From Yoga Mat to Google Map: How Digital Convenience is Rewiring Our Minds
On ashtanga yoga, offloading responsibility, and digital amnesia
I’ve been doing vinyasa yoga for a while, but recently, I decided to try to something different. A friend invited me to an Ashtanga yoga retreat, and it was not what I was expecting. The classes I joined were Mysore-style, which meant no instructor led us through poses (aka asanas). Instead, we were expected to memorize and do the fixed order asanas ourselves at our own pace and the teacher was there to help if you needed it (guess what, I needed it the entire week) but didn’t guide the entire class. It made me aware of how little attention I had been devoting to the individual poses while following the teacher’s instructions during the vinyasa classes; I had been essentially delegating the responsibility of remembering the correct posture and even the timing of my breath to the instructor.
In our daily lives, we frequently delegate responsibilities to other people. For instance, when visiting a new city and having someone who is very good at reading maps by your side, you can easily find yourself offloading your share of the tasks of finding your way around to your friend and follow them like a baby duck (Hi Gizem :)).
Lost in GPS Translation
Today, technology has seamlessly replaced the role of “other people”. One example is our increasing dependence on GPS navigation systems, which provides precise instructions on which route to take, often to the point where we are no longer even bothered to engage with our surroundings to confirm our direction. And sometimes, there are instances where we offload a bit too much, like this woman who persistently followed Google Map’s walking instructions, despite the fact that they let her onto a highway with no pedestrian walkway, resulting in a serious accident.
What is digital amnesia?
In this era of ubiquitous internet access and advanced smart technology, digital devices have emerged as our primary repositories of information, which makes it only natural that we offload many of our everyday responsibilities to the digital ecosystem that surrounds us. It helps to free up cognitive space in our heads.
While the convenience of instant information access is undeniable, it also raises questions about its potential impact on our long-term memory. Research suggests that we tend to forget things faster when we know we can easily look them up online, a phenomenon called as digital amnesia.
This explains why I can’t seem to remember the ingredient list of my favourite banana bread recipe, even though I’ve followed the same recipe and baked the same banana bread countless times. I know that I can simply watch the YouTube video and jot down the ingredients for my grocery shopping.
Our brains, in a way, are outsourcing certain aspects of memory to the vast digital database that is the internet. By doing so, it allows us to focus on more creative and complex tasks rather than memorizing large volumes of data.
“Digital amnesia is the experience of forgetting information that you trust to a digital device to store and remember for you” (Kaspersky Lab)
Taking photos: memory booster or memory buster?
The concept of digital amnesia also extends to photography. A study from 2014 investigated how people’s interaction with museum objects, either by simply looking at them or by taking photographs, impacted their ability to recall details later on.
The findings showed that individuals who took photographs remembered fewer details about the object and their placement in the museum compared to those who primarily observed without taking photos.
The “why” of digital amnesia
The widely acknowledged explanation for why digital amnesia exists is that we evolved to remember how to find information and where it is stored, rather than the information itself.
Our ancestors lived in tribes where they shared knowledge and resources to thrive. Within these groups, a concept called “transactive memory system” emerged. Essentially, it meant that individuals in the tribe not only stored valuable knowledge but also kept track of where that information could be found. In simpler terms, they acted as external memory for one another. Fast forward to today, and we find ourselves in a vastly different environment. Instead of relying on our social group’s transactive memory system, we now rely on the internet and digital devices as our external memory sources.
What do you think?
Today, the integration of digital devices and AI into our daily lives has almost become the norm. Would that mean that we simply accept digital amnesia as a natural consequence of our digital civilization, or should we actively design interventions to mitigate/counter its effects? But then what happens when individuals are born into a world where technologies like ChatGPT and Siri are an inherent part of their existence? Should we even expect those growing up in a digital era, to memorise information like “the sum of internal angles of a triangle is 180 degrees”? What would its implications be in terms of our education system and the way we assess students? And perhaps even more importantly, should we revise the format of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and make it more digital amnesia proof? Let me know in the comments.
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‘til next time :)
Elcin
One thing that's on the rise is Personal Knowledge Management systems. Since we acquire a lot of knowledge but it's hard to store them in our memory. A lot of people try to use a tool to manage the knowledge. Products like Obsidian and Notion let you create personal wiki style databases where you can link your knowledge together with tags etc. The aim is to be able to retrieve all information related to a certain thing much more easily from this digital Second Brain. Sounds amazing.
However, when I visit the internet communities that talk about these systems. I see a lot of anxiety symptoms. They're obsessed with storing their knowledge as something bad will happen if they just let their brain does the natural thing by filtering irrelevant information and leave what's important for you.
I think it's important to find a healthy balance because technology has a lot of positive things to offer by using the data we provide it.
As a person with a mental illness it's important for me to track my symptoms. An app can get my input. With the data it collects I can see some trends and diagnose my triggers.
I love the collections the gallery app creates for me. Before this, taking photos with phone felt bad because I knew I wouldn't revisit them for years.
I feel like we're already inseparable with our digital minds. We're kind of cyborgs. We just need to make sure we have a healthy relationship with technology so it doesn't make us dysfunctional.
Here is a good read about this: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. He talks about how some of the skills older generations had are already diminishing and provides examples. It is a great read and makes you question what shortcuts you're taking using the internet and be more mindful about it.