Digital Amnesia: Why We Forget the Little Things

Have you noticed how fewer people now remember names of top players from sports they don’t follow? Or how people don’t remember their favorite movies from one or two years ago?

For example, our son was talking about the upcoming Olympic Games and more specifically about the U.S. basketball team. He was naming some of the top basketball players that are going to be part of the U.S. team and my wife and I didn’t know most of them – why? We both could name famous basketball players from many years ago, for example Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, Scottie Pippen, etc. But we couldn’t easily name more than one from today, like LeBron James; Remember that I am talking about people who doesn’t follow basketball, like us. However, we could still name basketball legends from the era before the internet.

Why is this?

My theory is that with the internet we have so much more information fed to us constantly making it harder to remember things. The internet used to be called the information highway and this was accurate, only that now this highway is so congested that’s hard to keep information in our minds for more than just a moment.

The constant flow of information from many different sources is saturating our capacity to retain certain type of information that our brains don’t consider important; like the names of today’s top basketball players.

Is it possible that we’ve reached a threshold where this type of information is not or cannot be present in our minds for easy access?

With the constant consumption of information and overstimulation our brains are being more selective and are deciding to avoid keeping information around that it doesn’t consider relevant or important – maybe that’s what this is.

The overstimulation of all of our senses from various sources of digital information such as streaming videos, social media sites, games, streaming music, podcasts, news, etc. it’s what’s causes us to not remember some of the less relevant things.

My concern is the following, what if it is also affecting our capacity to remember things we deem important?

Turns out there’s quite a bit of research that lines up with what I’m thinking—and some that doesn’t. Ever heard of “digital amnesia” or the “Google effect“? This is the idea that we forget stuff we can easily look up online. Betsy Sparrow at Columbia University ran a study showing that we’re more likely to forget information if we know it’s just a Google search away. It’s like our brains are getting lazy because they know the internet’s got their back.

Then there’s this guy, Clifford Nass from Stanford, who found that people who juggle a lot of info from different media sources tend to be pretty bad at tuning out the stuff they don’t need. This might be why remembering something as simple as a basketball player’s name feels harder than it used to.

But, not everyone thinks our memory is getting worse. Some brain experts say we’re just changing the way we remember things. Instead of storing useless facts, we store the path to find them. It’s like keeping a map in your pocket instead of trying to memorize every street. I like this theory but while our brains might be storing a “path” to these memories, most of us don’t seem to be good at using these paths to find what we need when we need it, at least not yet.

Curious about diving deeper? Check out Betsy Sparrow’s study on the Google effect and Clifford Nass’s insights on multitasking and memory.

What are your thoughts? I personally believe that the volume of information and its constant flow into our everyday lives negatively affects our capacity to memorize and retain information. This is why movements like slow-living and slow-thinking are so appealing to me. Let’s slow down, enjoy the moment, and make it memorable.

Cheers.