How’s Your Memory?

In this month’s issue, Wired asks the question: "Are our memories suffering from our reliance on gadgets?". I think it’s certainly true that, like a muscle that doesn’t get exercised, certain aspects of memory will atrophy. So, if you have a mobile phone with all your numbers in it, you are likely to rely on the mobile, and not your memory.

By way of illustration, my mother, right up until her death a few days short of her 97th birthday, had a prodigious memory for telephone numbers. She could recall telephone numbers with no problem. This was almost certainly the result of being a telephone operator in the 1920s. Her job exercised that particular "muscle" in her memory – number memorising and recall – and she never lost the knack.

On a related ability, Isaac Asimov wrote a nice short story about this called "The Feeling of Power". Go and read it. I learned my "Times Table" in school – we didn’t have calculators in my day. I wonder if the facility for mental arithmetic is quite so well-developed in the average schoolchild today?

(hat tip to Mind Hacks)