Don’t look for everything on your phone: why it’s worth learning some things by heart

“I forget things, it must be age.” This is an expression that is used jokingly among people who are not necessarily elderly and are looking for an apology when they forget your birthday, for example. However, the loss of memory capacity is a very real thing, and our use of mobile phones may have a lot to do with this trend.

“The use we normally make of the telephone, which is to scroll on social networks, it is to our detriment,” says Francesc Serrat Sánchez, a neuropsychologist specializing in cognitive impairment and memory loss. “It’s like any other part of the body, the brain needs to be active. “It has been seen that brain activation is much more effective than any medication in slowing the deterioration process that can lead to dementia.”

digital amnesia

The use of smart mobile phones has led to talk of “digital amnesia.” Just two or three decades ago, we remembered the phone numbers of our family and friends, as well as their addresses and birthdays. If we asked someone for directions on the street, that person would sometimes give us a complicated list of directions (first left, then turn right in the park, etc.) that we also had to remember.

Nowadays all this information, and much more, is stored on the mobile phone we carry in our pocket, not in our heads. In An important study was published in 2010 in Science magazine that talked about the “Google effect”: if we know we can find something on Google, we don’t remember it. This is especially true in the so-called “semantic memory” which, for example, allows us to remember events such as the date of a battle. According to the authors, when we need to use our memory we do not remember the information, but the brain simply remembers where to find it (on Google).

Although the results of that study could not be exactly replicated in subsequent trials, they did clarify the possible reasons why this could occur. To begin with, it seems that knowing that we can store information elsewhere makes us lose the motivation to remember it, whether on the mobile phone or on paper. In a experiment carried out in 2021participants remembered information presented on the screen better if they knew there was a possibility of it being deleted, but they forgot it if they trusted that it would remain recorded on the computer.

Excessively delegating these functions to digital devices can weaken the brain’s ability to store this information on its own.

Overly delegating these functions to digital devices can weaken the brain’s ability to store this information on its own. We use the mobile phone as an extension of our brain to do a ‘cognitive offload’, reducing the cognitive resources we would need to remember that information and using them for other purposes. This phenomenon has been observed with technologies that have nothing to do with the Internet, such as taking notes in a notebook or take photographs, which can reduce recall of people about the details of the objects they photographed.

Loss of focus and memory

Memory also has to do with the attention we pay to what we do, an attention that has been reduced over the years as the volume of information that bombards us increases, as pointed out a review of studies from 2022especially in children. “Storing information and remembering it has three phases: encoding, storage and recovery,” explains Serrat. “Encoding is the moment in which you receive the information, and if your attention is not focused, if you cannot maintain your attentional focus, you cannot encode the information, and therefore you can no longer retain it.”

This is what happens with tourists who go on a trip, instead of looking at the monuments or the landscape, they record it on video on their camera or mobile phone, or those who do the same at a concert. “You don’t live the experience, your brain doesn’t live it. Your brain is looking at a screen and you are not experiencing the emotion, and the emotion is very important when it comes to fixing that moment and remembering,” clarifies Francesc Serrat.

Something similar happens with the use of GPS to get around, whether on foot or by car. Trust our mobile phone to guide us can negatively affect our spatial memory.

When cell phones help the brain

Not everything is negative. In 2015, a scientific article titled The brain in your pocket in which researchers discovered that people who avoid thinking about complex problems use cell phones more to search for information. But according to the authors, this is not always negative, but rather it allows these people with a lower cognitive capacity to enhance the capabilities of their brain and perform well those tasks that they are good at.

Furthermore, cognitive offloading is not always bad, if we offload something trivial. We may worry if the surgeon needs to watch a YouTube video how to do a suture before operating on us, but if he doesn’t remember, a phone will probably seem normal to us.

Encoding is the moment in which you receive the information, and if your attention is not focused, if you cannot maintain your attentional focus, you cannot encode the information, and therefore you can no longer retain it.

Francesc Serrat Sánchez
neuropsychologist

Using mobile phones, especially in older people, also facilitates activities that stimulate memory, such as cognitive games or access to relevant information that keeps the brain active. A review of studies carried out by the Oxford University in 2021 indicated that digital and virtual reality systems designed for cognitive training or learning new skills have the potential to stimulate the brain, promoting neuroplasticity and helping to mitigate cognitive decline in older people.

“This is called neurorehabilitation,” Serrat clarifies. “It consists of doing exercises, which can be with paper and pencil or with digital platforms, which serve to exercise the mind. It is not very different from, for example, doing sudoku, word searches, playing chess or board games. All this exercises the brain,” he concludes.

For Serrat’s patients, people who are getting older and who notice that they no longer have the same memory, doing away with the cell phone from time to time can have other advantages, such as increasing interactions with other people. “In the case of mild cognitive impairment, we advise, on the one hand, not to stay at home, to exercise. The worst thing you can do is go from bed to couch, watch TV, eat, take a nap and not move all day. On the other hand, being with friends, having a social network that supports you, and doing social activities that keep the mind active is very good.”

Although cell phones are also a tool for social connection through, for example, social networks and messaging applications, they have other side effects that can negatively affect memory, such as impaired sleep. It must be taken into account that the brain consolidates memories during a night’s rest, and the use of screens before going to sleep or in bed affects the quality of sleep, according to what was found. a study with more than 10,000 people.

Mobile phones and other electronic devices, along with the growing use of artificial intelligence, promise to increase the capabilities of our brains and free us from irrelevant tasks (and memories in our memory). But we can try not to also destroy the memories that matter.

*Darío Pescador is editor and director of the Quo magazine and author of the book your best self Posted by Oberon.

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