Unexpected effects II

In an article in  New Scientist (Australian Edition Issue 27/10/2018) by Helen Thompson “Is technology making me memory worse?” the author talks about outsourcing memory. We all experienced this in our life. Phone numbers we put into the memory of our phones are disappearing from our memory. We don’t remember what we wanted to buy because we forgot our shopping list at home. But technology poses a far greater risk.

As research by Diana Tamit at Princeton University has shown, participants in an experiment who were send on a trip, half of them were asked to take pictures, the other half didn’t showed different levels of memories about the trip. The ones who took pictures had a poorer memory of the trip than the other participants. What else are we outsourcing to technology? It looks like a lot. Facebook, twitter etc is full of memories and opinions we share with the world. All the picture we take and put on instagram. These are all memories we store externally.

“The brain will really begin to adapt in ways we can’t anticipate right now” says Martin Conway, director at the Centre of Memory and Law at University of London.

Evolution is real and still ongoing. How will our brains look like in 50, 100, 200 years?  How will the ever increasing merge of interfaces between us and technology change our mind?