Does the use of Smartphones help to improve memory? Or, on the contrary, is it harmful to our memory?
“I can’t remember anything” is a common complaint these days. But is it because we trust our smartphones so much? And do alerts and distractions prevent us from forming new memories?
“Last week I missed a real-life meeting because I hadn’t set a reminder on my smartphone, leaving someone I’ve never met before alone in a cafe,” one person commented. When memory lapses like this happen, it seems easy and logical to blame the technology we’ve recently adopted.
Does having more memory in our pockets mean there’s less in our heads?
I’m losing my ability to remember things — from appointments to what I was about to do — because I expect my phone to do it for me, commented another person. Before smartphones, our heads would have an array of phone numbers and our memories would contain a cognitive arsenal built up over time, but for smartphone users, this is no longer true.
Our brains and our smartphones form a complex web of interactions: since the mid-2000s, the intense use of smartphones with high interference in our lives has been growing, but it has been accelerated by the pandemic, as well as the use of the internet in general. Prolonged periods of stress, isolation, and exhaustion — common themes since March 2020 — are well known for their impact on memory. Memory researcher Catherine Loveday reported that 80% of her respondents in 2021 perceived their memories to be worse than before the pandemic. We are still feeling the effects, not just of COVID-19, but of the intense national and global news, and many, in the search for more tranquility and calm, are abusively indulging in social media.
So, could the overuse of technology lead to the collapse of our cognitive abilities and cause “digital dementia”? This has been of great concern to scientists involved in memory studies.
But the answer to a recent study by Durand et al (2022) seems to bring peace of mind. In this study, the authors evaluated the influence of storing information on a digital device on memory skills. And, contrary to what many researchers thought (or think), this study indicated that the use of digital devices such as smartphones can help with memory skills and does not make people lazy or “forgetful”.
Nesse estudo de Durand e colaboradores, foram incluídos 158 voluntários com idades entre 18 e 71 anos para uma tarefa de memória para ser reproduzida em um tablet ou computador digital com tela sensível ao toque.
In this study by Durand et al., 158 volunteers aged between 18 and 71 years were included for a memory task to be reproduced on a tablet or digital computer with a touch screen.
In general terms, study participants should separate a total of up to 12 tasks identified and distributed to the left or right, according to the definition of “more or less important”. This activity was performed 16 times by each study participant. Half of the time for this activity, participants had to use their memory to remember the position of tasks, and the other half were allowed to use reminders set on the digital device.
And what happened? There was an improvement in the memory of “saved” and “unsaved” information.
Professor Emeritus of Applied Statistics Kevin McConway (The Open University), who was not involved in the study, commented that the research was about a cognitive phenomenon called “intention offloading.” The cognitive load of many everyday life tasks exceeds the known limitations of short-term memory. One strategy to compensate for information overload is cognitive offloading, the use of physical action to reduce the cognitive demands of a task. Everyday memory depends heavily on this practice; for example, when we write down information to remember or use journals, alerts, and reminders instead of memorization. There seems to be a notable variation in offloading behavior among research participants, which raises the question of whether there is a common factor influencing the offloading behavior of different tasks that address short-term memory processes.
We can do things like “write shopping lists, sticky notes to remind us, set alarms on our phone or computer, and so on”. This can make it “easier for us to remember” to carry out our intentions, for example, “buy some specific items at a store tomorrow or call for an appointment with the doctor,” added Dr.McConway.
Researchers have demonstrated that digital devices can help people store and remember very important information. On the other hand, digital devices “can still free up memory to remember additional less important things.”
Very interesting was the observation that participants tended to use digital devices to store “most important” information, and when they did, their memory for this information improved by 18%. But memory for “less important” information was also improved by 27%, even including people who never created reminders for that information.
The study’s senior researcher, Dr. Gilbert explained: “We found that when people were able to use external memory, the device helped them remember the information they had saved on it. “This was not ‘surprising’, he said, but “we also found that the device improved memory of people for unsaved information as well”.
Professor McConway said: “The study looks at whether this process of putting reminders somewhere external outside of our memories can make it easier to remember some things for which we don’t store an external reminder.”
According to the study authors’ comments, the results showed a “potential cost” for using reminders. Participants remembered “less important than more important” information when the reminders were removed. It was evident that study participants trusted the most important information to their devices and then forgot about it.
“This was because device use changed the way people used their memory to store high-importance information versus low-importance information,” said Dr. Gilbert. But when people needed to remember on their own, they used their memory capacity to remember the most important information.
“However, when participants were able to use the device, they saved high-important information on the device and used their memory for less-important information.”
“External memory tools help us,” the study authors commented and added that far from causing ‘digital dementia’, using an external memory device not only helps people remember information saved on the device, but also can “improve our memory” for information that “has never been saved”.
“But we need to be careful to back up the most important information,” cautioned Dr. Gilbert. “Otherwise, if a memory tool fails, we may be left with nothing but minor information in our memory.”
Phones can have a few tens of gigabytes of possible memory storage, and the newer phones on the market have the most memory capacity. However, according to Scientific America, our brains have about a million gigabytes of memory.
Neuroscientists have long been trying to measure how much can fit in human memory, but the task becomes nearly impossible when we know of cases of extremely dedicated people who perform incredible feats with their brains.
One of them is the Chinese Chao Lu, in 2005, when he was a 24-year-old university student, he correctly recited the 67,980 digits of the number Pi (π), over 24 hours, without breaks.
However, many of us find it difficult to memorize a simple name, birthday, or phone number.
Neuroscience indicates at least five techniques to stimulate memory:
Visualize — when you have to remember something very important, try to see that thing in your head,
Associate — making links, or associations, between things you need to remember is a good idea if you want to remember more than one item,
Loci method (also called the Sherlock Holmes technique) — the concern with memory dates back to ancient civilizations when the records of history were much more fragile than the current ones (we will comment later),
Musicalize — why do some songs “stick” in our heads? It is no wonder that music is such a powerful tool for memory,
Transform lists into sentences — an absurd sentence can help us memorize the order of something.
These techniques can be part of a broader discussion, but two or three of these techniques are worth mentioning right away.
The loci technique seems to be long-standing. Legend has it that the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos invented, around 500 BC, a memorization technique shortly after narrowly escaping the collapse of the house where he was dining. And he was able to help identify the casualties of the banquet because he could remember exactly where each of them sat at the table.
This is the method of loci, which means “place” in Italian. This technique is also known as the Memory Palace. It mixes the two previous tips: visualize and connect the things you want to memorize.
It appears that this technique was used by orators in ancient Greece and Rome, such as the Roman Emperor Cicero, to remember what they wanted to say in their speeches, in a certain order. They started by visualizing the interior of the place where they were going to give their speech (a temple, for example) and then mentally associated an object to each corner of that temple. A sword could help the speaker remember an important battle mentioned in his speech.
And now, more recently, in a 2014 study, researchers had medical students use the loci method to remember what they had learned in a class about the hormone insulin and diabetes. Students had to visualize the university campus in their heads (the cafeteria, the entrance to the building, and a laboratory) and associate each of these corners with a concept learned in class. The student could associate the cafeteria with the way insulin works in a diabetic patient. At the entrance to the building, I could remember what glucose levels are. And so on.
In this study, students who used the Palácio da Memória method scored, on average, 9.3 in the test taken afterward, against the average of 8.1 for the other students. Even more important is that according to some authors, such as Eric Chudler, memorization strategies like this help to transform short-term memories into long-term memories, that is, they help in the absorption of knowledge.
In her book “Sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, and chocolate”, Brazilian neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel explains that music activates several regions of the brain.
And, the more we listen to some songs, the greater the chance that we will like them because our brain starts to understand the melodic sequence and creates an expectation for what it will hear. This expectation is immediately met by the music, generating a feeling of pleasure.
It is no wonder, therefore, that music is such a powerful tool, including for memory. Different studies show that our memory for musical lyrics is often much more accurate than our memory for other types of texts.
That’s why songs, sung rhymes, and parodies are a useful way to memorize lists, words, concepts, or formulas, for example. A simple idea to put this memorization technique into practice is to use common songs, whose lyrics everyone knows, and, keeping the same rhythm, change the lyrics for the content you want to memorize.
This technique is not new, but it is very efficient, as pre-university course teachers well know. They are masters at making parodies to help students remember important concepts.
On the other hand, a curious, often absurd, phrase can help us memorize the order of something. The first letter of each word in the sentence will correspond to the name of what you want to remember. The more absurd the sentence, the easier it will be for the brain to remember it.
Finally, remember that a good memory depends a lot on a good night’s sleep. When we sleep, the brain eliminates toxins and relives what we experienced and learned during the day, consolidating those memories.
Another tip from scientists is: food that is good for the heart is also good for the brain. That is, a balanced and nutritious diet also helps the head to “work” better.
Unlike a machine, you can’t just download information into your brain. So, to keep your memory sharp, you need to perform daily mental exercises.
But, today, with the technology that we have now, this is becoming more and more difficult.
References
Dupont D, Zhu Q, Gilbert SJ — Value-based routing of delayed intentions into brain-based versus external memory stores. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication. (2022) https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001261
Hicks R — Medscape News — August 2, 2022
Tanil CT, Yong MH — Mobile phones: The effect of its presence on learning and memory — PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219233 August 13, 2020
Idoeta PA — BBC News — São Paulo — 3 Outubro de 2020
