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Here’s a question that will only make sense to readers of a certain age: What was your childhood telephone number? I’m guessing you had no problem rattling that off despite not having dialed or recited those digits in decades. If technology were truly killing our memory, then surely this useless bit of information would have faded away long ago. But I submit that modern human beings have the same memory capabilities we’ve always had; technology is merely redefining how we choose to employ them.
To understand what’s going on, we must first become acquainted with the structure of memory. In its simplest form, memory can be understood as a three-step process: first we encode information in the brain; then we store that information in the brain; and finally, we retrieve that information from the brain. From each of these steps, we can learn something interesting about ...
