For those who celebrate the “ Outsourcing ” of memory to the web you may have been misled.
Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal ....
The hippocampus acts like an orchestra conductor ,in directing a new symphony of our conscious memory. it helps link new memories ( visual,spatial,auditory,tactile and emotional) with older ones forming the rich mesh of neuronal connections that give memory it’s flexibility and depth.
The memory stored in a computer by contrast takes the form of static bits you can move the bits from one storage drive to another and they will always remain precisely as they were.
The very act of remembering appears to modify the brain in a way that can make it easier to learn new ideas and skills in the future
We dont constrain our mental powers when we store new long term memories . We strengthen them..with each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of intelligence.
The other key fact to consider in memory consolidation is attentiveness. The sharper the attention the sharper the memory.
The influx of competing messages and information when we go online not only overloads our working memory it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing.
The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started.
One thing that sets us apart from other animals is the command we have been granted over our attention.
learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how we think and what we do.
Of all the sacrifices we make when we devote our selves to the Internet , the greatest is likely to be connection to our own minds. The web connections will never become our connections . When we outsource our memory to a machine we also outsource a very important part of our intellect and identity.
The connecting is the thinking ...the connecting is the self.
I
Comments