Running Down the Outboard Memory: 5 Take-Aways

I was at dinner last night with my wife and asked her about a ring she was wearing.

“Where’d you get that?” I wondered.

“You gave it to me,” she said. “Last Christmas.” (As in “Just 10 months ago, numbskull.” Though she is too nice to say that.)

I did not remember purchasing it until she reminded me of the situation—in the mall, with my daughter, picked the wrong one, etc. Then it all came back to me.

Did you ever hear of The Walloping Window Blind? It’s a poem written by Charles E. Carryl in 1885. I learned it about the time John Glenn flew in space. The first time John Glenn flew in space.

And, most days, I remember every line.

So, I won’t admit to a bad memory. But I will tell you that my memory is an adventure. A spectacular, unnerving adventure. One where I can tell you who was MVP of the AL in 1965 (Ed. Note: Zoilo Versalles) but can’t always remember the company’s 2006 EBIT or last quarter’s revenues, even though I live with those figures all the time.

So, I pay attention when I read an article about memory. Or, more to the point, memory loss. And, I’ve done enough reading over the last year to believe that it’s going to be technology, and not age, that will eventually do us all in.

In the recent Wired magazine, Clive Thompson wrote, “We're running out of memory. I don't mean computer memory. That stuff's half-price at Costco these days. No, I'm talking about human memory, stored by the gray matter inside our heads. According to recent research, we're remembering fewer and fewer basic facts these days.”

Thompson’s article, Your outboard brain knows all, discusses what’s happening to young people who have had electronics to enhance their memory their entire lives, and to older people, who are shifting gears in mid-life in the way they remember. It’s not pretty, especially when you understand that the more you remember, the more interrelationships you create; the more of those you create, the more innovative you are. Heck, the smarter you are. Half of experience is being able to connect the dots held in our memory.

Here are 5 take-aways:

1. This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up. . .Younger Americans today are the first generation to grow up with go-everywhere gadgets and services that exist specifically to remember things so that we don't have to: BlackBerrys, phones, thumb drives, Gmail.

2. In fact, the line between where my memory leaves off and Google picks up is getting blurrier by the second. Often when I'm talking on the phone, I hit Wikipedia and search engines to explore the subject at hand, harnessing the results to buttress my arguments.

My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

3. And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I'm using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat. . .Still, I have nagging worries. Sure, I'm a veritable genius when I'm on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I'm not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?

4. There's another type of intelligence that comes not from rapid-fire pattern recognition but from slowly ingesting and retaining a lifetime's worth of facts. You read about the discoveries of Madame Curie and the history of the countries bordering Iraq. You read War and Peace. Then you let it all ferment in the back of your mind for decades, until, bang, it suddenly coalesces into a brilliant insight. (If Afghanistan had stores of uranium, the Russians would've discovered nuclear energy before 1917!)

5. Of course, it's probably not an either/or proposition. I want both: I want my organic brain to contain vast stores of knowledge and my silicon overmind to contain a stupidly huge amount more. At the very least, I'd like to be able to remember my own phone number.

Susan Shellenbarger wrote in the Wall Street Journal that

“A growing body of scientific research shows [that] multitasking can actually make you less efficient and, well, stupider. Trying to do two or three things at once or in quick succession can take longer overall than doing them one at a time, and may leave you with reduced brainpower to perform each task.

"There's scientific evidence that multitasking is extremely hard for somebody to do, and sometimes impossible," says David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan. Chronic high-stress multitasking also is linked to short-term memory loss.”

So, it’s possible technology is causing us to lose memory by remembering things for us AND allowing us to do too much at once. It can make you nostalgic for a legal pad and pen.

By the way, my wife wasn’t angry last night that I had forgotten that I’d given her the ring as a Christmas present ten months earlier. She’s a peach.

But all bets are off when I ask her again in November.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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