Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner—and his colleagues Ralph Erber and Paula Raymond—first began to systematically explore “transactive memory” back in the ’80s. Wegner noticed that spouses often divide up memory tasks. The husband knows the in-laws’ birthdays and where the spare light bulbs are kept; the wife knows the bank account numbers and how to program the TiVo. If you ask the husband for his bank account number, he’ll shrug. If you ask the wife for her sister-in-law’s birthday, she can never remember it. Together, they know a lot. Separately, less so.
Wegner suspected this division of labor takes place because we have pretty good “metamemory.” We’re aware of our mental strengths and limits, and we’re good at intuiting the memory abilities of others. Hang around a workmate or a romantic partner long enough and you discover that while you’re terrible at remembering your corporate meeting schedule, or current affairs in Europe, or how big a kilometer is relative to a mile, they’re great at it. They’re passionate about subject X; you’re passionate about subject Y. So you each begin to subconsciously delegate the task of remembering that stuff to the other, treating one’s partners like a notepad or encyclopedia, and they do the reverse. In many respects, Wegner noted, people are superior to notepads and encyclopedias, because we’re much quicker to query: Just yell a fuzzily phrased question across to the next cubicle (where do we keep the thing that we use for that thing?) and you’ll get an answer in seconds. We share the work of remembering, Wegner argued, because it makes us collectively smarter.
that’s an interesting article!
i never worried that technology was eroding my memory. i already knew my memory sucked, and having to remember things cut down on brainspace i could use for things i’d rather think about. knowing i can easily look something up frees me to use my personal memory on things a computer can’t help me with.
Yeah, I’ve known I was relying on the internet to be my backup brain for a while now, since I feel so gutted and uncertain when I can’t access it. But what’s really cool to consider is the part where humans are really good not at remembering information, but remembering where the information is. Like, we cache and store information. We let a partner or a book or the internet store something we need to know for us so we don’t have to drag it around, but we’ll still be able to go dig it up when we need it, and it’s not an acorn or a piece of meat, it’s knowledge. How cool is that?
reblogging again because yes that is incredibly cool and i never thought of it that way
Is Google Wrecking Our Memory?Nope. It’s much, much weirder than that.
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