this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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you need GPS to go to the place youv'e been multiple times, because you have GPS. Your brain does a funny thing where it doesnt feel like it has to remember shit when you have the answer infront of you on a computer/phone/device cause it is basically using that device as its short term memory.
Same with phone numbers. We used to remember them, or at least a handful of the most important ones.
Nowadays it took me years just to memorise my own.
yep. still remember my childhood home phonenumber cause i had to dial it so much.
cant remember my own cell number without opening my cell and looking at it.
Yeah, having the internet in my pocket absolutely affects how much I commit to memory.
Which is a good thing, at least for how my mind works- leaving it up to the internet to fill in the details frees up space in my head to retain a greater breadth of vague knowledge...
You and I both know that freed up space is just used for anxiety.
It's like we can all match the most "erudite" that lives 50 years ago just by the fact we can access infinite knowledge at all times. At the end of the day those guys's work was to know where to look for information in their libraries, and have the surface knowledge to understand what they were reading about.
It is problematic though. Having access to information is not the same as using it. We have kinda "outsourced" most of what was considered common knowledge back then. We think we don't have to remember a lot of "common knowledge" because we can just look it up. But how often do we actually look up that fact instead of just assuming something, even though that information can be accessed immediately?
If you think about it, it is most likely less often than you would have assumed, because it becomes a bother contintually having to look up facts in the middle of something. By having memorised a lot of common knowledge you can immediately incorporate that knowledge into your decisions, as they did back then, instead of having to pause your decisionmaking in order to look something up.
I remember routes even with GPS, and even better when you learn the roads. I usually only have GPS on for traffic data. On the other hand, I never remember phone numbers...