My wife still has to ask me our new home phone number, and we moved over a year ago. I only know it because I fill out all the Publisher’s Clearinghouse entries.

Is this something new with the internet, or just another technology where we can outsource some brainpower? Did people have these same conversations about calculators, lamenting the sad demise of long division?

“…sometimes I have to search my inbox to remember an associate’s last name…”

What’s-his-name needs some Inbox Zero zen.

There’s a story that says Einstein was once asked for his phone number. He walked over to a phone book and started to look it up. When the questioner expressed surprise that someone so smart wouldn’t know his own phone number, Einstein said he didn’t want to clutter his mind with information he could easily look up.

Back when I had a landline, I knew all of my friends’ numbers by heart. Today, I know only one of those numbers, and that’s because it’s the same as it was back when I had the landline.

I think there’s something to be said for relegating rote data to a trusted technological medium (backed up/synced in at least four other places, of course), but I don’t think rote memory abilities have totally fallen by the wayside. Sure, I don’t remember phone numbers, but that’s because I never have cause to interact with them after initially entering them into my Crackberry. A birthdate, however, is initially in my Tickler, but then I write it on that day’s Action Card + actually do something (call, wall post, email, text) related to the date. That makes it easier to at least remember the general vicinity of someone’s birthday (“I was driving in a snowstorm when I called AJ to wish him a happy birthday…”)

I think there’s something to be said for giving yourself a minimal amount of stuff to remember at all times even to flex the grey matter in other ways. Girlfriends phone numbers and birthdates are a good place to start. My GF likes to give me pop quizzes from time to time just to keep me on my toes ;)

Merlin’s original question (“if you really do start entrusting all your ephemeral memory work to external systems, might your wetware start to atrophy?”) is an interesting one, but this study does nothing to answer it. It would be good to know if ability to remember useful info deteriorates from lack of use.

I’m reading a book right now (Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin) that’s chock full of people spouting off snippets (or whole scenes) of Shakespeare from memory. I’d hate to think that having a reliable reference system is damaging my ability to maybe do that if I spent the time to fill up the wetware with such trivia.

This doesn’t tell us anything about either age group’s ability to remember anything but the specific set of information that the researchers decided was worth remembering. I’m going to go out on a limb here to suggest that research neuroscientists probably aren’t in the MySpace generation, so of course that information is going to skew to information that’s more worthwhile for people in their age group to remember.

This is such poor experimental design, it’s not even worth keeping this study in your outboard brain.

It isn't a contradiction to learn from The David And His Teachings but still value this wetware you speak of.

The Greek orators had a system for memorization, Method of Loci, which was pretty damn amazing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

I can probably still list all of the songs on Elvis Costello's first six albums in order and have no idea what my phone number is.

Of course I had the albums on vinyl, so I might switch up the A and B sides, but that is another digression.

I was thinking somethign similar myself the other day. I had called a bodyshop to get them to come out and look at a dint on my car. The chap I needed to speak to was not in and as I was about to leave the house, the garage asked me for my mobile number. I had no idea what it was. In fact I have no idea what any numbers I use regularly are. They are all stored in my phones’ memories and not mine. Strangely enough I know numbers I used to use a lot 20 years ago.

I am worried about that? No.

What does worry me is that the quality of my spelling has deteriorated. I put this down to spell checkers. It used to be I would think about the spelling of certain words as I wrote them out, not all words, but a good proportion of fairly complex words. Like “deteriorated” for example, it’s easy to spell but I suppose somewhere in the back of my head I am using methods I learned as a kid to get the letters out in the right order. Well with spell checkers there’s no need. You can bash out the forst approximation of the word that might be in your head and have the machine do the rest for you. Without use the old spelling methods and routines kind of fall apart.