I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”.

Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains.

We evolve with technology, and it evolves with us. We might be losing our ability to remember, but if it is because we don’t “need” to remember because technology has augmented us... Well, this is why I also am fond of telling people that I have a difficult time separating technology from nature. Even though the two don’t seem like the same thing, technology too becomes part of the natural ecosystem as organisms invent and rely on it.

Also, another way of thinking about this is, maybe the ability to recall small detailed facts was evolutionarily less important than building models in our brains. So, we offloaded recording small facts, while I think we still ingest and build/train our neural nets just fine in our brains.

Then the only problem I see is, if life becomes all about mental models, when our ability to form new mental models degrades with age, what then? Especially with the rate of technological change, I do see a real likelihood that old mental models get left behind and without the ability to adapt, organisms (i.e.) us could be hosed.

Edit: ..and the last sentence could be why the big push for AI and machine learning too - to ensure the models get encoded into the technology too... and be discovered faster, changed more fluidly, etc. Another evolutionary tool.

I feel that in general we are consuming a lot more information than we really need. I am not sure the human brain was evolved to handle a large amount of information that does not have any physical references.

I find myself not only forgetting myriad facts and figures, but also mixing up information or having false memories. Many of my memories have nothing to anchor on.

I think the trend today is to prime the brain with content depending on the context. E.g. before giving a talk, an engineering meeting or leading a training session you can use flash cards to warm up the cache and strategically dump what is not important to remember.

Not exactly sure how I feel about that.

Whenever I do a SEO workshop I ask 3 questions to my audience:

  * How often did you Google this week?
  * What was the last thing before the last thing that you Googled?

For the first question, I get laughs. For the second one blank stares.

Later, I shoot another question:

  * What is the last thing you read, that you googled before, top to bottom?

For the last question everybody looks at their feet.

The use case I optimize websites for is:

  * Users do not know when they Google.
  * Users do not know what they Google.
  * Google is an extension of their thinking.
  * They do not read what they find. 
  * It just need to move them forward in a way.

We are all users.

> So I wouldn’t say we are losing our ability to remember, as I posed at the start of this post. I think people (me included) just don’t do enough work to move stuff from our working memory into our long-term memory.

I'd say we could be better at remembering that some piece of information exists and where to find it instead of having to memorize it. This seems more powerful.

And for things you do often, you will probably memorize it anyway.

Lack of focus leading to not remembering the content of a meeting is problematic though. I don't have this issue fortunately.

Wasn’t there a Greek philosopher who lamented how the youngs are losing their ability to remember because this newfangled invention called “writing” is making them lazy?

Memory is fundamentally limited anyway. Unless you're going to set up an Anki deck for your Zoom meeting notes, it's unrealistic to try to remember action points from every Zoom call we're on. The brain is an efficient machine, and it will naturally remember things that come up often enough. It works quite well on its own. I don't think I've ever sat down to try to remember how to write a for loop in whatever my preferred coding language is at the time - you just remember it after a few semi-regular lookups.

If you feel your memory is limited in an area you do value instant recall that doesn't inherently produce regular repetition, there are ways to steer your long term memory consolidation. For example, you can train yourself to remember everyone's names when you meet them, if you value that. If you don't value it or put any particular effort into training it, there's no reason to think you've gone senile if you forget the name of most people you meet the first few times.

For most things, I think the second brain solution is ideal. You value something enough to want to be able to recall it at a moment's notice, but you don't have any real need to instantly recall it without reference. We're not taking closed book exams outside of school [1]. This is where all the Zoom notes and book quotes are placed, where you can further digest, interpret and later recall them if and when they become relevant.

[1] https://fortelabs.co/blog/knowledge-building-blocks-the-new-...

I've been wondering the same thing recently. If anyone's interested in learning more about how previous cultures remembered vast amounts of information I would recommend the book I'm currently reading:

Frances Yates - The Art of Memory,

and the one I'm planning to read next:

Mary Carruthers - The Book of Memory.

One of the most interesting aspects for me is how the concept of memory in the middle ages was much more closely associated (sometimes conflated) with imagination than it is now. Most people I know now would consider memory and imagination as two quite distinct mental faculties.

For anybody interested in diving deeper into this subject, I would recommend reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. It was written in 2011, but is still very applicable today. Brain plasticity is a real concept and our constant connection to the Internet affects us.

https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...

During the pandemic, spending more time at home and less time having real social interactions has lead me to beleive I am forgetting some of my vocabulary or at the least not practicing it enough to keep it in what you describe as "Working memory".

Zoom and the like is far from natural and I find myself searching for words during sentences that I know I would not have in the past.

I pre-date Google and whenever I had technical questions the only way I could get them answered was to explain to the person I was asking exactly what I was doing and why, and they would only answer me if they agreed 100% with what and how I was doing something. If they didn't like either then I didn't get my question answered. This forced me to have to go learn and memorize everything about all aspects of technology just so I didn't get roadblocked by someone having a bad day. Today Google is more of a convenient way to jog my memory - I can function just fine when the internet goes out, read a map if my GPS loses its signal, etc. I don't ever want to be one of those blank people who just stand there and stares when the screen blinks out.

I honestly fear what will happen when we attach more directly to the brain/eye the type of infrastructure and capabilities of a modern smartphone / search engine / assistant device that we now carry in our hands. Like Google Glass or whatever, but more invisible and immersive. I already feel so distracted; memory and focus and analysis sideloaded onto devices, and I'm not even a big phone user.

Kids in school are already struggling with these things. What happens when every child is walking around with facts available instantly and constantly, but no context to manage it?

I second, second brain. heh. I invested like 20 hours setting up my notion just right, and it's so worth it. It's so much more organize than my mucky/intangible brain. I also believe in the GTD philosophy that your brain is for having ideas, not storing them.

I strongly suspect the article's title should replace "we" with "I" and ought to be an introspective on the process of aging.

"Something had to be wrong! I started to notice (increasingly!) my inability to recall trivial things; for example, the action points from a Zoom call, or a quote from a book that I had read a couple of months ago. Surely this can’t be normal?"

Except it's fairly normal under stress for people's memory to function more poorly and since we're experiencing a Global pandemic that has completely up ended our normal mode of living I would expect baseline stress for almost every one to be up considerably.

So that's my hypothesis, which requires less assumptions than "people are losing the ability to remember because of computers" but doesn't result in a blog post where I can talk about Anki or equivalents.

Haven't we seen this topic dicussed and dismissed before? I could have sworn...

Yes... probably ... what was the question again?

// This loss of ability to remember is real and personal. To combat it, once a year, I undertake a two to three week digital detox. No devices, no media, only long form traditional books. Takes a week to overcome agitation from not being able to “consume” digital micro-info-bursts on demand. Following that, my brain begins to restore its ability to build and maintain concepts, built up like Jenga towers or houses of cards while reading. That ability remains until I get lazy, quit taking notes by hand and go back to digital.

Don't know about memory, but without doubt, the web defines our access to information, during the pandemic more than ever. With far-reaching consequences for politics, cognitive abilities, history, power balances, market access, etc. Which is why it's so enormously important to not let us slide control over the language(s) of the web, such as HTML and CSS out of our hands, but retain or regain participation and representation in web standards.

There's a further separation here - let's call them "conscious" and "recognization" and they are processed by two different parts of the brain. I'm doing a lot of generalizing in this explanation and I'm not attempting to be 100% accurate in where things happen - I'm a programmer/architect, not a brain guy.

And it's not just memory, but the processing or "thinking" of that memory. Let's take just one sense, sight, for our example.

When you see something, eventually the signal gets to your "conscious" mind (also, there is a slight delay as your brain processes things). But at the same time that information is processed by the "recognization" part of your brain which will eventually store that information, also, in long term memory. There are a few interesting facts about this that I've seen:

1. there are people who are blind, but not because their eyes are damaged, but because the connection is severed to their "conscious". But their "recognization" connection is still intact. Because of this, even though they can't see, they can recognize faces and even stop before running into a wall. This is because the regognization happens even though you're not consciously aware of it. Something like face blindness is (probably) the opposite. 2. When you're in a parking lot looking for your car and you see your friend, you won't recognize them - this is because the "recognization" processing is only single threaded! 3. You can recognize someone you know from much further than you can make out their face consciously. 4. Recognization looks for very complex patterns - especially faces. Just ask yourself "how" you tell one face from another? That feeling of being being watched may be just that there's something face like in the environment. 5. The recognization will store its information and your conscious mind will look for it where its stored but they don't talk directedly!. So, again, when you see something, that information is sent to both places. But sometimes, especially if you have a chemical issue (e.g. serotonin) (even just a minor issue for that moment, not necessarily a big issue), the recognization process will be fast but the conscious process will be slow. So the recognization will store it, then the conscious brain will check to see if it's stored - and it's there! So your con

Has anyone built something to try to automate setting up spaced repetition?

For example, I've looked up numerous PHP functions on www.php.net, numerous Python functions on docs.python.org, numerous Perl modules on metacpan.org or with the perldoc command, and numerous JavaScript functions on MDN.

It would be neat if there was something that could automatically note what I've looked up, and turn that into flash cards for use with something like Anki.

My brain is basically a cache for pointers at this point. I always know where to find something I'm trying to remember and I always have my phone on me.

Book Suggestion that goes into this problem and offers solutions, I'm listening to the audio version right now: "Think for Yourself" - https://www.amazon.com/Think-Yourself-Restoring-Artificial-I...

I am experiment the same problem. As a software developer, I spend all my day on computer and mobile phone. Recently, I have a the feeling that it take me a while to recall the name of a friend. Or even searching for a solution. It could be the side effect of all of the autocomplete and search result which are accessible within my palm.

I always liked the idea of a second brain, an exobrain done in any form of technology.

I humbling say my exobrain is Evernote as I throw a lot of thing in there after adding some tags. I'm fast approaching the 3000 item mark, which is interesting because I'm gradually losing the capacity to find things as I can't remember what's in there to be searched/found. Day to day things like receipt photos are in some way at the top of my mind, but unique events from past years may be forever buried in there.

Another evidence: I saved an article from 2017 just to find out days later when I searched for its title that I had actually saved the same article back in 2017.

Well, I can't even imagine how this second brain will be like in 2027.

I read somewhere that before the advent of paper and books, ancient civilisations would keep epic stories in their heads. After we started writing things down in larger volumes, committing entire "books" to memory was not needed, so it became less prevalent and eventually stopped altogether.

I guess smartphones may further reduce what we need to commit to memory, which will probably have some implications in terms of neuro-plasticity - i.e. it may well shrink (or at least change) parts of our brains.

I like the idea he raises of Google or search in general being an extension of our memory.

I think as technology evolves, we may see a better version of this idea. The ultimate version of this would be what Connor Macleod is gifted at the end of Highlander 2.

He has this ability to see people's thoughts and help them work together to solve huge problems in the world.

We have lots of chat apps that give us instant communication, but it is not very organized or easy to search like the idea of direct access to someone's thoughts.

I've noticed a few ways in which this overload of information manifests.

You've got the people who consume a lot of "information" yet can't make much sense of it, or at least in a way that lines up to shared reality. I'd say this represents the average person. The main coping mechanism for these people is to consume information as entertainment and otherwise not think about what they're taking in. Otherwise, they might subscribe to prefab reality "lenses" that effectively give them the orders they need to make executive decisions in life.

Then you have those who actually can remember lots of trivial knowledge, but can hardly think beyond the level of factoids. In other words, they think that the world can be explained by what's directly in front of them, ignoring the need to distill, synthesize, and extrapolate in order to make predictive models of the world. I know a few intellectuals that insist on this thought process, and their predictions are usually wrong, yet they don't adjust their belief that memorizing a bunch of facts makes them more accurate thinkers. Likewise to the common person, the trivial knowledge archetype sometimes subscribes to existing world views so they can cherry pick knowledge that fits those views, mistakenly believing that their views are original and not assigned to them.

There's also the opposite of the last archetype, which is the overly abstract thinker who can't remember many specific facts at all, so they cope by passively consuming large amounts of "data" and distilling it down into a models of the world that make sense to them. This is the camp that I fall into. It's not that I don't remember anything specific, but individual factoids must be of significant interest for me to commit them to concrete memory. Even if my models of reality don't line up on a factual basis, the more important thing to me is whether I get results. The problem with people like I am is that we can think in terms of big picture but sometimes fail when thinking in a micro-scale actually counts for something. This becomes even worse when there is too much information to consume, because any bit of compelling data causes the distilled reality models to expand in ways that might not be justified.

I also think we consume more information that we need. I think we also tend to overvalue getting that information and retaining it. The HN crowd is biased towards analysis and information, but just look at the abundance of note-taking systems posted.

I used to store as much info as I could somewhere (a personal wiki) but over the years I realized there's just too much there and most of it I never need, and if I do need something, I can look it up again anyway.

I think it's possible to become something of an information pack rat. It's true that for me learning something new feels productive somehow, but if I were to be honest, most of the knowledge I seek out online doesn't really provide me with direct value. The act of seeking it out as well is time that could've been used to do something else.

Ditto.

This reminds me of write-up by Morgan Housel: long-term knowledge vs expiring knowledge[0]. To optimize that trade-off, I generally try to review, on a weekly basis, what I consume from the internet-verse. This has helped me in some ways. Not sure if it's gonna work or not for other people... Plus, moving the scale towards consuming long-forms is also helping me out. (I guess it depends on what type of bubble you are wrapping yourself into. For instance, only visiting specific sub-reddit and LW topics intentionally has been advantageous to me...)...

[0] - https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowle...

Some of my most vivid childhood memories are dreams I had. When recalling the events in my life, it's not always easy to recall which were dreams and which really happened. It's terrifying.

It's all too much information. I worked on cdrom technology 20 years ago. I don't want to know the sector size is 2532 bytes, but I do.

You just made me realize how confusing it must be for our brain to receive a high density of pointless information projected into it when we binge-watch a TV show through a weekend.

Reddit, and by extension HN, is by and large trivia porn.

Humans spent thousands of years telling stories orally, we didnt even have a written language for much of our existence, yet our memories have been working pretty well these past few millenia

There is some research to suggest memories are stickier when tied to locations or other physical things.

40 years ago it would have been:

    * How often did you read articles in newspapers this week?
    * What was the last article before the last article that you read?
    * What is the last newspaper article that you read, top to bottom?

Or, for tech people:

    * How often did you read manpages this week?
    * What was the last manpage before the last manpage that you read?
    * What is the last manpage that you read, top to bottom?

We remember things differently depending on what the purpose of the information is, and that hasn't changed. There's absolutely no reason to shame people into "looking at their feet" over it. Throughout the ages, countless people have read the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, but very few people beyond actors who have actually performed it would know who said this, or even in what act it was said:

    Both by myself and many other friends:
    But he, his own affections' counsellor,
    Is to himself--I will not say how true--
    But to himself so secret and so close,
    So far from sounding and discovery,
    As is the bud bit with an envious worm,
    Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,
    Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.
    Could we but learn from whence his sorrows grow.
    We would as willingly give cure as know.

That reminds me of Joel Spolsky's book "User Interface Design for Programmers", in particular chalter 9, 10, and 11 which are titled "People Can't Read", "People Can't Control The Mouse", and "People Can't Remember".

Can be argued that Googling is simply unimportant. It is not an extension of a thought process (as pouring a cup of tea is not an extension of our digestive process), it's simply something trivial that we do and immediately discard the memories of that as of having no importance for us. Humans are - I believe - goal-oriented, so whenever we want to discover something that's our goal, not the process that led us there (unless something memorable happens along that process).

IMHO, what we remember is the task and its outcome, not the trivialities that brought us from one to another. Which makes me wonder why the last question puzzles people.

I don't readily remember my search history, because I just discard the memories of reaching for something (unless there was something exceptional, which is rare). It's like driving to the restaurant, when there are multiple ways to get to the place. I do remember the outcome (dinner) but unless something happened on the road I probably would need to think/reconstruct if I'd be suddenly asked about the particular roads I took.

Same with the articles - I do remember what I was interested in today (as opposed to "what I've searched for", a subtle difference), and what were the results - things I've read top-to-bottom. Although maybe not in true historical order, but typically the last one is still correct.

To summarize:

- "How often" - unimportant, as the count rarely has a value. Need to enumerate and count things, and that's quite a tedious mental process.

- "What was the last thing before the last" - typically unimportant, as historical order of unrelated events rarely has a value. Needs some mental processing to sort things.

- "What is the last thing you read" - beats me, I do remember what I've read. May need some mental processing (going through my "reading history" and confirming that I've reached this by searching), but besides a possible surprise factor not really a puzzling question.

Sounds not necessarily bad were Google something open source or on-premise hosted.

Yep, I've found I'm less effective at remembering fully detailed information but more effective at remembering 'bread crumbs' which let me quickly find the information in documentation or online. It's sort of like I store the index internally and the data table externally.

> I'd say we could be better at remembering that some piece of information exists and where to find it instead of having to memorize it. This seems more powerful.

[paraphrase] "I wrote it down so I don't HAVE to remember." --quote from Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade

Seems similar to Einstein's "Never memorize what you can look up.".

> I'd say we could be better at remembering that some piece of information exists and where to find it instead of having to memorize it

This approach is called Transactive Memory, and you do it with Google, with your note-taking software, with your friends and colleagues. You do it with your pet.

One of our biggest employable strengths as hackers is that we know where to find information. We make a habit of learning where to find different kinds of knowledge, then do a deep dive into a particular subject. We are masters of transactive memory.

We as a species are rapidly shifting to a more transactive memory in general as it further compresses our knowledge into a small space by storing metadata instead of the knowledge itself, allowing for rapid acclimation to a given task based on the wealth of knowledge around you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactive_memory

Sometimes not remembering the content of a meeting has to do with no important content in a meeting.

you just described pointers and RAM :-)

Plato's Phaedrus (c. 360 B.C.E.)

> ... If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written ...

http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html

In a way Socrates was exactly right. Consider Buddhism, a philosophy that lasted orally for hundreds of years before the first texts were written. Even today, buddhist monks use chanting and repetition to memorize these teachings, internalize them, and live them.

Sure, you could read these teachings and move on with your life, but can you recite what you just read, or even what you just wrote? Not a chance. Your memory of text is fleeting compared to if you gave focused mental effort committing that text to memory through oral repetition.

Yes but its us that live in era of weaponized attention grabbing.

People are being paid millions to figure out how to hijack your attention, how to use yourself (body, mind functions) against you.

Writing is a tool, it doesn't try to work against you, or have an agenda that might not be aligned with yours.

True but slippery slope and all. We need some basic ability lest we devolve control to things not us. We should still be able to get by without technology in emergency situations (natural events causing power outages, etc). We should not be rendered helpless.

How do you know he wasn’t right and writing indeed worsened our memory? Maybe you’d remember who it was if not for knowing it is written down somewhere.

Very scary and I do get a sense that my recall ability and general focus is severely diminished after a decade of being active on reddit and other places like here. The problem is I'm on this dopamine treadmill. I see a thread with an interesting topic and a lot of comments, and I want to dive in and spend an hour sifting through it. I check my subreddits and HN every day.

And for what? I get nothing out of it, maybe a little pissed off every now and then. Most articles I read are forgettable and have no impact on my life. There is literally nothing that I've learned on the internet over close to two decades of use that I couldn't learn more thoroughly with a book or by looking at a newspaper, and in recent years it's been getting impossible to find actual factual subject information on the internet that isn't some half assed SEOified article that doesn't even have my answer.

I think I'm just gonna pull the plug and block these websites with some browser extension, because I am just too compulsive at this point, too engrained into this automatic unconscious action of cmd+t->news.y->tab->enter to do it under my own volition. Sometimes I sit down and I don't even remember opening HN, but there I am scrolling through the front page.

I still need the internet for emails, stack overflow, or finding articles in my field, but that sort of use I will allow because I take that information and synthesize it into something novel and useful. I'm going to pull the plug on being a mindless internet consumer, who leaves no time for actual thinking in between the rampant consumption.

Good bye, HN, hopefully for good but we will see how long I'm able to remain disciplined. I'm kinda excited about what sort of mental clarity this might bring me and how much that will improve my life.

Second this recommendation, I enjoyed that book very much. However, I felt defeated by the end, because I couldn't act on the presented information in any meaningful way.

Halfway through the book the author tells about how much he had struggled to write and had to isolate himself from technology for a while, but only temporary. He then came back and felt the "shallows" once again.