Kim Gaskill argues we're outsourcing too much to phones and apps. We're losing our ability to remember phone numbers and dates because we let technology do it for us. She warns that memory, like a muscle, atrophies without use.
Welcome to a new day. I'm Kim Gaskill, and this is the Daily Spark. How good is your memory? Are you using it, or have you totally jumped over into the technology side and let apps and calendars and all those things do all of the things for you that you used to use your own memory for? Like phone numbers. I don't remember phone numbers, even my mom, my sister, my family. And you know, it's— I kind of feel bad sometimes because I don't even remember my mom's phone number. It's in my phone. I think we all do that. We have all the phone numbers accessible through our devices, so we don't use our memory anymore to try and remember those. There's no need to. It's wasted energy. And I got to talking with a friend this morning, and we started talking about how technology is moving at such a fast pace, and we're using apps and, and tools to do all these things for us. And we're using our memory less, but it's because we don't have to. That uses a lot of energy to try and remember all of these things and, and space. It's taking up space. And because there's so many things that we are stimulated by now, that we're doing many more things than we used to all at the same time, there's a lot of stuff we're cramming in our brains. So using our memory for things that we can have a tool do that for us is kind of useless work. Or is it? If it all went away tomorrow, could we use our memories the way that we used to? We used to remember phone numbers. We used to remember dates and times. And appointments. Yeah, we might write them down on a piece of paper, but we remembered in our head, oh, I have that appointment this week, let me go check and see when, when it is. And then we would look at what we wrote down. Now we tend to just move through our day, and if we don't get a little vibration or tone or beep from our phone or our watch or a different tool that tells us, oh, in 5 minutes, you need to do this. We're not doing it. We're getting so trained to have something prompt us. And now with Alexa and all this voice, um, activated technology, we're talking into things and telling them to remind us. It's like we're having a personal assistant follow us around all day, so we don't need to remember. But if it all goes away, we're gonna have to use that muscle again and use our memory to do those things for us. So don't give up on it totally. Use the technology, but find some things that you can actually use your own memory and train it and work it so it doesn't ever go away. Catch you again tomorrow for another Daily Spark.
