So we're the first generation shifting cognitive burden of some kinds of memory (all those phone numbers) elsewhere. I welcome it. My wife hates it, but she likes the books. In a couple of generations it all will be irrelevant.
Socrates absolutely did.
> for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Gr....
It fascinated me. The idea that books, that were more or less revered depositories of knowledge, could have been seen as anti-intellectual at one time. It pushed me into memorizing stuff. I think it had an unanticipated effect. I thought it would help my overall cognitive capabilities and make me maybe better at science and maths but instead, it gave me a taste for poetry.
If you learn poetry for the sake of it, not because you have a recitation exercise, after a while, it become easy. It is not like memorizing the digits of pi: good poetry has a flow. A flow of sounds, a flow of words, a flow of meanings and a flow of emotions. It is easy to dismiss them when you simply read it, but having to learn it makes you connect deeply to the meaning. Hearing it also has a different effect. I now understand why poems, that I used to find uninteresting when skimming over them in books were actually so highly regarded back in the time.
That was an interesting experience, but Socrates missed a trend that continues nowadays: the volume of accessible information grows. We need faster processing modes. We need written text so we can skim through a page and dismiss it in a few minutes. We can't do that with oral transmission.
That must not make us forget that deeper modes of thought exist. Once we have googled the words we did not know, wikipediaed the summary of the knowledge we lacked, we must fight the urge to keep the flow of information going, reach out to the off button, and dare to stay an hour or two with our mind. Thinking.
We memorize things by exerting recalls. We understand things by banging our heads over what we don't understand about them. Acquiring the knowledge is just the first step of acquiring understanding.
In this day and age meditation becomes popular amongst intellectuals for a reason, but even if you are not into meditation, do yourself a favor when you learn new things: think about them with only your brain for an hour or two. Thinking does take time but without it information gathering is useless.
It was written 7 years ago, but it's still relevant as Android and 4G were rapidly rising in usage around then.
This may be over-simplified but appears to be backed up by the general discussion on pages 10-11.
I feel I would benefit greatly from being able to truly turn my phone off one day a week.
They had amazing memories, but they couldn't memorize large works like that after just one hearing. There are techniques that allow one to remember information like that, but it still requires effort.
Here are two great books on that subject:
- The Art of Memory by Frances Yates (covers Greece, Rome, and Europe)
- The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly (goes back further into prehistory)
And two quick articles about memory feats in ancient Greece[1] and Rome[2].
[1] http://blog.artofmemory.com/simonides-of-ceos-81.html
[2] http://blog.artofmemory.com/pliny-the-elder-on-memory-5824.h...
- Preface to Plato, by Eric Havelock
Is this a true fact, or just a story people keep repeating because it sounds interesting?
If it were true... how would we know? Presumably you would cite sources from Ancient Greece where people reported that they knew bards who could memorize a whole story with one listen, but like, there are sources from Ancient Greece claiming to know of a woman who was so ugly that looking at her could turn a man to stone.
We can kind of sanity check the claim by looking at modern peoples. Anthropologists have extensive experience with pre-literate peoples, and they do have fine memories --but not magical ones [1].
1. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/in...
If it were true, how would they know?!?
It's like if my nephew came to my house and saw Star Wars, and then on the drive home with his mom, he told her the story and she (who never saw the movie) said "He recited the entire movie after one hearing!"
No, what he did was remember most of the plot outline (imperfectly), and describe several scenes (imperfectly), and reproduce the gist, more or less, of some of the dialogue... He's not some incredible savant, he's just a normal person who paid attention to a story. I mean, sure, he "can recite the whole thing after one hearing", but in a pre-literate society, how would you even double-check? It would take someone else with total recall to verify that the bard had total recall. So you have to assume storytellers have perfect memory in order to demonstrate that a storyteller has perfect memory.
I wonder how that subset of the population would rank on their evaluation.
- Oral communication priorotizes memory (as mentioned) but also personal trust, since knowledge is always obtained directly from another person. Hence oral cultures tend to place high value on communal social structures.
- written communication priorotizes rationality since all communication can be scrutinzed before and during reading. It also prioritizes individual assessment and independence. You could argue that the broad adoption of print as a medium of communication lead to individualism, the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, and the Reformation (i.e. the fundamental contributors to modern Western Civilization).
There are obvious merits to digit communication, but the full effects on our minds and culture are not known. A blind belief in some salvific and inevitable march of progress is unwise. We may be trading immediacy, emotivism, and impulsivity for rationality and that should give us pause.
The comparison to today is not whether you can find someone who can recite a book on first reading, but someone who can recite a song the first time they hear it, or parts of a stand-up routine.
Epic recitation was probably not fixed until someone wrote it down. Different recitations of the same plot varied (and were expected to).
That sounds highly unlikely. Do you have a legitimate sources to back this up? Certainly bards had great memory and were able to recite whole epics (perhaps with a level of improvisation akin to "freestyling" in rap), but under what circumstances would they only hear an epic once?
This is extremely unlikely. What the Bards could do was improvise on themes. And often that theme was ancient Troy. They would actually improvise to music in a well-known meter, not unlike a Jazz musician would.
"Yet if Homer was strictly an oral poet, how could he keep such long works as the Iliad in his head? It would take days to recite all of the Iliad or the Odyssey! It is now thought that Homer worked some time between 725 and 675 B.C., when the alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians was just coming into use among the Greeks. It seems likely that writing helped Homer in collecting and composing."[1]
Apply stories and mnomics to information you want to remember. Leverage your spatial memory by associating particular locations in a familiar place with a memory. Get into the habit of reviewing your situation at opportune times, i.e. when you get home or enter your car, and remember things you wanted to do there.
A good approach to this makes it a lot easier to effectively apply your digital memory, and is also useful in situations where electronics are inappropriate (i.e. recognizing someone IRL).
And maybe we over relied on some senses and made an education system which relied on certain sense organs more than other senses. But talking about Smartphones,we may be coming to a full circle with Voice assisted AI is gaining ground.
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I would suggest you to read The book 'A brave new world' By Aldous Huxley which predicted how the information overloaded numbness works in a beautiful way
How can anyone remember 10+ mins music piece for 9 voices is beyond me. Granted, Mozart had some music superpowers, but still...
For example, if I asked an advanced programmer to read a professional implementation of some basic data structures and algorithms, they could likely later recreate the exact same thing. Obviously they didn't memorize the file character by character, but a sensibly written implementation is going to have the same shape and form as something the expert has done hundreds of times.
I recognized that my mind started to become a mental index of information at some point. This is to say that I hold memories of compressed information that I can expand with key search terms to hook onto the information I am actually seeking. One recent example was searching for "Milton Friedman Thalidamide FDA" because I knew it would snag an Uncommon Knowledge discussion I shared with a developers group recently.
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Scripture-Literary-Authori...
If one is up for reading a book written by a Christian, this book describes the world well.
Reciting a story accurately pre writing had a different meaning (not word for word)
Attention is precious, and our society gives it away like free candy. Anything with a screen magnify this, and this has important consequence on learning, social interactions, self growth, mood, hapiness and health.
[citation needed]
http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/extended-cogniti...
This has been part of a larger life exercise in practicing general moment-to-moment mindfullness, and I think I'm going to keep this up for a while and see how long I can go without a smartphone before people start asking me questions at work. So far, so good.
It's like I've withdrawn from a drug and some of my attention is back under my control, where my mind can better keep its peace. I guess I didn't exercise proper discipline when I had the phone.
I already have three pocket-sized notebooks filled up already with tons of art and ideas from my fountain pen!
(Love that pen. Now I write in a crude Spencerian script for extra fun points.)
Opera Mini is enough to browse most websites, and the lack of javascript support is a serious plus.
Half the features on the phone are dead though, the Nokia servers are gone.
I didn't miss the calls, or anything. Only the possibility to take pictures on the spot.
It's fun to review old photos, so I enjoy taking lots of them. But anytime I put my camera between myself and whatever I'm photographing, it also feels like a removal of being in the present moment and just enjoying it for what it is.
I have family and friends in other cities and a girlfriend across town. Texts are just too convenient not to have when you need to coordinate. Just last week a friend passed through town looking for a new car and we met up for dinner - never would have happened without a phone. GF gets into a minor accident (not her fault, she would like to point out) and I can be over there in minutes thanks to a couple of texts. Father breaks his knee and I can follow how he's doing in real time, rather than finding out at the next family gathering.
I could do without the "smart" part of the phone. I really just need texting/calling (mainly texting). But I don't want a land line, and I'm pretty sure my relationships with friends and family would quickly deteriorate without my cell phone.
Why not just buy a "dumbphone"?
When I realized how dependent I became on the phone for my well-being I decided to go through a painful-ish withdrawal to get back my own sense of self. Definitely wasn't comfortable, which prompted me to continue the practice!
3 months ago I changed my phone's language to Japanese. Everything is Japanese - maps, services, apps that read from the default phone language.
Oddly enough, instead of learning Japanese, I just use my phone less.
Similarly, I stopped listening to any music on my iPhone once I got an iPhone 7. Unexpected side effect of having no headphone jack, but I always forget the dongle somewhere. So, no more music from the iPhone. I listen to old am/fm talk radio again instead.
(On a more serious note, 6-month girlfriend fluency in Japanese is something I've observed a few times, and it's a great stepping stone but mostly just barely functional. Especially when your situational choice of e.g. verb form broadcasts so much about your educational background)
When you play the game, listen to what's being said and read the subtitles, you can actually learn the alphabet while playing the game. I still can't read Russian fluently, but I can now decipher/map each individual letter to a Latin version and such at the least understand what's being written! Sadly, a lack of time made me stop playing.
The last few days I really feel the effect of having to check my phone every hours or so. This article motivate me to turn it off for the week. Thanks!
Edit: Well, except for the part where they admitted they just started to use their phone less.
Apps I really want AND never waste time on:
- ride sharing (Lyft, Uber)
- calendar
- calculator
- mobile banking
- movie times & reviews
- booking a place to stay (CounchSurfing, Airbnb)
- public transit schedules
- camera (only pictures, not picture sharing)
- identity verification (RSA, Okta Verify)
- alarm clock
Also I dream that spoken interaction / programming would force us to be more expressive than through touchscreen / mouse control, just following what someone put on a screen. Though I guess “user-friendly” speech interface could always be developed to keep users engaged without having to think about what they're doing :/
Google and Apple seem to agree there is a market need for such a device since they also have competing products: Google Home and Apple HomePod.
Maybe future generations will see our management of information devices as backwards and unhealthy once we learn more about the human brain, the same way we treat smoking, child-rearing, and daily routines of yesterday as horrifyingly detrimental.
I think some of that will come with training for how to avoid brain rot, but when the world's data is at your fingertips, it seems like it might be better to focus the brain on processing vs. memorization. What I'll be curious to see is how we adapt to being always connected like that. Will we see the first true hive minds evolve? Will we lose our sense of self? Will time seemingly speed up?
It felt great. It's had me thinking more and more or the digital things and the hyper-available entertainment and information (and, maybe importantly, hyper-available choice of which to indulge in, at a moment's notice) as kind of junk-food like.
Yeah it's cool to be able to watch all this crap from my childhood, and a thousand great tv shows or movies, or hundreds of the best video games yet made, or browse endlessly for new music tailored to my tastes, or whatever, totally on demand—but maybe that kind of thing's just not healthy to have around.
Automate all the things.
Seriously only way to manage complex systems with small teams and stay sane. Prioritize automation and monitoring. When you do get emergencies spend the time when you are back in the office to figure out how to improve your processes to prevent that particular problem in the future.
I've seen people stymied as to how they could possibly make a phone call without their phones. Payphone. Borrow someone else's. Not that hard.
I used to think this would only ever happen to geeks like me. Boy, was I wrong.
I use to have most of my friend's phone numbers memorized by the shape they made on the keypad. Today we stay in contact with a lot more people, or at least I do, and it helps to no need to memorize numbers.
actually it does not. if you had to memorize numbers you would have better memory and would have little to no issue remembering them.
Ubiquitous cell phones have caused most of these to be removed.
> Borrow someone else's.
Phones becoming more loaded with sensitive personal material than wallets have made people reluctant to loan them to anyone not a close friend.
Mild panic, how do I get home?!
But yea, simply having a smartphone around makes you want to fiddle with it. I would guess there is some addictive component there, as it impacts nearly everyone.
That's by design. There's a whole science of making the customer come back over and over again.
The smartphone and social media often feels like a glorified Skinner box.
Humans like to feel connected, like to know interesting things, and like to feel engaged, and so on. And this little magic box pumps a lot of reward for just a few tiny taps. Just a swipe, and new shiny spectacle things happen, woo! One more swipe!
And you see other humans on Facebook. For some people that's addictive. For others learning about new gadgets, for some simply learning (duolingo, coursera, audiobooks), or checking the news, or reading a book, just one more page while I wait for someone to go back for something in the shop/car, etc.
It seems like that's a regression in design. Only notify me if something goes wrong, don't notify me if things are as they are supposed to be.
Now I've set the "Quiet Hours" setting to permanently on so no notifications are permitted.
I can see at a glance of my wrist that I have no notifications, and it'll tap my wrist if I do, so I almost never need to pull out my phone. I'm still just as "connected," but it really did cut down use of my phone to clear tasks and extended boredom.
For me, airplaning would add stress in that I'd have that nagging feeling that I'm missing something important.
*typo
Out of sight, out of mind (and you can't feel it in your pocket either!)
Thank you for sharing this hack. I think I will employ it regularly in the future.
I think the effects of a smart phone on someone varies greatly depending on how exactly the individual uses it.
What about going the extra step of collecting the phones to be returned when the meeting or event is over?
Is there any way to do either of these without coming off as a jerk?
In short: You all stack your phones on each other after ordering food. First person to crack pays the bill.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/you-have...
I'm genuinely asking, because there's an informative error message, so it's clearly deliberate; I just can't understand the motivation.
Edit: the only human-readable cookie is 'machine_last_seen', perhaps that's just considered a really important statistic...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-neural...
The iPhone has the best build quality (come at me), and you can easily make it do what you're looking for here. A device that doesn't give you the option of extra features won't sell enough to get the scale you need for really high build quality.
I'm on devops. Can't ditch the smartphone.
I use "Tasker" on Android to check for my name in the on-call calendar and change notification settings accordingly. Otherwise it's dead silent when at work and very low volume when connected to a wifi.
It sucks when capitalism shows people what they really want because sometimes it pierces people's bubbles of who they think they are and they find out who they actually are.
Anyway, reading through the paper, there are a few methodological issues that I believe severely weaken the claims made by the authors.
1. Even though the claims made specifically towards phones, there was no "control" item situation.
2. Participants were explicitly drawn to the item in 2 out of 3 conditions right before the task.
3. Experiment 1 does not randomize on task (OSpan and RSPM) order.
4. Item (phone) dependency tests were based on self-reporting. Why not some more objective measure like in a neutral situation, how many times does the participant take the phone out of their pockets to check it?
5. As far as I can tell, there is no control for differences in their population & their measure of phone dependency (ie, is phone dependency uncorrelated to factors like age?)
but really, the killer finding is: there is a (non-linear) interaction effect between phone dependence and phone location. In the phone on desk condition, there is a negative correlation between phone dependence and performance on the OSpan (working memory) task (which is the result the abstract talks about), but in the phone/bag AND other room condition, there is a POSITIVE correlation between phone dependence and performance on the OSpan test.
So based on these results, I can make the claim that we should use our phone MORE to increase our cognitive capacity. We should become more dependent on them. We just need to remember to put them away, out of sight, rather than leave them on the table nearby.
I would put as much trust in the claim above as the original claim by the paper's authors.
EDIT: continuous grammar improvements
The points about the methodology stand, and I don't believe one should update ones beliefs in either way based on this paper.
The "killer" finding is not necessarily a killer towards the reported results (which are dubious anyway), but towards the way the paper is presenting these results. The missing discussion of this interaction effect between phone dependence and phone location is what makes me very much doubt the quality of the paper.
I wonder in the study, is the control group smartphone users temporarily deprived of the phones, or non-smartphone users. Could make a big difference.
DND on for priority only, forever. Star my wife.
Then I can check my phone at my leisure time for everything else.
I recently started getting into photography and I'm finding it very hard not to look at different lenses and Lightroom tips etc etc on my phone.
Combine that with a desire to learn about new tech and program and I end up spending a lot of time looking at it.
Being in motion vs action: http://jamesclear.com/taking-action
I put 3-4 important people on the exception list and ignore everything else. You will find 99.9% of alerts and digital nags are adding zero value to your life and require no action at all, let alone immediate action warranting your attention and a big buzz and chime.
Our phones are so powerfully captivating because of the high-speed Internet connection it hides. New information at the tips of your fingers, just a swipe and even more things! Facebook, Instagram, messaging apps, HN, Reddit, news, and so on.
Sure, there are addictive offline things (games mostly), but that's not the things people usually complain about.
Phones are made to be efficient magic boxes of interesting things. It can load anyone's poison in just a few blinks.
Does smartphone deprivation return cognitive capacity to baseline or cause people to exceed it? Phone deprivation may induce a higher state of attention than before a person had a phone if they associate phone deprivation with focus situations such as exams or crises.
Having a phone around may train the brain to relax and offload tasks, leaving it more fresh to focus when required.
It was named thus because we were once eating in a bar/restaurant situated below ground level, with no mobile phone reception whatsoever. At one point, someone mentioned "that submarine movie with Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in it." We couldn't remember the name of the movie. We could almost recite the entire script, but couldn't say the name of the danged movie.
We tried (in vain) all the way through lunch. We managed the name of the submarine, the Alabama, but not the name of the movie. So the instant we left, off to the Internet movie database. Crimson Tide! Ah, because it was the Alabama! It makes sense now!
Most recent occurrence was two days ago, when we couldn't remember the name of the band that sang "Cult of Personality" for over 15 minutes. We could remember that they were a rare instance of a rock band with black people in it. We could remember that they were not a one-hit wonder, because they had one other hit.
I can only hope that memory storage has been repurposed for more useful data rather than simply lost.
And when I get home to my computer, the refreshing relaxation of the internet is great.
Smartphones making people dumb, dumb phones making people sane.
I tried meditating in the train instead of fiddling with my phone. I can definitely feel the urge to read up on something despite knowing that there's not really anything that currently needs my attention on the phone anyway.
Also I replaced my digital calendar and task list with a bullet journal that I'm carrying around. I was surprisingly more successful with keeping task load under control. As a test, I bought the new Things 3 and used it with Fantastical for a month instead of my journal. I was able to add things faster but actually getting things done has become slower. Though the Calendar reminders are definitely super helpful.
Maybe a detox in a country where you don't have mobile data or wifi might be nice.
Given that this test essentially measures attention and distractions would seem to affect performance, I wonder what the results would be for some other object on the desk in the field of view - a book or a photo say - rather than just a phone.
- "The dialogue of Phaedrus, Plato
These authors expressed scientifically what I've been feeling for years.
Today I barely remember my own phone number.
I have outsourced the cognitive load to my phone.
I'm still not sure if that's better or worse.
I've been trying to stay off my phone when I'm bored and clean/read/do something productive without technology. I'm glad I had a chance to grow up in the 90's before tech was involved from every waking moment.
It doesn't help that I'm a network admin and I work on my computer all day
