Oh dear! My suspicions are confirmed…
A study from Fairfield University, Connecticut, has shown that taking photographs prevents us making memories of the thing we’re snapping!
People in the study remembered more about their museum visit, the fewer photos they took! Memories are made of this? Maybe not!
Having been primed by an article in New Scientist that far from becoming more intelligent, we seem to have reached a peak, and are perhaps experiencing a down-turn, we watched a film called Idiocracy this week. All a bit daft, but imaginatively done: a couple of ‘average’ people find themselves fast-forwarded 500 years.
The story is about what could happen to us and the world too, if we continually rely on external devices to entertain and inform us – and it doesn’t exactly make for a compelling future!
Whether we need to memorise information at all any more is hotly debated, now that so much information can be stored and accessed via the mobile ‘phone in the palm of your hand.
Perhaps our brains are no longer just in our heads?