Not just that we don’t memorize people’s phone numbers anymore but we have trouble remembering our own’s. Technology is shaping our memory. Smartphones save all the phone numbers in the world. The phone reminder rings when it’s time to take a medical pill. Facebook reminds us of birthdays of family members and friends. Google calendar notifies us when a meeting is approaching. TikTok reminds us it’s just a waste of time. So, the next time you turn off your phone you are shutting off part of your memory too.

Once I remember using WhatsApp to call up a good friend of mine to wish him a happy birthday only after seeing his birthday’s notification on my Facebook wall. After I wished him a happy birthday, he told me that I was the only one who remembered his birthday and everyone else didn’t. He said that all the happy birthday wishes he received came from Facebook by posting on his wall and messaging or calling on Messenger. Well, he didn’t know I was like the rest, remembered through Facebook. I really wanted to correct him but couldn’t resist not take the complement so I played it off by replying: “People!”. Joke aside, does remembering, or should I say being reminded, using technology have a bad influence on your memory?

The more you depend on the internet to retrieve information the less likely you depend on your memory over time, a study reports¹. The authors hypothesized that when people use some technological sources, e.g. Google, to retrieve particular information they would be more likely to depend on these sources on future occasions than they would have been depended on their memories. To test the hypothesis, a set of undergrads from the University of California were divided into two groups. Both groups were asked difficult trivia questions, e.g. historical events, high school knowledge, etc. The first group was given the option to use the internet, while the second group was only allowed to answer from memory. Next, both groups were asked easier trivia questions with the option of using the internet if they want to.

As you might have guessed, those who used the internet, the first group, were more likely to depend on the internet to answer the easy trivia questions than those who were initially instructed to answer the difficult trivia questions only from memory. Furthermore, those who used the help of the internet to answer the difficult trivia questions were faster on relying on it the next time than what would have been otherwise. Around 30% of the undergrads who used the internet to answer the difficult trivia questions could not later answer one simple question from memory, compared to only 10% of undergrads from the second group. In other words, the more you use a source, e.g. Google, to obtain some information the faster you’d depend on it again even when you could have successfully relied on your memory instead.

The use of Google to look up answers is one form of cognitive offloading. Cognitive offloading has been defined as “the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task in order to reduce cognitive demand”². In another word, cognitive offloading is the use of an external source as a free pass to replace cognitive processes. While it’s beneficial to free ourselves from remembering mundane tasks to focus on more pressing matters, for example letting Google calendar do the deed for us, more often than not we tend to overuse such tools that have no benefit or increase in our productivity in return. In such cases, we’re basically diminishing our cognitive abilities and impairing our memories. It’s already evident that our ability and rapidness to retrieve information has already been altered with the advent of technology². Therefore, especially for students, knowing when you’re cognitively offloading something (feeling lazy doing brain demanding task) should be taken as a red flag. Otherwise, over a period of time, such a behavior turns into a habit that might eventually harm one’s cognitive abilities or impairing their memories.

Human adaptation to change around them is remarkably elastic and evolutionary beneficial. But that doesn’t mean we should diminish our cognitive abilities and memories. Research in cognitive offloading is still in its infancy and more research is needed to unravel to which extent will it really affect us, and whether or not should we be considered about it. Until then, avoiding cognitive offloading in scenarios where it’s not necessary seems to be a safe bet.