Digital Amnesia: Are Smart Devices Destroying Our Memories?

Freda Liu: Do you find yourself struggling to find the right word in a conversation? Or experience the concept that dances at the tip of your tongue but remains out of reach? Someone who often tops the lists of those we’d like to forget is Matt Armitage.

Freda Liu: What’s with the memory moments.

Matt Armitage:

• I don’t know about memory moments but This is one of those massive irony moments.

• I knew what topic I wanted to cover today. But I genuinely couldn‘t remember what it was.

• It had completely disappeared from my mind.

• Even though I spoke about it briefly on A Bit of Culture.

• I could remember the topics the others spoke about. I can vividly picture the zoom session with Kam Raslan and Couple’s Aidil Rusli.

• Worth listening to for Kam’s rant against drum machines three decades after they became the norm.

• And Aidil’s riff on Malaysian cinema.

• But I had no recollection of what I’d been talking about.

• In the end, I had to go to my Whatsapp and check the conversation I’d had with Kam to try and figure out what it was.

• It turned out to be Digital amnesia.

• Exactly – I used a digital device to remind me to do a show about digital devices destroying our ability to remember.

• Even worse, on ABOC, I kinda argued the idea of digital amnesia is blown out of proportion.

Freda Liu: I think you might have forgotten to explain what digital amnesia is to the rest of us…

Matt Armitage:

• From now on, I’m not admitting to forgetting anything.

• Everything is deliberate. It’s all just performance art.

• Even if it’s forgetting my wallet and only realising when it’s time to pay.

• It’s all theatre, darlings.

• And you are the audience for the experiment that is my life.

• Wow. That sounds more like dementia than amnesia, but anyway.

• I actually had to message Freda the day before this recording to ask her to remind me what time we were recording this episode about amnesia.

• It’s like having a lemon for a brain.

• Digital amnesia is the idea that our reliance on digital devices – especially phones – is physically damaging our memories.

• There are a few components – for example, there’s the distraction argument.

• That while we’re using digital devices we’re distracted and not aware of what’s around us.

• Therefore, the use of the device is the memory your brain writes.

• Not the lady cartwheeling in a ring of fire that was going on beyond your distracted brain.

• Then there’s the neuroscientific approach that argues we’re altering the structure of our brain with the device.

• Rewiring it in a sense and changing how we store and recall information, or physically reducing our capacity to store and recall information.

Freda Liu: How different is this from the concept of living through a lens?

Matt Armitage:

• There’s definitely overlap with that. Studies have shown that when we record an event in our lives with a photo or video, we often don’t remember it in the same way.

• Because our memory isn’t of experiencing that event. Our memory is of recording the experience of that event.

• It might not sound like much of a distinction, and hopefully it’ll get clearer as we progress.

• But it is fundamental: your memory become that shareable public moment rather than the experience itself.

• I’m not talking about posing everyone for a photo after dinner. I’m talking more about that moment when your child wins or loses at sports day.

• Your attention might be on the action, but it’s the action seen through an intermediary, the screen of the device.

• So your experience is the narrow one that the lens captures.

Freda Liu: This sounds a little generational. The old man telling the kids to put their phones away and go outside and play in the mud because it ‘never did you any harm’.

Matt Armitage:

• Funny you should mention that. My mum tells me of a trip to the beach when I was a small kid.

• And playing around a large pipe snaking its way out to sea.

• Then being violently ill.

• turns out it was a pipe disgorging untreated sewage waste in the water.

• I’ve got at least two head injuries and countless other scars and incidents that certainly represent a hangover of harm if nothing else.

• Still, the harm hasn’t done me any harm. But no, I’m not being all Gen X about it.

• This technology is still really new.

• Heavens, in the scheme of human development, photos and electricity are still really new.

• A couple of hundred years is barely a pyramid in the history of our species.

• And I’m as guilty as anyone else. We all have that urge to capture moments.

• I was going to say weirdly, but people who know me probably won’t find it weird.

• I don’t really take many pictures of people. It doesn’t occur to me to document meet ups with friends and family in that way,

• But I’ll happily spend a half hour taking shots of an interesting building.

Freda Liu: Although your obsessions are fascinating, let’s work through some of the different scenarios. Let’s start with the distraction example.

Matt Armitage:

• Just to give some reference points – I sourced some of the information for this show in an article called ‘is your smartphone ruining your memory?’

• By Rebecca Seal. Which you can read on the Guardian website.

• And to reiterate again. We often use smartphones as a shorthand for digital devices.

• Increasingly we switch seamlessly from one device to another.

• A lot of the ecosystems now let you move from a phone to a tablet to a laptop.

• Even to your smart TV or a voice controlled device.

• Without pause. Which is really great from some points of view.

• You can go into a meeting with a phone and have the same information your laptop has.

• I know that most of us use it so that we can carry on watching that TV show or YT clip while we wander to the bathroom.

• But, as I said when we talked about zero point five selfies a week or two ago; people lead messy lives.

• We don’t have these curated insta filter lives.

Freda Liu: That same sense of continuity – moving from device – increases the distraction they create?

Matt Armitage:

• Absolutely. We all like to think we can multi-task.

• But we can’t. When we talk about multi-tasking, what we really mean is halting one project while we move to another.

• It’s more about being able to switch focus than split our focus.

• For example, I can listen to music while I research and prepare these shows.

• But I can’t listen to talk radio – sorry BFM – or listen to podcasts.

• Because the words grab all my attention. I’m drawn to the narrators.

• When I’ve done more manual or repetitive type jobs in the past, or when I’m cleaning the house, say.

• I’ll listen to podcasts or audiobooks. Because the different types of tasks are using different bits of my brain and require different levels of concentration.

• And because I’m pretty lousy at cleaning.

• But back to multi-tasking – we don’t, or at least we don’t in the way we think we do.

• Our focus is on that thing – we may have a peripheral awareness of external events, but our focus is drilled.

Freda Liu: So if you’re concentrating on the phone screen, then you’re missing the cartwheeling fire woman?

Matt Armitage:

• Absolutely. How many times have you looked down at your phone to read a message while you’re watching the TV and then had to rewind what you were watching?

• Doubly annoying in a family setting where everyone has phones because it means every movie takes 5 hours to get through because you’re constantly pausing or winding back for one person or another.

• I think it’s one reason people are less interested in watching stuff at movie theatres.

• Because it demands our attention.

• Our devices make it much easier to fragment our attention – to consume in chunks.

• That’s neither a good thing or a bad thing. Or it’s both. That’s what they are, it’s what they do.

• But memories are something we experience and are then written down into our minds.

• The Guardian article quotes science writer Catherine Price:

o that if you’re paying attention to your phone then you aren’t paying attention to anything else.

• Furthermore, she points out that this seemingly obvious observation is actually deeply profound:

• If we’re not paying attention to something, then there is no memory to recall.

• Because there was no experience of the event. Or at best, there’s a peripheral memory.

Freda Liu: Because real life isn’t like a seamlessly transitioning digital device?

Matt Armitage:

• Correct – there’s no skip back ten seconds function and repeat – unless it’s an Adam Sandler movie. Click.

• Although I think that was more about fast forwarding to the interesting bits.

• But that’s sort of what our life has become in some instances – me included.

• The device is our fast forward switch to take us through the boring bits of our life.

• And then we look up too late and it’s gone.

• The Guardian piece quotes neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki who makes the further point that it’s our memories that shape our lives and defines our lives.

• It’s why dementia sufferers become so adrift. Because they’re lost in those moments and memories.

• And their ability to shape new moments is impaired.

• We’ll talk a bit more after the break about one of the areas that Catherine Price is currently looking into.

• Which is whether this continual partial attention affects our ability to form long term memories.

• But I’ll leave you with a quick example.

dy by Cambridge University in: 2010

• One group were using IM before the task, one group used IM during, and one group used IM neither before nor during.

• They were then set a comprehension exercise after the experiment, to gauge how well they recalled and understood what they had just read.

• The group using IM during the task found it much harder to recall or show understanding.

Freda Liu: Don’t touch those fast forward or rewind buttons. We’ll be back…

BREAK

Freda Liu: In case you’ve forgotten what we’re talking about today, it’s digital amnesia. The idea that our smart devices are changing not just what we remember but how we remember it. We talked about distractions and partial attention before the break. What about the effect that these devices are having on our brains?

Matt Armitage:

• People talk about muscle memory – which isn’t actually a thing.

• Muscles don’t have a memory – what we think of as muscle memory is essentially the brain subconsciously recalling and retrieving relatively low load tasks.

• Which are essentially like the background processes on your computer that the mysterious system agent takes care of.

• But there is a lot of truth in that adage, the more we use our brains, the healthier they are.

• We’re exercising it. We’re making it work. Whether it’s exercising and playing sport, doing wordle, learning a language or playing an instrument.

• All those things are good for our brains. Some of them are good for us in other ways, too.

• But they’re great brain food.

• Oliver Hardt, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, who specialises in the neurobiology of memory.

• Believes that the more we use our devices, the greater the physical need to use them as a replacement for memories.

• He believes that when we stop routinely using our brains for these memory tasks like remembering a recipe.

• Then it becomes harder to use them for other memory tasks.

Freda Liu: And does that pose a health risk?

Matt Armitage:

• That’s the area that Oliver Hardt is researching at the moment.

• He hypothesises that shifting these mental tasks to a third party – in this instance your phone –

• Could lead to reduction in grey matter in the hippocampus over a prolonged period.

• Reductions of gray matter in this area have been linked to all manner of conditions, from depression to forms of dementia.

• Which would be another irony – the tools we relied on during the pandemic to stave off depression – could simply be shifting it further down the line.

• It’s an extension of that area we mentioned in relation to Catherine Price before the break.

• She is also exploring the idea that electronic devices are making us less insightful, which I find particularly interesting.

• Because I hadn’t looked at in in that way.

Freda Liu: In the sense of where our insights come from?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes, you know, one of the reasons I like doing these shows is because I get to pull a lot of disparate threads together.

• To look for those insightful connections.

• I’m gifted in being a person who knows a little about a lot of things and nothing in depth.

• Other than being fluent in Jafarsi, which is the language my cat King Jaff R speaks.

• It has a lot of food and anger related terms.

• Ms Price makes the point that in order to create insights, the brain needs a lot of raw material.

• Again, it’s obvious when you think about it, you can’t pull threads together when there aren’t any threads.

• Imagine if Archimedes had been looking at fail videos as he stepped into that bath?

• He wouldn’t have noticed the displacement of the bath water and we wouldn’t have any Eureka moments.

Freda Liu: Is there any evidence that any of this is happening, or is it all theoretical at this point?

Matt Armitage:

• Largely theoretical. Because the devices are so new.

• For anyone born before: 2000

• And our adoption has been staggered. Widespread smartphone use is a decade old at most.

• It could be another 20 to 30 years before we see whether it will result in widespread brain diseases.

• However, neuroscientists have noted developmental changes in the brains of that first generation of digital natives that is now reaching adulthood.

• A large scale US study – the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study – is tracking more than 10,000 kids from childhood to adulthood.

• They have found a correlation between technology use and cortical thinning.

• The cerebral cortex is responsible for some fairly important stuff including memory, processing thought, attention, perception.

• I don’t know how accurate this is, but I picture it like threads coming loose.

• Although you might want to think of it as jelly that’s being eaten from the inside out.

• If there are any neuroscientists listening, please feel free to tweet how amateur you think my analogies are.

• Anyway, wobbly jelly aside, cortical thinning is a normal part of ageing and usually starts in middle age.

• So Freda and I aren’t at any risk yet.

• But the ABCD study found that this cortical thinning process had begun in kids who used more technology.

• Now, we know the role cortical thinning plays in AD, PD, depression etc etc in older people.

• But we don’t know what, if any risk, it poses to the young.

Freda Liu: With anything like this, you have to wonder, is distraction built into the model of digital devices?

Matt Armitage:

• In an engineering sense? That’s a really hard question to answer.

• And not just in the sense of being sued by a big tech company.

• And there are so many contradictions in this space.

• For example, my iphone gives me a weekly report on my screen time.

• Ostensibly to inform me and allow me to make decisions to reduce that time.

• Most devices have all kinds of modes that allow you to mute messages, calls, notifications, apps.

• But they also serve as gateways for apps whose sole purpose is to entice you to spend more time looking at them.

• And as Catherine Price points out – some of these apps deliberately try to interrupt you and break your focus.

• Because they want you to focus on them. And she phrases notifications as interruptions.

• We all do it – I complained to a local bank because I was getting multiple promotion notifications from them a day.

• And most of us are simply too lazy or distracted to go into settings and turn off the notifications for an app.

• Especially a banking app that informs you of transactions on your account.

• But as Oliver Hardt points out – our brains were laid out 30,000 in our hunter gatherer phase.

• Whether it was avoiding danger or finding food, our brains are hardwired for the fight or flight nature of a smartphone’s pings.

• They force us out of whatever bubble of concentration we’re in.

• They take us away from the task and towards the device.

Freda Liu: So far we’ve mostly heard the negatives. Is there a sense of consensus that these devices are harmful?

Matt Armitage:

• No. As I said, these devices are new. So the opinion and consensus is only starting to shape.

• Rather than do my usual thing and end on the apocalypse, I thought we’d talk about the opposing views at the end.

• The Guardian article quotes Chris Bird a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sussex.

• He points out that some of the tasks we offload onto our devices are things we’ve always used external storage mechanisms for.

• Like putting appointments in a physical diary. Or writing contact details in an address book.

• If any of our listeners has no idea what an address book is. Ask an old person; they will probably be happy to clip you around the ear with one.

• That’s why people give out business cards – because we don’t retain all that contact information at once.

• So digital devices are in some ways just another filing system.

• Are you one of those people who takes a photo of where they’ve parked their car in a mall?

Freda Liu: replies

Matt Armitage:

• I do. I can’t remember the number of times I’ve lost a car in a mall.

• Unsure even what floor I parked on. I remember one occasion when a friend parked up in his new to him car.

• Neither of us remembered where it was. And because it was still new to him he didn’t remember the number plate.

• His was a grey Proton in a sea of grey Protons.

• We ended up walking from floor with him waving his beeper around until we finally found the car.

• Took us maybe 30 to 45 minutes.

• Bird also makes the point that tasks like that – where we’ve left our car – actually carry quite a high mental load for something seemingly trivial.

• So taking that photo is a way to reduce the bandwidth consumption and allow you to concentrate on other things.

• Of course, other people argue that offloading those tasks to a phone isn’t bringing us any closer to winning that Nobel prize.

• That we’re more likely to use that recaptured time to consume more social content.

Freda Liu: What about those brain shaping components?

Matt Armitage:

• Yeah, so one of the topics that oliver hardt raises is the use of GPS.

• And this is something I’m especially guilty of.

• Relying on Waze to get me everywhere. I don’t even think about it any more.

• You don’t give a second thought to where you’re going – you hop in and follow the directions.

• Hardt notes that navigating and map reading is hard, so it’s one of the first tasks we offload

• That totally describes me. But offloading that process to an app that simply gives you linear instructions: turn left, go straight ahead etc.

• Is detrimental to our health.

• He argues that the spatial strategies we have typically used to navigate – creating a 3D map of our surroundings – are very good for us precisely because they are so hard to accomplish.

• However, there’s disagreement over this as well. Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter argues that the effects from using GPS are task-specific rather than long-lasting.

Freda Liu: So, essentially all we can do is wait and see?

Matt Armitage:

• If we’re lucky the world will descend into a fireball long before most of us develop dementia.

• Digital devices aren’t going away. Studies in this area are useful because we need to know the long-term effects and how to avoid them.

• We talk about voice-activated devices on the show a great deal – maybe they will be lower impact than screen-based devices.

• Maybe we’ll develop socially recognised notification windows – all notifications are muted until the last ten minutes of the hour, for example.

• A lot of the changes are behavioural as much as they are technological.

• These shows wouldn’t be possible without digital devices.

• I’m not joking when I say that digital devices make me smarter.

• And they let me view the world in a much wider way.

• I think – at this juncture – the best thing we can do is remain aware of how we’re using this technology.

• And remember to do something else from time to time.

• Even if it’s to play songs badly on a guitar like me.