Our brains and our smartphones form a complex web of interactions: the intelligent voice of life has been growing since the mid-2000s, but has been accelerated by the pandemic, as has internet use in general. Prolonged periods of stress, isolation and exhaustion – common themes as of March 2020 – are well known for their impact on memory. Of those surveyed by memory researcher Catherine Loveday in 2021, 80% felt their memories were worse than before the pandemic. We are – still – devastated, not only by Covid-19, but also by the miserable national and global news cycle. Many of us soothe ourselves with distractions like social media. Meanwhile, endless scrolling can, at times, create its own anxiety, and phone notifications and self-pausing to check them also seem to affect what, how, and whether we remember. So what happens when we assign part of our memory to an external device? Does it enable us to squeeze more and more out of life because we don’t rely so much on our wrong brain to tell us things? Are we so addicted to smartphones that they will eventually change the way our memories work (sometimes called digital amnesia)? Or do we just occasionally miss things when we don’t remember the reminders? Endless scrolling can, at times, create its own pain, and phone notifications seem to affect what we remember Neuroscientists are divided. Chris Bird is professor of cognitive neuroscience in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex and research director of the Episodic Memory Group. “We’ve always offloaded things to external devices, like taking notes, and that’s allowed us to have more complex lives,” he says. “I have no problem with using external devices to enhance our thinking or memory processes. We do it more, but that frees up time to concentrate, focus and remember other things.” He believes that the kind of things we use our phones to remember are, for most human brains, difficult to remember. “I take a picture of my parking ticket so I know when it expires because it’s something arbitrary that I have to remember. Our brains are not evolved to remember very specific, individual things. Before we got devices, you’d have to put in a lot of effort to remember how long it took you to get back to your car.” Professor Oliver Hardt, who studies the neurobiology of memory and forgetting at McGill University in Montreal, is much more cautious. “Once you stop using your memory, it gets worse, which makes you use your devices even more,” he says. “We use them for everything. If you go to a website for a recipe, you press a button and it sends the ingredient list to your smartphone. It’s very convenient, but convenience comes at a price. It is good for you to do certain things in your mind.’ Hardt doesn’t care about our reliance on GPS. “We can predict that prolonged GPS use will likely reduce gray matter density in the hippocampus. Reduced gray matter density in this area of ​​the brain is accompanied by a variety of symptoms, such as an increased risk for depression and other psychopathologies, but also some forms of dementia. GPS-based navigation systems do not require you to form a complex geographic map. Instead, they just tell you directions, like “Turn left at the next light.” These are very simple behavioral responses (here: turn left) to a specific stimulus (here: traffic light). These kinds of spatial behaviors do not involve much of the hippocampus, unlike those spatial strategies that require knowledge of a geographic map, on which you can locate any point, coming from any direction, and which require [cognitively] complex calculations. When investigating the spatial abilities of people who use GPS for a very long time, they show impairments in spatial memory abilities that require the hippocampus. Reading maps is hard, which is why we make it so easy on devices. But the hard stuff is good for you because it engages cognitive processes and brain structures that have other effects on your general cognitive function.” Reading maps is hard, which is why we make it so easy on devices. But hard things are good for you Hardt doesn’t have the data yet, but believes that “the cost of this could be a huge increase in dementia. The less you use that mind of yours, the less you use the systems that are responsible for complex things like episodic memories or cognitive flexibility, the more likely you are to develop dementia. There are studies that show that, for example, it’s really hard to get dementia when you’re a university professor, and it’s not that these people are smarter – it’s that until old age, they’re usually doing jobs that are very intellectually demanding.” (Other scientists disagree – Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist who wrote the seminal Seven Sins Of Memory: How The Mind Forgets and Remembers, thinks the results from things like GPS are “just for work,” only.) While smartphones can obviously open up completely new perspectives of knowledge, they can also drag us away from the present moment, like it’s a beautiful day, infinite because you’re down, WhatsApping a meal or a conversation. When we don’t attend to an experience, we are less likely to recall it correctly, and fewer experiences we recall could even limit our ability to have new ideas and be creative. As noted neuroscientist and memory researcher Wendy Suzuki recently put it on the Huberman Lab neuroscience podcast, “If we can’t remember what we did, the information we learned, and the events of our lives, it changes us… [The part of the brain which remembers] it really defines our personal stories. It defines who we are.” Catherine Price, science writer and author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, agrees. “What we pay attention to in the moment contributes to our life,” he says. “Our brains can’t multitask. We think we can. But every time multitasking seems successful, it’s because one of those tasks wasn’t cognitively demanding, like folding laundry and listening to the radio. If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to anything else. This may seem like an observation, but it is actually profound. Because you will only remember what you pay attention to. If you’re not careful, you literally won’t have a memory to remember it.” If you’re not careful, you’re literally not going to have a memory to remember Cambridge neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian also has evidence for this. “In an experiment in 2010, three different groups had to complete a reading task,” he says. “One group received instant messages before they started, one group received instant messages during the task, and one group did not receive instant messages and were then given a comprehension test. What they found was that people who received instant messages could not remember what they had just read.” Price is much more concerned about what being constantly distracted by our phones—called “persistent partial attention” by technologist Linda Stone—does to our memories than using their simpler functions. “I’m not distracted by my address book,” he says. And he doesn’t think smartphones let us do more. “Let’s be real with ourselves: how many of us use the time our banking app gives us to write poetry? We’re just passively consuming crap on Instagram.” Price is from Philadelphia. “What would have happened if Benjamin Franklin had Twitter? Would he be on Twitter all the time? Would he have made his inventions and discoveries? “I was really interested in whether the constant distractions caused by our devices might be affecting our ability to not just accumulate memories initially, but transfer them to long-term storage in a way that could hinder our ability to think deeply and interestingly. thoughts,” he says. “One of the things that hinders our brain’s ability to transfer memories from short-term to long-term storage is distraction. If you get distracted in the middle of it” – by a notification or the overwhelming urge to pick up your phone – “you’re not actually going to make the physical changes needed to store that memory.” It’s impossible to know for sure, because no one measured our level of intellectual creativity before smartphones took off, but Price believes that excessive smartphone use could impair our ability to be insightful. “An insight is being able to connect two different things in your mind. But to have an insight and be creative, you have to have a lot of raw material in your brain, just as you couldn’t cook a recipe if you didn’t have ingredients: you can’t have an insight if you don’t have the material in your brain, which they’re really long-term memories.” (Her theory was supported by the 92-year-old Nobel…