, isolation, and exhaustion—common themes of March 2020—are well known for their effects on memory. Of those surveyed by memory researcher Catherine Loveday in 2021, 80% felt their memories were worse than before the pandemic. We are still broken, not only by Covid-19, but also by the wretched national and global news cycle. Many of us self-soothe with distractions like social media. Meanwhile, endless scrolling can sometimes create its own distress, and phone notifications and interrupting ourselves to check them also seem to affect what, how, and whether we remember.
So what happens when we export some of our memory to an external drive? Does it allow us to squeeze more and more out of life because we don’t rely so much on our faulty brains to suggest things for us? Are we so dependent on smartphones that they will eventually change the way our memories work (sometimes called digital amnesia)? Or do we just sometimes miss things when we don’t remember the reminders?
Endless scrolling can sometimes create its own distress, and phone notifications seem to affect what we remember
Neurologists are divided. Chris Bird is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex and leads research from the Episodic Memory Group. “We’ve always transferred things to external devices, like taking notes, and it allows us to have more complex lives,” he says. “I have no problem with using external devices to augment our thought processes or memory processes. We do it more, but it frees up time to concentrate, focus on and remember other things. He believes that the things we use our phones to remember are difficult for most human brains to remember. “I take a picture of my parking ticket so I know when it ends because it’s a random thing to remember. Our brains didn’t evolve to remember very specific, one-time things. Before we had devices, you had to put in a lot of effort to remember the time you needed to get back to your car.”
Professor Oliver Hardt, who studies the neurobiology of memory and forgetting at McGill University in Montreal, is much more cautious. “Once you stop using your memory, it will degrade, making you use your devices even more,” he says. “We use them for everything. If you go to a website for a recipe, press a button and it sends the ingredient list to your smartphone. It’s very comfortable, but convenience comes at a price. It is good for you to do certain things in your mind.’
Hard is not inclined to rely on GPS. “We could predict that prolonged GPS use would likely reduce gray matter density in the hippocampus. Reduced gray matter density in this area of the brain goes along with various symptoms, such as an increased risk of depression and other psychopathologies, but also certain forms of dementia. GPS-based navigation systems do not require you to compile a complex geographic map. Instead, they just tell you an orientation, like “Turn left at the next traffic light.” These are very simple behavioral responses (here: turn left) to a certain stimulus (here: traffic light). These kinds of spatial behaviors do not engage the hippocampus much, unlike those spatial strategies that require knowing a geographic map in which you can locate any point coming from any direction and that require [cognitively] complex calculations. When they examined the spatial abilities of people who had been using GPS for a very long time, they showed impairments in spatial memory abilities that required the hippocampus. Reading maps is hard, and that’s why we make it so easy for devices. But hard things are good for you because they engage cognitive processes and brain structures that have other effects on your overall cognitive functioning.
Reading maps is hard, and that’s why we make it so easy for devices. But hard things are good for you
Hardt doesn’t have the data yet, but believes that “the cost of this could be a huge increase in dementia. The less you use that mind of yours, the less you use the systems that are responsible for complex things like episodic memories or cognitive flexibility, the more likely you are to develop dementia. There are studies that show that, for example, it’s really hard to get dementia when you’re a university professor, and the reason is not that these people are smarter – but that until very old age they’re usually engaged in tasks that are very mental demanding.” (Other scientists disagree—Daniel Schacter, the Harvard psychologist who wrote the seminal The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, thinks the effects of things like GPS are only “task-specific.”)
While smartphones can obviously open up whole new vistas of knowledge, they can also distract us from the present moment, as if the day is wonderful, unlived because you’re upside down writing food or chatting on WhatsApp. When we don’t pay attention to an experience, we are less likely to recall it correctly, and fewer recalled experiences could even limit our ability to have new ideas and be creative. As noted neuroscientist and memory researcher Wendy Suzuki recently said on the Huberman Lab’s Neuroscience Podcast, “If we can’t remember what we’ve done, the information we’ve learned, and the events of our lives, it changes us… [The part of the brain which remembers] really defines our personal stories. It defines who we are.”
Kathryn Price, science writer and author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, agrees. “What we pay attention to in the moment contributes to our lives,” she says. “Our brains cannot multitask. We think we can. But any time multitasking seems successful, it’s because one of those tasks isn’t cognitively demanding, like folding laundry and listening to the radio. If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to anything else. This may seem like a throwaway observation, but it’s actually profound. Because you will only remember the things you pay attention to. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll literally have no memory of it to remember.
If you’re not paying attention, you’ll literally have no memory of it to remember
Cambridge neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian also has evidence for this. “In an experiment in 2010, three different groups had to complete a reading task,” she says. “One group got instant messages before they started, one got instant messages during the task, and one didn’t get instant messages, and then there was a comprehension test. What they found was that people receiving instant messages couldn’t remember what they had just read.
Price is much more concerned about what our constant distraction from our phones—dubbed “permanent partial attention” by tech expert Linda Stone—does to our memories than using their simpler functions. “I don’t get distracted by my address book,” she says. And she doesn’t believe that smartphones free us to do more. “Let’s be real with ourselves: how many of us use the time our banking app gives us to write poetry? We just passively consume crap on Instagram. Price is from Philadelphia. “What if Benjamin Franklin had Twitter?” Would he be on Twitter all the time? Would he make his inventions and breakthroughs?
“I became really interested in whether the constant distractions caused by our devices might be affecting our ability to actually not just accumulate memories to begin with, but transfer them into long-term storage in a way that might interfere with our ability to think deeply and interestingly think,” she says. “One of the things that hinders our brain’s ability to transfer memories from short-term to long-term storage is distraction. If you get distracted in the middle”—by a notification or the overwhelming urge to pick up your phone—”you’re not actually going to make the physical changes necessary to store that memory.”
It’s impossible to know for sure, since no one measured our level of intellectual creativity before smartphones began to evolve, but Price believes that excessive smartphone use can harm our ability to be insightful. “Insight is being able to connect two different things in your mind. But in order to have an idea and to be creative, you have to have a lot of raw material in your brain, just as you couldn’t cook a recipe if you didn’t have the ingredients: you can’t have an idea if you didn’t have the material in your brain, which are actually long-term memories . (Her theory was supported by the 92-year-old Nobel…
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