Digital amnesia and erosion of memory

Smartphones remove needed introspection between the impulse and the action

I remember my parents’ phone number. They had it for more than seven decades before they died.

Long ago, I remembered many phone numbers — friends, relatives, places I worked, movie theaters, even my doctor’s. In grad school, I memorized the numbers of a dozen pizza places along with that of a guy who sold the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookies — and he’d throw in a quart of ice-cold milk.

But these days, I really only remember one other number — my own. (And maybe a few numbers at my university, I guess.)

How many numbers can you remember now? If you’re much younger than me, probably not many. If you’re older, perhaps a few. Our cell phones have eliminated the necessity for cramming phone numbers into the brain’s memory bank.

So, too, have online search engines done away with the need to remember stuff. Google stores 25 exabytes (25 billion gigabytes) of data every day. Google’s memory holds about 30 zettabytes, or the storage capacity of around 600,000 50-gigabyte hard drives. (That’s 10 to the 21st power bytes. That’s a lot of zeroes.)

So we don’t have to remember all that much. The cloud and the phone do so much of it for us. And we pay plenty of money for these privileges of enfeebling our memories.

Does the export of our core memory functions mean we have become less aware of history? And especially our own personal histories? Our brains store more than memory — the brain remembers decisions made, the reasons for them, and the outcomes, good or bad. That’s called thinking before acting. But has reliance on digital memory instead of brain memory affected how we make decisions?

Four Turkish scholars last year called this digital amnesia.

The fact that students and young adults store and rely on information on digital devices rather than taking notes negatively affects their learning and memory processes. Neuroscience research suggests that the constant flow of digital information may lead to structural and functional changes in brain regions associated with attention and memory. These changes include cognitive effects such as distraction and reduced memory functions resulting from intensive use of digital devices. [emphasis added]

Translation: If you don’t use it, you lose it.

Well, so what? I have a cell phone. I bought my first one at age 59 — a Motorola flip phone. I make phone calls. I text people. I maintain a calendar (thank the lord for the reminder functions). I write emails. I can’t type with my thumbs; I use a stylus. I made a video this week of someone teaching me how to start my lawnmower. (I’d forgotten. I hadn’t used the mower in eight years.)

If you’re up there in years, like me, maybe your phone use might just be replicating your analog behaviors of long ago. It’s likely you don’t walk around holding your phone in your hand as if it had been surgically attached to it.

But those Turkish scholars said they found distraction and reduced memory functions in students and young adults. Those are the people a third to a quarter of my age I’ve taught as a professor. I worry about them.

Here’s Adrian Monck (bio) on Threads:

What separates smartphones from previous technologies is their intimate, always-available nature combined with business models that profit directly from maximising engagement. The resulting attention arbitrage system doesn’t create human weaknesses — it methodically exploits existing ones with ruthless efficiency. [emphasis added]

Now add in some the-world-is-ending stuff. Here’s the “smartphone theory of everything” from Arpit Gupta on X:

• worsening mental health, esp. women

• rise of addictive gambling behavior, esp. men

• cognitive decline

• lower coupling rates, so lower fertility

• new information bubbles and global rise in populism

Whew! Let’s stick to memory issues. My own cognitive decline can’t deal with the Gupta’s whole theory.

The ubiquitous presence of a cell phones in the hands of students and young adults breeds enacting instantaneous decisions without thought or reflection. If a pattern of checking one’s memory of how previous decisions have been made is absent, then what really guides consumer, political, and personal decisions?

What the Turkish scholars, Monck, and Gupta are suggesting is this: There’s little intervening distance, if any, between impulse and action. Because of that, the younger you are, the more likely you have not constructed a reflective history of how you’ve made past decisions. Sadly, monolithic tech corporations make profitable use of that fact.

Consider Monck’s phrase ruthless efficiency in light of today’s ease of making a bet. Back in the day, the doorbell would ring around 6 p.m. at a relative’s house. He’d answer the door and pass a small envelope to a man waiting outside. That envelope contained two dollars and a piece of paper with three numbers. That man was my relative’s bookie. Just a few bucks, five days a week. That’s all. My relative never went broke, lost his business, ruined his marriage, and disillusioned his children.

Bookmaking back then, for my relative, was not a ruthlessly efficient enterprise (unless, of course, he didn’t cover the bet).

Over the past few years, I’ve watched students place bets even while sitting in my class as I’m lecturing. Sometimes they’d be dueling with each other, raising bets, parlaying more than the other guy.

What intervening thought sits between impulse and action in the mind of someone holding a smartphone burdened with FanDuel, ESPN BET, and DraftKings apps on it? Does that instant access trump thinking about the consequences of a bad bet? Or a string of bad bets?

No one beats the house.

From the Business of Apps site: “FanDuel generated $5.79 billion revenue in 2024, a 19.6% increase on the previous year. Over $50 billion was wagered on FanDuel in 2024, a 26% increase on the 2023 figure.”

Again from the B of A site: “DraftKings made $4.7 billion in 2024, almost all of it came through its sportsbook service.”

Gambling is so much easier — and addictive — if you’re carrying around your bookie in your pocket wherever you go.

Instantaneity often marks a decision instead of introspection. When I first began teaching, I had a student whose parents gave her a credit card — “just for emergencies.” She put the credit card in a bowl, filled it with water, and stuck it into the freezer. If she had an impulse to buy something, the time needed to melt or chip the ice out of the bowl would usually defuse her desire to use the card.

Today, Amazon would await her. Social media and a coterie of corporations would thrust ads at her with ruthless efficiency. There would be no ice to melt between her and the impulse to spend.

Such a ruinous formula for a few recent generations: instant access to ways to spend, entities using addictive tools to encourage it, and a memory with little memory of reflecting on making such decisions wisely.

With each impulsive decision enacted on a smartphone, the erosion of memory continues.

h/t: Brian Stelter of CNN’s Reliable Sources