I cannot help but imagine our world spinning into a land of sputtering, fact-less people with internet-access on hand to aide in facts that may come up in any type of intelligent conversation. Without memory of direction, history, and so on we would zombie around until a GPS system or the internet malfunctions and we are shaken from our trance to remember...remembering--whoa, what a concept. Yes, I know this is outlandish. But it makes me think is memory like a sport, in that if we don't practice, we lose our ability?
I worked and still volunteer for an Alzheimer's non-profit organization, and several studies have shown that keeping your brain moving--puzzles, daily conversations, reading, decrease in television consumption, and exercise, can possibly help prevent the on-come of Alzheimer's Disease. So does letting a brain become stagnant teach it to stay dormant?
The article below explores different aspects of memorization and how it may affect our world:
I knew I worked those word jumble puzzles for a reason. Memory is a somewhat tricky operation of the brain. As we get older, it does become more difficult to transfer information from short-term to long-term memory, which explains why I forget foreign phrases shortly after I hear them. I find that I remember more easily if I 1) repeat the information in several classes over two or three years, 2) write down what I want to remember (the extended mind?), and 3) link the new information to something already important to me. In that regard, humans will never lose the capacity to remember, because we will all have information which meets one of the three above criteria.
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