Does anyone remember the phone numbers? Or have all these little bits of information that you used to memorize moved to digital devices like smartphones? Some have argued that this outsourcing of our memory is harming our ability to remember anything correctly, but a new study suggests that’s not the case. Using a digital device to remember some things may be freeing up our brains to remember more things in general. Unless of course we lose our smartphones…
About a decade ago, German neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer coined the term “digital dementia.” Spitzer warned that excessive use of digital devices could lead to a new type of cognitive decline. By outsourcing many short-term memory demands to devices like smartphones, he proposed that our ability to remember things can be damaged, resulting in a unique type of amnesia.
But the idea of digital dementia was initially proposed without any real scientific backing, and some scientists have suggested that using devices to store random bits of information can help improve our cognitive abilities by freeing up space to think about other things. Chris Bird, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, recently compared the way we use smartphones to the way we used to jot things down in notepads.
“We have always downloaded things on external devices, like writing notes, and that has allowed us to have more complex lives,” Bird explained to The Guardian. “I have no problem with using external devices to augment our thought or memory processes. We’re doing it more, but that frees up time to concentrate, focus and remember other things.”
A new study, led by researchers at University College London, offers good evidence to suggest that using digital devices to store information can free up your memory to remember less important things.
The researchers developed a unique memory game that presented volunteers with a dozen numbered circles on a tablet screen. Each circle had to be dragged to the right or left side of the screen. If the circle was dragged to the correct side, the volunteer would receive a small financial reward.
Half of the circles were classified as high value, meaning they would pay 10 times more than regular circles. The volunteers repeated the game several times and had to remember where to drag the circles to receive the highest reward.
In the first half of the tests, the subjects were asked to use their own memory, while in the second half they were allowed to set a small number of reminders on a digital device. As expected, most subjects used the digital reminders to mark the location of the high-value circles. But not only did their scores improve on the high-value circle locations when they set digital reminders, most participants also improved on the low-value circle locations with no set reminders.
Sam Gilbert, lead author of the new study, says this finding highlights how using digital devices to store important information can free up mental space for remembering lower-order information. So instead of the device affecting people’s ability to remember other things, it actually increased their ability to remember more things overall.
“This was because the use of the device changed the way people used their memory to store high- versus low-importance information,” Gilbert explained. “When people had to remember for themselves, they used their memory power to remember the most important information.” But when they were able to use the device, they saved highly important information on the device and instead used their own memory for less important information.”
However, the findings were not all good news. When subjects using digital devices configured with reminders for high-value circles had their devices removed, they struggled to remember anything beyond the low-value circle locations. This suggests that when information is stored on a digital device, a person entrusts that information to the device. And if the device is held, that information is likely to be gone.
This highlights a big difference between using a digital device to store information and writing it down on a notepad. A large body of research has indeed shown that writing something on a piece of paper activates a complex neural process that helps strongly encode memory. So writing something down on a piece of paper often means you’ll remember it even without revisiting your notes.
But using a digital device to remember information doesn’t work the same way. And here Gilbert notes the catch. For very important information, he suggests we use “backup” storage, like maybe writing an extra note somewhere. Maybe it’s a valuable password or a crucial phone number. But as long as we have additional backups, there is not necessarily a problem with downloading information to digital devices.
“The results show that external memory tools work,” Gilbert said. “Far from causing ‘digital dementia,’ using an external memory device can even improve our memory for information we never save. But we must be careful to back up important information. Otherwise, if a memory tool fails, we might be left with nothing but minor information in our own memory.
The new study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.