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EN
The generation that memorised phone numbers, addresses, and directions in their heads isn’t sharper than younger people, they simply built a kind of everyday memory that the world stopped requiring around 2007 and never quite replaced
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Silicon Canals
The people who can still recite a dozen phone numbers from memory aren’t cognitively superior.
This is what psychologists call cognitive offloading, and it has been discussed for a very long time.
The everyday memory that the world stopped requiring wasn’t replaced by a new everyday memory of comparable weight.
The pre-2007 bundle happened to include: holding numbers, holding routes, holding small facts about people, and holding a rough internal check on whether the world matched your model of it.
The generation that memorised phone numbers isn’t sharper.