Do you remember your spouse’s phone number? How about your kids’?
If not, you’re not alone. A new study is drawing attention to the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of “digital amnesia,” a term used by researchers to describe the experience of forgetting information that you trust a digital device, such as a smartphone.
The study by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab surveyed 6,000 European consumers in an online questionnaire conducted in February and March.
It found that more than half of respondents didn’t know the number of their workplace or their children’s phone numbers. A third (33.5 per cent) didn’t know their partner’s phone number and nearly 90 per cent of respondents didn’t know the number for their child’s school.
Interestingly, more than half of those surveyed (56 per cent) could recall their home phone number from when they were 10 years old.
To better understand the results, the firm referred the survey to Dr. Kathryn Mills of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.
“One of the reasons consumers might be less worried about remembering information is because they have connected devices that they trust,” Mills told the study authors. “In many societies, having access to the Internet feels as stable as having access to electricity or running water.”
In addition to shrugging off the need to remember phone numbers, the study found that a sizeable number of smartphone users are also comfortable with forgetting information that can easily be found again online.
When confronted with a question, 36 per cent of respondents said they would turn to the Internet for an answer before trying to remember. Nearly a quarter (24 per cent) said they would forget an online fact as soon as they had used it.
About half of those aged 16 to 34 and 40 % of those aged 35 to 44 said their phones hold almost everything they need to know or recall. Surprisingly the survey found that respondents older than 45 were even more likely to go straight to the Internet for an answer to a question.
The survey found that the both men and women were equally affected by the “digital amnesia” phenomenon.
According to one neuroscientist referenced in the study, the constant reliance on digitally stored information could be making u shallower thinkers by robbing us of opportunities to form more long-term memories.
“Past research has repeatedly demonstrated that actively recalling information is a very efficient way to create a permanent memory,” Dr. Marla Wimber of the University of Birmingham told the researchers. “In contrast, passively repeating information (e.g. by repeatedly looking it up on the Internet) does not create a solid, lasting memory trace in the same way. Based on this research, it can be argued that the trend to look up information before even trying to recall it prevents the build-up of long-term memories, and thus makes us process information merely on a shallow, moment-to-moment basis.”
But despite our increasing reliance on smartphones to store information that would otherwise be committed to memory, Wimber said there could be benefits for our brains as well.
“Our brains clearly have a capacity limit in terms of how much information is accessible,” Dr. Marla Wimber of the University of Birmingham told the researchers. “Old memories do fade and will eventually be forgotten, or overwritten by more relevant memories if we don’t use (recall) them.
“Given these capacity limitations, one could argue that smartphones can enhance our memory, because they store information externally, and thereby free up capacity in long-term memory.”
Nevertheless, the study suggests that with more and more vital information residing on our phones rather than our heads, that data may be at risk, with just 34 per cent of respondents having installed extra IT security on their phones.
Mills said more research should be done to see whether people who live in places with unreliable Internet access are equally affected by “digital amnesia.”
