How Technology Can Help Us Remember Things

The last point is that technology has made it easier to capture and treasure these memories. Dickerson has said that he has captured more on his iPhone than his pen. “It has improved the process of engaging with life through pausing to capture it” (256). Due to this new technological revolution we can now record all of our lives and it only takes a second to capture instead of sitting still for a picture and waiting for our pictures to

Holladay, April. "How Does Human Memory Work?" How Does Human Memory Work? USATODAY.com, 15 Apr. 2007. Web. 04 October 2015.

Technology in today's world affect everyone about the same since we can not live without. The amount of different activities and possibilities to do on the internet using different devices is immense . Whatever you want if it is food,games, or researching something anyone can receive in a matter of seconds. Tammy Kennon who is the author of , “ 5 New Brain Disorders that Were Born Out of the Digital Age” states the negatives about the technology devices that run the world. She tells us about how our patience, attention spans, and memory are all affected due to that fact that we are obsessed with electronics. In today’s world everyone relies on web searches like google to answer a question or do something for them. When a research was conducted by researchers they found out that”[O]ne -Third of them did not even try, reaching for google immediately” this shows how much people rely

Carr attempts to get all of us who read this to really think about this by stating “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” (2). He goes on to say that he doesn’t feel like that his brain is working as well as it used to, and attributes it to constant use of the internet. Understandably, most people use the internet more in this day and age, and it can very easily be assumed that this technology is hurting us in some way. Even Clive Thompson said “We're running out of memory. I don't mean computer memory... No, I'm talking about human memory, stored by the gray matter inside our heads. According to recent research, we're remembering

In Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering” (found in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, published 2011) he explores the history and current state of remembering and how technology affects it.

Do you consider yourself to have a great memory or do you consider yourself to have a bad memory? Can you remember more than four phone numbers and more than three immediate family members birthdays without using any technology? If you cannot answer those simple questions than maybe you should reconsider on working on your memorization side of your brain. Joshua Foer, the author of The End of Remembering, and Paulo Freire, author of The “Banking” Concept of Education, both write about how important memory is in the world today. In Foer’s passage he states that before paper, books, and modern technology people were expected to remember any piece of information that was given to them. Now people rely on anything that could record information so they would not have to remember it or worry about forgetting. He believes that technology is running our memory. However in Freire’s passage he states that memorizing decontextualizes and is unrelated to present conditions, but memory can concrete conditions of our daily lives. The importance of memory and its functions in the world today is that it lets a person find self-identity, prevents shallow base of knowledge, and sets values.

In the article “Does Tech Make Us Stupid? the author Genevieve Roberts presents different views of the effect of technology on our memory. Roberts obtains these views through the results of various studies performed in universities and by quoting a collection of books she has read. Roberts states that the use of technology has caused our memory to deteriorate therfore promoting a dependency on technology to retrieve information.

The most noticeable effect of technology usage is a shortage of memory; not as in computer memory, but human memory. With Google constantly at people’s fingertips, it’s easy to look up information rather than memorize it. Carr cites in his article that tech users "cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful," instead of relying on the internet to quickly search for facts without having to commit them to memory (7). He also states that humans are losing the capacity to ‘deep read’ and cannot unearth meaning in articles the way that they used to in the time of the printing press and less evolved pieces of technology (3). In Gigi and Small’s article, they mention that the prefrontal cortex, or the area in the brain that handles short-term memory, could be altered by technology usage (4). However, Kristina Konidaris, a student who uses multiple technological devices daily, states that the technology does not have a profound impact on her memory. Instead, she states that her memory is more affected by her interest in the subject and her feelings rather than the technology used, although sometimes it may be easier to remember things she has handwritten rather than typed. Also included in Gigi and Small’s

When we walked into the 21century, technology has not only become an important part of our daily life, it has been advanced at a rate we could never imagined. Technology broadens our horizon and shows us so many aspects of the world. However, the more advanced technology becomes, the more we lose our ability to care for others, which is a significant part of our humanity. We use machines a lot more in our daily life instead of ourselves. Due to this, the open world makes it more difficult to concentrate and focus on ourselves , others and our environment. In “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era”, Richard believes that modern technology makes us less attentive and hard to concentrate on one thing. The development of technology does bring us convenience and let communication become easier and faster, while we become too rely on our technology and use them to store our memories, communicating and so on. In “We Are a Camera”, Nick claims that we are more likely to use electronic products to record our memories instead of our own brain.Technology could make people become too lazy to memorize or talk to each other face to face. The development of technology lets us become more connected to the whole world, however, we also spend less time with our close friends and family. We are losing our humanity because we rely on technology more than ourselves, this is shown evident through cognitive attempts at multi-tasking which is to follow society’s fast speed and focus

Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.” Harris uses this quote from James Gleick to introduce the topic of memory in his book. Harris (2014) asserts that with the constant connection of the internet, people are memorizing less info and “off-loading” memories onto their devices. “Human memory was never meant to call up all things, after all, but rather to explore the richness of exclusion, of absence.” (pg. 164) With new technology it is possible to know almost everything with the click of a button. Within seconds we can search for a friend’s birthday or the name of that cast member on our favorite show. We have “the illusion of knowledge” which brings up the question of what do we truly know as compared to that of a computer? Human memory is substantially different from that of computers. While a computer's entire memory could be concentrated down to ones and zeroes, the human mind is much more complex, relying on certain instances for us to recall our memories. “Memory is a lived, morphing experience...not some static file from which we withdraw the same data time and again.” (Harris, 2014, pg.

Nicole Bloudoff (2013) states in her article, “Digital Technology: Help or Hindrance?”, “digital interruptions that occur simultaneously while performing a main job or task are especially able to disrupt the transfer from short-term into long-term memory” (p. 94). These digital messages constantly interrupt us throughout the course of our day with various alerts and notifications, with the intention of reminding us not to forget, but are these interruptions actually interfering with our memory regarding day-to-day information? Bloudoff conducted a study which examines the effects of digital interruptions on long-term memory. The experiment produced concerning results. Bloudoff first set up three separate test groups in computer labs, each consisting of a number of university students. The students are assigned a task to perform on the computers, and in the midst of their progress they were interrupted by digital messages (Bloudoff, 2013, p. 94). An observation of the first experiment showed that “memory accuracy was decreased after the students attended to an interrupting message” (Bloudoff, 2013, p. 96). The second experiment showed that “four interrupting messages were used, and the result was replicated” (Bloudoff, 2013, p. 98). In the third and final experiment, it was “discovered

For some, it does not seem important to make efforts to retain data, seeing that they possess an " electronic memory " capable of offering them any necessary information. Why strain our brain or memory when there is an also big and rich amount of information at our fingertips from any site? Many people think that to try to memorize an information which we can obtain in one, two clicks, is a waste of time. Hard drives have replaced the individual memory. Nowadays, for example, if we need to take knowledge of the works of a writer, we just have to write his name on the web, and we can even get explicit summaries about his works instead of reading the book itself and find our own explanations as formerly. “A study suggests that human memory is reorganizing where it goes for information, adapting to new technologies rather than relying purely on rote memory. We're outsourcing "search" from our brains to our computers…a new study confirms it: Google is altering your brain. More precisely, our growing dependence on the Internet has changed how -- and what -- our brains choose to remember. When we know where to find information, we're less likely to remember it” (Krieger, McClatchy); today’s society, we are called to deal with a lot of data on a daily basis, so some people prefer to rely on the internet, which is rich in ideas and quick to provide information, explanations, rather than do a job that could take a long time to perform; “In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates… feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” (Carr 59); If our brain become as "empty box", we cannot have our own point of view, considering that what we are supposed to have for knowledge is a part of our personality; make our own study is essential to the formation of our

Memory is used as a tool to preserve past realities, but memory is never an absolute preservation.

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.

Growing up as a millennial technology has continued to evolve. It has become an issue though, because many individuals are constantly abusing and overusing it. It is hard not to use technology because it’s used for just about everything including work, school, and for our own personal use. It has become a very reliable source of communication, however, it is way too over used. This type of communication can cause us to distance ourselves from the outside world and cause physical and psychological harm to our bodies. “ “Digital Dementia”, is a term coined by top German neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer in his 2012 book of the same name, it is used to describe how the overuse of digital technology is resulting in the breakdown of cognitive abilities in a way that is more commonly seen in people who have suffered a head injury or psychiatric illness” (Gwinn). If people continue to rely on technology without