“Digital amnesia”: how smartphones spoil our memory

“I forget everything” is a common complaint these days. But is it because we rely so heavily on our smartphones? And do endless notifications interfere with the formation of new memories? Scholars are divided

There is a suspicion that the more memory in our handheld devices, the less it is in our heads. Maybe we really lose the ability to remember things from scheduled meetings to the location of the streets, because we are always waiting for prompts from the phone? The authors of The Guardian discussed with scientists “digital amnesia” – a phenomenon first voiced in a study by KasperskyLab, when memory and cognitive abilities deteriorate due to the active use of gadgets.

Unloading the brain is harmful

Scholars are divided. Chris Byrd, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex School of Psychology, leads the episodic memory team and does not believe that smartphones adversely affect a person’s ability to memorize and remember.

Professor Oliver Hardt, who studies the neuroscience of memory at McGill University in Montreal, is more cautious. In his opinion, as soon as we stop loading our memory, it weakens, and this makes us use devices even more actively. “We use smartphones for everything. If you go to a website for a recipe, you press a button and it sends a list of ingredients to your phone. It’s very convenient, but convenience comes at a price. It is useful for a person to do certain things in his mind, without relying on assistants, ”he says.

Neurophysiologist Elena Belova, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Brain, agrees that the excessive use of helping apps and devices does not go unnoticed for the brain and memory.

Destination: Dementia

Professor Oliver Hardt also doesn’t like the fact that people have become too reliant on GPS: “We can predict that prolonged use of the navigator is likely to reduce the gray matter density in the hippocampus. This, in turn, increases the risk of depression and other psychopathologies, as well as some forms of dementia. GPS-based navigation systems don’t require you to recreate a complex geographic map. Instead, they just give you directions, like “turn left at the next traffic light.” These are very simple behavioral responses to a specific stimulus. They make little use of the hippocampus, unlike those spatial strategies that require knowledge of a geographic map and cognitively complex calculations. Reading a map is difficult, which is why we give it away to devices so easily. But complex things are good for humans because they involve cognitive processes and brain structures that affect our overall cognitive functioning.”

Elena Belova confirms that memory is formed in the hippocampus and, first of all, a person needs it for orientation in space. The function of understanding where everything is is the primary substrate in which long-term memory is formed. This means that the ability to navigate is directly related to the ability to form and retain long-term memories. And GPS is no help at all.

Distraction is the enemy of learning

According to scientists, another property of any smartphone interferes with the formation of long-term memory – an endless stream of notifications.

Cambridge neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian has evidence for this. She describes how, in a 2010 experiment, three different groups had to complete a reading task. One group exchanged quick messages before it began, the other was distracted by this during the task, and the participants from the third group did not correspond with anyone at all. The subjects were then given a text comprehension test. The researchers found that people who received messages during a task were unable to remember what they had just read.

Psychologist and professor Larry Rosen shares his tactics for dealing with smartphone distractions in his book The Distracted Mind. One such tactic is technical breaks. Use your phone for a minute, then set an alarm for 15 minutes and put your smartphone away. Turn off the sound, put your phone face down and do something else. After the alarm, you will have another one-minute technical break. Continue until you become accustomed to the 15-minute concentration time without the device, and then increase this time to 20 minutes. “If you can achieve 60 minutes of focus with XNUMX minute technical breaks before and after, that’s a success,” Rosen says.

Preventive measures

Oliver Hardt links overworking the brain with a greater likelihood of early dementia: “The less you use your mind and the systems responsible for complex things like episodic memory or cognitive flexibility, the more likely you are to develop dementia. There are studies showing that, for example, it is very difficult to get dementia if you are a university professor. And the reason is not that these people are smarter, but that, until their very old age, they habitually engage in tasks that require mental effort.

It is clear that the matter is not in the smartphone itself, but in how we use it. From the phone screen, you can read complex books, solve puzzles, learn new languages. There are even special applications for brain training, but are they really that effective?

For those who want to reduce the risk of cognitive decline, Elena Belova makes the following recommendations:

• Good dream. Sleep disturbances can lead to depression and, in old age, to cognitive impairment. People who use smartphones right before bed have health problems more often than those who don’t. The night shift function was introduced just after it became clear that intense white light from the phone screen interferes with the production of melatonin and worsens the quality of sleep. Therefore, before going to bed, it is better to either completely abandon the phone, or make the light more yellow and warm. The quality of sleep directly affects the cognitive functions of a person – if tomorrow you need to get up and think well, take care to sleep well.
• Regular physical activity. Both aerobic and power loads are important, it is better to alternate them.
• Gaining new experience and impressionslearning new activities and skills.
• Support for social connections, emotional and positive communication, helping people, volunteering

“Techniques for improving cognitive functions are very similar to the advice of our grandparents on what to do to be good,” says Elena. “Everything here is trite, but difficult to perform, and nevertheless, very useful for improving the cognitive state and quality of life in general.”

An important role, according to the researcher, is played by heredity – all people are different from birth, including their tendency to neurodegeneration. People with low intelligence seem to have a higher risk of dementia.