Have you ever felt terrible, really terrible for forgetting something?
A birthday, a passport, an appointment?
Maybe forgetting has had negative consequences for you and your relationships.
People that tend to remember facts and details and recall them on short notice can appear
more intelligent, and these traits are often praised and highly valued.
As we grow-up we are taught through experiences (both positive and negative) that being forgetful
is a bad thing, but scientists at the University of California Santa Cruz are asking us to
take a deeper and more scientific look into the adaptive *benefits* of forgetting.
The authors of a paper published in Psychological Science recently proposed that forgetting
allows us to re-allocate cognitive resources away from maintaining old potentially irrelevant
information and focus instead on remembering new information.
This may free our brains up to be more responsive to our environment in real time.
So how do we make room for new information without the negative consequences of forgetting
our mother’s birthday?
Or the names of the new boss’s kids?
(holds up iPhone) with technology of course!
The title of the recent paper says it all: "Saving-Enhanced Memory: The Benefits of Saving
on the Learning and Remembering of New Information" Our external hard drives, be they digital
records, handwritten lists, or long suffering moms and girlfriends who remember details
for us and keep us on track, function to expand our minds and allow us to hold on to information
without impairing our ability to access the full store of our working memory.
This may seem like a no-brainer, after all if you’re like me your Google calendar has
been running your life for the past few years, but now scientists are taking a deeper look
at this seemingly intuitive phenomenon.
And asking specific questions about how technology and our confidence in the “saving” process
facilitates our ability to create new memories.
The nuts and bolts of the study go like this:
Researchers asked 20 college students to use a computer to open and study pairs of PDF
files (cleverly named File A and File B).
Each file contained a list of 10 common nouns and students were told that they would be
tested on their ability to remember those lists.
After 20 seconds of studying File A they were asked to close the file.
They then studied File B for 20 seconds and were immediately tested on how many File B
nouns they could remember.
The key to this study is that half the students were told they could save File A to a particular
folder before opening File B.
The other half of the students were simply told to close the file.
Unsurprisingly, students remembered more words from File B when they had saved File A instead
of just closing it.
This implies that knowing that the information in File A was saved somewhere, allowed them
to forget that information and free up more working memory for the list of nouns in File
B.
Additional trials revealed that the perceived reliability of the saving process of File
A affected the subject’s ability to remember content from File B. When students were told
that saving File A might not work, there were no saving-related memory benefits.
So we have to have confidence in where we are saving our information in order to release
that space in our short term memory for new stuff.
The researchers conclude that “off-loading memory onto the environment in order to reduce
the extent to which currently unneeded to-be-remembered information interferes with the learning and
remembering of other information.
But only if we trust the place we are storing our information.
So I guess, in a way, those smartphones and other assistants that seem like an extension
of ourselves … really are.
And a trusting partnership (with technology) is allowing us to expand our individual abilities
and hopefully be smarter.
After all, as Einstein said: “The value of a college education is not
the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think”
Where do your save your “off-loaded” memory?
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You can also come find me on twitter at PolycrystalHD