05.2020 | THE SCIENTIST 13periods—ideally, interspersed with several bouts of sleep.
If you’ve ever pulled an all-night cram session for an exam
only to forget everything you studied a week later, you’ve
experienced this principle in action.
Amidst the current attention economy, many modern tech-
nologies have been designed to continuously pump out infor-
mation so as to keep users engaged for longer periods of time.
Netflix urges us to watch one more episode, hyperlinks compel
us to open one more tab, intermittent rewards drive us to play
one more game.
Unfortunately, when information exposure is constant and
ceaseless, our ability to hold onto information naturally dimin-
ishes. In fact, as colleagues and I demonstrated in a recent
study, individuals asked to binge-watch the entire season of a
television series remembered significantly less about the plot
and characters than individuals who watched the same series
on a nightly or weekly schedule. Human beings have always
had a limit to the amount of information they could meaning-
fully encode in any given d ay. Modern technologies have not
changed this; they simply push us beyond this limit more fre-
quently than media of the past.
In a highly cited study from 2011, researchers found that
individuals remember significantly fewer facts when they’re told
that those facts will be externally stored and easily accessible in
the future. Termed the “Google Effect,” this is the reason why
we so often don’t remember phone numbers, email addresses,
or meeting schedules—technology has allowed us to outsource
memory storage.
Here’s the problem: in order to meaningfully interact with
offloaded information, we must remember where that informa-
tion is located—which keystrokes are required to access it, how
to sift through it, etc. These processes are all internally stored
memories. Accordingly, rather than killing our ability to create
memories, technology is simply changing what information we
choose to remember.
Human thinking and cognition depend largely on those
memories we have internally stored. In fact, the higher-order
skills most people clamor for, such as critical thinking and cre-
ativity, emerge from and can only meaningfully be applied to
facts held within our long-term memory. As educational psy-
chologist Paul Kirschner of the Open University of the Nether-
lands states in a 2006 review paper, “Everything we see, hear,
and think about is critically dependent on and influenced by our
long-term memory.”
Some researchers have hypothesized that the secret
to forming deep, lasting memories resides in the primary
encoding phase. More specifically, if an idea or event elicits
strong emotions during encoding, then people will form a
deeper memory. Although this is true, it can’t be the whole
story. Otherwise, why do we all remember completely emotion-
less TV commercial jingles from our childhood?
Other researchers have suggested that the secret to form-
ing deep, lasting memories resides in the storage phase. That
is, if an experience is repeatedly encountered, there will have
been multiple storage opportunities, leading to a deep mem-
o r y. Again, although this is true, it can’t be the whole story. If
it were, more people would be able to draw an accurate Apple
Macintosh logo from memory. ( Tr y it yourself.)
It turns out that the secret to forming deep, lasting
memories resides in the final retrieval phase. Put simply,
memory is constructive: the more you retrieve a memory,
dredging it up from the depths using your own cognitive
faculties, the easier it becomes to recall in the future. This
is likely why we remember so many TV jingles—we retrieve
these songs each time we sing them—and why we don’t
remember so many ubiquitous logos—very few of us have
ever retrieved these images.
Modern technology by and large is geared toward information
broadcasting. It specializes in organizing and presenting ideas
to people in a highly engaging format. Unfortunately, outside of
usernames and passwords, technology is very bad at forcing us
to retrieve information. This is the final reason why it may seem
technology is killing our memories: when we need never recall
information, relevant memories become weak and fleeting. Rest
assured, there is no reason to assume human beings are losing
the capacity to form deep memories. We are simply using this
faculty to access and create deep memories for things such as
usernames, passwords, and URLs.
Although technology may be changing what information
we encode, store, and retrieve, it does not appear to be alter-
ing our memory machinery. The fact that you can remember
the name of the folder that holds a specific document, even
if you don’t remember the contents of that document, shows
memory is still chugging along. We are merely employing it
differently than previous generations. This leads to the truly
important questions: Do we like how we are currently using
our memory? Do we like how this may be altering our learn-
ing, our discourse, our evolution?
If the answer is “no,” then we need to re-evaluate how we
are employing modern technologies. That our tools may not be
killing memory does not mean they are innocuous. gJared Cooney Horvath is an educational neuroscientist at the
University of Melbourne in Australia. He also serves as director
of LME Global, a company dedicated to bringing the latest in
brain and behavioral research to education and business alike.
Follow him on Twitter @JCHorvath.Although technology may be changing
what information we encode, store, and
retrieve, it does not appear to be altering our
memory machinery.