Mobile technology is warping our memories…

Originally posted By vivien kamhoua on June 10, 2018

… How sustainable are the cognitive changes that mobile technology is bringing into education?

With mobile devises, the need and pressure to memorise information is fading. Instead of memorising information, learners tend to retain how they can retrieve these information by storing them, or creating a secure path to access the information for future potential use.

While exploring mobility technology and mobile education, we should be aware of the potential that mobile devises have in affecting human’s long-term memory. Especially when we know that,

• in order to have information stored in our long-term memory, our attention is required while processing these information. In fact a simple task that intervenes while we are holding a piece of information will degrade our ability to remember it
• nowadays, attention to even the most pressing matters can be interrupted at any moment by familiar buzzing from a mobile device
• these frequent and unplanned interruptions, coupled with growing expectations for immediate response challenge our cognitive control system at its very core
• cognitive control is our ability to focus on accomplishing a task in the context of competing demands; and this increasingly taxed ability is what has allowed humans to achieve remarkable feats, such as developing languages and building complex societies.

How is mobile technology affecting how memory?

• Information overload makes it harder to retain information. An overload of information erodes our performance on a wide spectrum of cognitive activities, including the ability to recall details in our lives.
• The internet is becoming the brain’s “external hard drive.” Research has found that when we know a digital device or tool will remember a piece of information for us, we are less likely to remember it ourselves.

Is memorisation important for learning?

“Memorization’s defenders are right: It’s a mistake to downplay factual knowledge, as if students could learn to reason critically without any information to reason about. But memorization’s opponents are right, too: Memorized knowledge isn’t half as useful as knowledge that’s actually understood.”

“The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system,” Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, wrote in Wired in 2010. “When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought.”

When we think of mobile education and how mobile technology affect our memory. There is no doubt that we have to be careful about the influence of the unending streams on our minds. When we are engaged in something that requires high-quality attention, we should attempt to conduct ourselves in a manner that is most appropriate for how our brain function: in focus mode.

Here are useful links to gain more insight about this topic.

How mobile tech can influence our brain

How Technology Is Warping Your Memory

When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning

---