External memory (psychology)

Last updated

External memory is memory that uses cues from the environment to aid remembrance of ideas and sensations. When a person uses something beside one's own internal memory tricks, traits, or talents to help them remember certain events, facts, or even things to do, they are using an external memory aid. External memory aids are used every day. A large part of these aids come from technology; people use their smartphones to remind them when they have meetings and Facebook reminds people of their friends' birthdays. These aids also include taking notes in class, carrying a grocery list to the supermarket, or jotting down dates on a planner. Even people, or prompters, can be used as external memory aids. [1]

Contents

Oral tradition and the externalization of memory

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of how Theuth, the Egyptian god and inventor of writing, approached the king of Egypt, Themis, in order to offer the Egyptian people what he regarded as a branch of learning that would improve memory. [2] Themis, however, was wary of the implications the written word would have on memory. He believed that, if the Egyptian people were to take up writing, their reliance on their internal memory would decrease in exchange for external memory. [3] He was of the opinion that writing was a "recipe not for memory, but for reminding" and the person relying on the written word would only give off the illusion of a person possessing knowledge. [3]

"Buddha's teachings were passed down in an unbroken chain of oral tradition for four centuries until they were committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century BC." [4] In 1920, Milman Parry, in his master's thesis, discovered that the stylistic quirks and bizarre repetition found in the Odyssey and the Iliad were evidence of the works' oral transmission. The use of "clever Odysseus" and "swift-footed Achilles" is this evidence. [5] Walter Ong, priest, philosopher, and English professor, has found that people remember best when things are rhythmic and repeated. [6] This repetition is in use in many fairy tales. The use of the "brave prince" and the "beautiful princess" time and time again was necessary to keep the oral tradition alive. [6]

By fifth century BC, many texts had been committed to paper, scrolls as long as 60 feet to be more precise. [3] At this time, written works were meant to be external memory aids. These written works were also written in scriptio continua; words were connected without spaces and sentences were connected without punctuation, making it difficult for the reader to read the words without reading them aloud. [3] It is because of scriptio continua that most reading in the Middle Ages was done aloud and often with an audience. [3] Also for this reason, those who read had to memorize the text in part before reading it to audiences because they had to remember where one word began and another ended and when to pause. [3] It was not until the ninth century that spacing and punctuation came to be.

The reading and memory dynamic was very different. Books were a rare commodity; simply having access to a book one day did not imply access to it the next. [7] Also at this point in time, books were not bound with outward facing spines; they were quite heavy, and lacked indexes. [7] Even if one did have access to a book, it was unlikely that he/she would be able to find what he/she was looking for without having read and even become familiar with the book from top to bottom. In this point in time, external memory and internal memory blended together. Manuscripts were copied in order for the copier to memorize them. [8] Instruction manuals, external memory aids, by Romans like Cicero and Quintilian also existed in order to teach readers how to use internal memory aids. Although, Quintilian agreed with Socrates' views on writing in Plato's Phaedrus'. [9]

"In the fifteenth century, Gutenberg came along and turned books into mass produced commodities, and eventually it was no longer all that important to remember what the printed page could remember for you". [8] As books became easier to consult, it became less relevant to commit them to memory. [7] It is argued that modern day society has almost completely replaced internal memory with external memory. "The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory." [10]

By January 1980, as evidenced by two interview studies conducted by John E. Harris, external memory aids were said to be used more often than internal memory aids. [11] Subjects in both studies were asked what memory aids they used and to rate how often they used them. The studies set out to compare the reported frequencies of external memory aids (such as the ones listed below) with internal memory aids (see mnemonics or the method of loci). Both studies consisted of 30 participants. In the first study, all 30 participants were university students (15 male and 15 female). In the second, the participants were 30 adult women. Both studies yielded the same result: external memory aids are used more frequently than internal memory aids.

Non-electronic external memory aids

External memory aids came to be through Theuth's invention of writing and other advances such as the Gutenberg Press. [2] [8] An external memory aid can be a post it note reminding one to do laundry or a grocery list reminding one to buy detergent.

Other examples include: [12]

Collective memory/transactive memory

Other individuals may also be used as external memory aids. [13] Before the development of technology, individuals still had access to collective memory. First referred to as transactive memory by Daniel Wegner, the idea is (basically): An individual may know things that other people do not know while other people know things that that individual does not. Together, individuals know more than apart. "In any long-term relationship, a team work environment, or other ongoing group, people typically develop a group or transactive memory, a combination of memory stores held directly by individuals and the memory stores they can access because they know someone who knows that information. Like linked computers that can address each other’s memories, people in dyads or groups form transactive memory systems." [13]

Electronic external memory aids

Examples of electronic external memory aids: [12]

The Google effect

What Socrates and Quintilian feared is still debated in modern-day society. Thanks to the Internet and common search engines like Google, often referred to as humankind's collective memory, remembering seems to be less important than it once was. With the right search cues and the click of a button, any person can find almost any piece of information. The Google effect, also called digital amnesia, [14] refers to the tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines such as Google.

Betsy Sparrow (Columbia), Jenny Liu (Wisconsin) and Daniel M. Wegner (Harvard) described the Google effect in July 2011 after having conducted four experiments. [13] They found that the participants thought about search engines when searching for information. Perhaps, the most important finding from their studies suggests that individuals have a tendency to forget information that they believe will be readily available to them in the future. In other words, why remember certain information if it is easily assemble through the use of an on-hand electronic device? Fortunately, their studies also claimed that people's ability to learn information offline remains the same. [15]

Effect of external memory aids on ability to remember

Almost from the first examples of external memory, the practice has been the subject of much criticism. Detractors of externalized memory assert that recording events and information externally is causing the internal human memory to degrade. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates said of writing that it would "implant forgetfulness in [men's] souls". Concerns along these lines were expressed by many throughout history, and at every stage of development. Today this belief is more prevalent than ever, but it focuses mostly on electronic examples of externalities memory. The Google effect, as described above, is a primary example of these concerns.

Much of the criticism about external memory is a product of common misconceptions about memory; specifically, the fact that people are very poor judges of it. Most people believe that they remember far more than they actually do in practice. [16] This is especially true of verbatim memory: generally, a person will recall the general ideas of a text or conversation rather than the exact words that were used. Even so, most people believe that they can recall conversations word-for-word. [17] Because we cannot know what we do not know, people tend to have an inflated view of how well the human mind can remember. As such, it is not surprising that the importance of external memory aids is often underestimated, and that the belief in its purported negative effects is so widespread.

While the idea that externalized memory degrades the innate capacity of humans to remember is prevalent, it is also unsubstantiated. Scientific investigations have failed to demonstrate any connection between technology usage and impaired memory. In addition, studies have concluded that the remarkable verbatim memories held up as the ideal by those who criticize the modern memory are not, in fact, verbatim. Instead, each retelling in oral tradition is a reconstruction of a story using given structural principles, allowing for a great deal of variation over time. [18] Easy access to external sources of information may cause specific information to be remembered less thoroughly, but the overall memory capacity is undiminished. In fact, external memory aids can assist internal memory by providing retrieval cues that allow access to otherwise inaccessible memories. [16]

Human transience

The externalization of memory calls into question humankind's transience. "If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained." [10]

Lifelogging

There are extreme uses of external memory aids. Individuals who constantly record their lives are referred to as lifeloggers. Gordon Bell is an American engineer and manager at Microsoft, but of interest here is his lifelogging. In a fight against natural memory deterioration, Gordon Bell has kept a digital "surrogate memory" to supplement his own memory. "Why should any memory fade when there are technological solutions that can preserve it?" [19] His version of lifelogging includes wearing a SenseCam around his neck that captures everything he sees on a daily basis. He also wears a digital voice recorder to capture the sound he hears. Bell also scans what he reads onto his computer and records his phone calls. He has digitized all of his photos, engineer notebooks, even logos on T-shirts. At any given moment, with the help of his custom developed search engine, Bell has access to anything he has seen, heard, or read in the past decade. [20]

Morris Villarroel, a professor of animal behavior at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, is another lifelogger. [21] His version of lifelong includes a Narrative Clip camera strapped to his chest that shoots about 1,200 photos per day at 30-second intervals. When asked about why he lifelogs, Villaroel responds, "It's nice for me that I have a whole series of photos, moments, that I can look back on, and maybe even share in the future. For example, I have a son who is 11 months old, and he has pictures of his mother, pregnant with him, hundreds of photos of himself the day he was born, and every day thereafter. I imagine him growing old, being 80 and deciding one day to look at a photo of how his mother looked when she was eight months pregnant, what we were doing when he was 120 days old, and how our life was. That motivates me to continue for a long time." [21]

See also

For the use of the term 'external memory' in computing instead of psychology, see:

Related Research Articles

The mnemonic peg system, invented by Henry Herdson, is a memory aid that works by creating mental associations between two concrete objects in a one-to-one fashion that will later be applied to to-be-remembered information. Typically this involves linking nouns to numbers and it is common practice to choose a noun that rhymes with the number it is associated with. These will be the pegs of the system. These associations have to be memorized one time and can be applied repeatedly to new information that needs to be memorized.

Memorization is the process of committing something to memory. It is a mental process undertaken in order to store in memory for later recall visual, auditory, or tactical information.

Memory augmentation is the process by which one's ability to retain information is increased. The retrieval of memory has been theorized to be untrustworthy, and it can be partially inaccurate and not totally reliable Ubiquitous Memory Systems have been invented in order to reduce these memory mistakes. A study conducted by students of the Information Science Department in Nara, Japan sought to measure different types of memory augmentation. They used a computer system, the "Ubiquitous Memories," to demonstrate if the technology aided to augmentation better than other methods such as notes with a pen and paper, portraits used in a previous trial experiment, and just plain human memory. The results were that the Ubiquitous Memories aided in retrieving memory, and decreased the likelihood of mistakes in comparison to other methods.

Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.

Memoria was the term for aspects involving memory in Western classical rhetoric. The word is Latin, and can be translated as "memory".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Method of loci</span> Memory techniques adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises

The method of loci is a strategy for memory enhancement, which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, journey method, memory spaces, or mind palace technique. This method is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises. Many memory contest champions report using this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words.

Prospective memory is a form of memory that involves remembering to perform a planned action or recall a planned intention at some future point in time. Prospective memory tasks are common in daily life and range from the relatively simple to extreme life-or-death situations. Examples of simple tasks include remembering to put the toothpaste cap back on, remembering to reply to an email, or remembering to return a rented movie. Examples of highly important situations include a patient remembering to take medication or a pilot remembering to perform specific safety procedures during a flight.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Tammet</span> British writer and savant (born 1979)

Daniel Tammet is an English writer and savant. His memoir, Born on a Blue Day (2006), is about his early life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, and was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services magazine. His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009. His third book, Thinking in Numbers, was published in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom and in 2013 by Little, Brown and Company in the United States and Canada. His books have been published in over 20 languages.

The art of memory is any of a number of loosely associated mnemonic principles and techniques used to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and 'invention' of ideas. An alternative term is "Ars Memorativa" which is also translated as "art of memory" although its more literal meaning is "Memorative Art". It is also referred to as mnemotechnics. It is an 'art' in the Aristotelian sense, which is to say a method or set of prescriptions that adds order and discipline to the pragmatic, natural activities of human beings. It has existed as a recognized group of principles and techniques since at least as early as the middle of the first millennium BCE, and was usually associated with training in rhetoric or logic, but variants of the art were employed in other contexts, particularly the religious and the magical.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joshua Foer</span> American freelance journalist; memory champion (born 1982)

Joshua Foer is a freelance journalist and author living in Brookline, Massachusetts, with a primary focus on science. He was the 2006 USA Memory Champion, which was described in his 2011 book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. He spoke at the TED conference in February 2012.

Representational systems is a postulated model from neuro-linguistic programming, a collection of models and methods regarding how the human mind processes and stores information. The central idea of this model is that experience is represented in the mind in sensorial terms, i.e. in terms of the putative five senses, qualia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ed Cooke (author)</span> British writer (born 1982)

Edward "Ed" Cooke is a British entrepreneur and author of Remember, Remember: Learn the Stuff You Thought You Never Could. He is also a Grand Master of Memory and the co-founder of Memrise, a freemium online educational platform that uses memory techniques to optimise learning. He grew up in Oxfordshire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plateau effect</span>

The plateau effect is a phenomenon that lessens the effectiveness of once effective measures over time. An example of the plateau effect is when someone's exercise fails to be as effective as in the past, similar to the concept of diminishing returns. A person enters into a period where there is no improvement or a decrease in performance.

Exceptional memory is the ability to have accurate and detailed recall in a variety of ways, including hyperthymesia, eidetic memory, synesthesia, and emotional memory. Exceptional memory is also prevalent in those with savant syndrome and mnemonists.

Eidetic memory is the ability to recall an image from memory with high precision—at least for a brief period of time—after seeing it only once and without using a mnemonic device.

Memory conformity, also known as social contagion of memory, refers to the phenomenon where memories or information reported by others influences an individual and is incorporated into the individual's memory. Memory conformity is a memory error due to both social influences and cognitive mechanisms. Social contamination of false memory can be exemplified in prominent situations involving social interactions, such as eyewitness testimony. Research on memory conformity has revealed that such suggestibility and errors with source monitoring has far reaching consequences, with important legal and social implications. It is one of many social influences on memory.

The Google effect, also called digital amnesia, is the tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines. According to the first study about the Google effect, people are less likely to remember certain details they believe will be accessible online. However, the study also claims that people's ability to learn information offline remains the same. This effect may also be seen as a change to what information and what level of detail is considered to be important to remember.

<i>Moonwalking with Einstein</i> Book by Joshua Foer

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is a nonfiction book by Joshua Foer, first published in 2011. Moonwalking with Einstein debuted at no. 3 on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed on the list for 8 weeks.

The USA Memory Championship is an annual competition that took place every spring in New York City until 2016, and is currently held in Orlando, Florida, after an online qualifier. It was founded by Tony Dottino, President of Dottino Consulting Group, Inc., and Marshall Tarley in 1997. Designed to test the limits of the human brain, the USA Memory Championship is an organized competition in which Memory Athletes (MAs) attempt to memorize as much information as possible in events such as Names and Faces, Cards, Random Numbers, Images, and guest information at a fictional "Tea Party". Since 2018, there is also often an event called Long-Term Memory in which the MAs are given reams of data a month in advance about a wide variety of subjects such as the Period Table of the Elements, Space Shuttle missions, NFL Hall-of-Famers, etc. Participation is open to US citizens who are at least 12 years of age. The competition currently consists of 9 total events, 5 of which are online qualifying events, while the last four events are held at a live event to determine the champion.

References

  1. ↑ Schönpflug, W. (1 January 2001). "External Memory, Psychology of". External Memory, Psychology of A2 - Smelser, Neil J. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Pergamon. pp. 5192–5195. doi:10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/01501-1. ISBN   9780080430768.
  2. 1 2 Ed., Plato.; introd., with; notes, by John M. Cooper (2005). Complete works (5. pr. ed.). Indianapolis, Ind. [u.a.]: Hackett. ISBN   978-0-87220-349-5.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Foer, Joshua (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein : The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin Press. pp.  138–140. ISBN   978-0-14-312053-7.
  4. ↑ Foer, Joshua (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin Express. pp.  125. ISBN   978-0-14-312053-7.
  5. ↑ Foer, Joshua (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein : the art and science of remembering everything. New York: Penguin Press. p.  127. ISBN   978-0-14-312053-7.
  6. 1 2 Walter J. Ong., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982
  7. 1 2 3 Foer, Joshua (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin Express. pp.  144–145. ISBN   978-0-14-312053-7.
  8. 1 2 3 Foer, Joshua (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein : The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin Press. pp.  9–11. ISBN   978-0-14-312053-7.
  9. ↑ O'Gorman, Marcel. "Taking Care of Digital Dementia". www.ctheory.net. Retrieved 29 April 2016.
  10. 1 2 Foer, Joshua (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein : The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin Press. p.  19. ISBN   978-0-14-312053-7.
  11. ↑ Walker, W. Richard; Herrmann, Douglas J. (2004). Cognitive Technology: Essays on the Transformation of Thought and Society. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. p. 21. ISBN   978-0-78-648453-9.
  12. 1 2 "Using External Aids to Compensate for Memory and Organizational Problems Post-TBI". Brainline. Teaching Research Institute, Western Oregon University. 2011-04-11.
  13. 1 2 3 Sparrow, Betsy; Liu, Jenny; Wegner, Daniel M. (5 August 2011). "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips" (PDF). Science. 333 (6043): 776–778. Bibcode:2011Sci...333..776S. doi:10.1126/science.1207745. PMID   21764755. S2CID   7688306. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 December 2019.
  14. ↑ "Study: Most Americans suffer from 'Digital Amnesia'". Washington's Top News. 1 July 2015. Retrieved 29 April 2016.
  15. ↑ Krieger, Lisa M. (2011-07-14). "Google is changing your brain, study says, and don't you forget it". The Mercury News. Retrieved 29 April 2016.
  16. 1 2 Zhang, T., Kim, T., Brooks, A. W., Gino, F., & Norton, M. (n.d.). A "present" for the future: The unexpected value of rediscovery. PsycEXTRA Dataset. doi : 10.1037/e573552014-099
  17. ↑ Foer, Joshua (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein : The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin Press. pp.  123–125. ISBN   978-0-14-312053-7.
  18. ↑ Foer, Joshua (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein : The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin Press. pp.  127–129. ISBN   978-0-14-312053-7.
  19. ↑ Foer, Joshua (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein : The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin Press. pp.  156–159. ISBN   978-0-14-312053-7.
  20. ↑ Bell, Gordon; Gates, Jim Gemmell; foreword by Bill (2009). Total recall : how the E-memory revolution will change everything (1. print. ed.). New York: Dutton. ISBN   978-0525951346.
  21. 1 2 Stump, Scott (25 October 2015). "Meet the man who's recorded every detail of life for the past 5 years". TODAY.com. Retrieved 2016-05-02.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.