SMARTPHONE = DUMB USER?
Is your smartphone making you dumber?
The Other Side / Fairfield Daily Republic 7-21-11By Kelvin Wade
Google is frying our brains. OK, it’s not exactly frying our brains but it’s changing how we use our brains. In a collaborative study, professors from Columbia, Harvard and the University of Wisconsin recently found that people aren’t likely to retain information that they can easily look up on the Internet.
In one experiment, subjects were given some trivia information that was placed in one of five computer folders. The subjects were better able to recall what folder the information was in than the information itself. The implication is that when asked a question, instead of thinking about the answer, we think about where to find the answer. Technology appears to be changing how we think.
Think of the impact technology is having on our brains in your daily life. What’s your best friend’s phone number? Your brother’s? Mother’s? Maybe you know it by memory. But more and more of us rely on our cell phone address book to make calls. We used to remember frequently dialed numbers. There’s no longer a need to recall phone numbers so our brains don’t.
Now I pause when giving someone my own number.
How many more birthday wishes are given since Facebook made it nearly impossible to forget a friend’s birthday? We rely on our smartphones and the Internet to remember special dates we used to recall with our memories.
For thousands of years humans have relied on what is called “transactive memory.” We’re all familiar with this. We have people we rely on to remember dates and events for us. I do this with my siblings. For any music-related question I’ve always asked my brother Tony, who has a head full of the most arcane musical knowledge. Now when he calls me and asks me to remember something for him I find myself reminding him that we have no need to keep knowledge in our heads. Then I reach for my keyboard.
Last summer I taught my 13-year-old granddaughter how to tell time on an analog clock, something she thought pointless since “clocks are digital now.” Cathi gave her some maps from AAA but what’s the point of maps when you have Google Earth and GPS?
As a technophile, I love the advances in hardware and software we have now. I’m the guy who recently sat in bed using my laptop to go online while playing Scrabble on my iPod Touch and texting a friend on my Blackberry. But it makes me wonder how this is changing us.
With as impressive as a Google search result can be, it’s still astonishing to see someone such as Fairfield resident Nanciann Gregg recall fascinating details about Fairfield on the I Grew Up In Fairfield Too Facebook page. Her wealth of knowledge is priceless.
I’ve had older readers write to me and relate richly detailed experiences they had in their youths that had me enthralled. Are we losing that?
What are we giving up by having our memories and knowledge base in the clouds? On the Internet? As the researchers say, the Internet is becoming our external storage source. What happens to those unused portions of our brains? We know that when we don’t use a muscle, it atrophies. Is this what’s happening to parts of our brain?
This type of research is in its infancy. But wouldn’t it be ironic if all our technological advances end up making us less intelligent? Peace.
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ADDITIONAL NOTES: You wonder what the human species is going to be like in another fifty years. Will we know anything? Will we all have smartphones on our wrists like watches that supply us with all the info we need so we have to hold nothing in our heads? Will the human brain devolve over time? Will Skynet, a computer system developed by Cyberdyne, become aware and attack us with a wave of Terminators?
We're slaves to machines. My internet connection was down for 11 days once and I thought I would lose my mind. How could I function? It's amazing how much of our daily lives we turn over to machines. Perhaps IBM should stop working on artificial intelligence. Today they're beating us at chess and Jeopardy. Tomorrow? Who knows?
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