I make a point to remember dates, phone numbers, membership numbers, and addresses. I constantly practice and make a point of remembering dates maybe 3-4 months out. I find that if I don’t do this constantly my brain slows down.

Friends and colleagues often ask me… “Why?” They tell me that they no longer remember even their family’s phone numbers, that they don’t need to because they have a smartphone. Their smartphone calendar now manages their lives and they are lost without reminders and pings. My theory has always been, that as our brain is a muscle like all others, if you stop exercising your muscle (asking your brain to remember, retain, recall, and challenge it), like all muscles it will weaken/die. We make a point to go to the gym, but how are we exercising our brains?

This article from The Guardian shows that research confirms my theory and that people are not getting smarter (but the reverse) with the extreme use and reliance on smartphones. This reminds me of when I was in Boston recently, standing in the middle of the campus running a brief experiment (and deliberately did so in an environment with high IQ). I asked 10 people walking by, where a particular street was. Everyone consistently did not know where it was and everyone immediately reached for their smartphone. Then every one of them realized that the street was immediately to our right. Of course, not knowing a street is one small thing, but how much is online GPS reliance deteriorating one’s mental navigation capacity? Just because SIRI or Google can tell us where to go, does not mean we know. Rather, we are becoming less involved and less smart by following instructions instead of learning them.

What do you think?

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