Are we heading for a digital amnesia epidemic?
Scientists are saying that our dependence on smartphones to remember important information could be harming our memories
8July 2022TextSerena Smith
Whether you like it or not, smartphones are irrevocably part of our lives. For many of us, they bookend our days, as we wake in the morning to the tinny chime of an iPhone alarm and drift off at night after numbing our brains with TikTok. And as for our waking hours: Gen Z has a staggering average screentime of 7 hours and 20 minutes a day.
To be fair, not all of this time is spent doomscrolling or perusing niche meme accounts – much of it is spent doing ‘practical’ things, like jotting down notes or reminders. According to a survey by Kaspersky Lab, 91 per cent of people use the internet “as an extension of their brains”, with 21 per cent relying on their memories alone to remember information.
Treating our phones as such is wreaking havoc with our ability to recall information. Personally, I would be a total mess without my phone: my Notes app is a chaotic miscellany of lists – groceries, birthday present ideas, things I need to do – while my camera roll is littered with screenshots of articles I want to read and recipes I want to try. My sense of direction is also totally nonexistent, lying dormant in an entirely unexercised part of my brain which has always outsourced its work to Google Maps or Citymapper.
Are we heading for a digital amnesia epidemic?
Scientists are saying that our dependence on smartphones to remember important information could be harming our memories
8July 2022TextSerena Smith
Whether you like it or not, smartphones are irrevocably part of our lives. For many of us, they bookend our days, as we wake in the morning to the tinny chime of an iPhone alarm and drift off at night after numbing our brains with TikTok. And as for our waking hours: Gen Z has a staggering average screentime of 7 hours and 20 minutes a day.
To be fair, not all of this time is spent doomscrolling or perusing niche meme accounts – much of it is spent doing ‘practical’ things, like jotting down notes or reminders. According to a survey by Kaspersky Lab, 91 per cent of people use the internet “as an extension of their brains”, with 21 per cent relying on their memories alone to remember information.
Treating our phones as such is wreaking havoc with our ability to recall information. Personally, I would be a total mess without my phone: my Notes app is a chaotic miscellany of lists – groceries, birthday present ideas, things I need to do – while my camera roll is littered with screenshots of articles I want to read and recipes I want to try. My sense of direction is also totally nonexistent, lying dormant in an entirely unexercised part of my brain which has always outsourced its work to Google Maps or Citymapper.
