If something has an urgent effect on our survival, be it a snarling saber-toothed cat or a report for a fearsome CEO, we give it the focus and attention it warrants. Sustained attention on something moves it past the memory acquisition apparatus of the brain (hippocampus), and stores it effectively in long-term memory along with countless other mental artifacts, all of them colored with emotional perspectives.
Of course, today we’re given a lot more stuff to acquire, sort, file, and action, and we’ve barely started to ask ourselves how that’s changing our brain in the longer term. There’s little question that the constant bombardment of information in the modern age affects our ability to retain it in the short term.
Tony Schwartz, productivity expert and author of “The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working,” likened the brain to a glass of water when speaking to HuffPost: “It’s like having water poured into a glass continuously all day long, so whatever was there at the top has to spill out as the new water comes down. We’re constantly losing the information that’s just come in — we’re constantly replacing it, and there’s no place to hold what you’ve already gotten.”
Worse still, taking so much information in such a piecemeal fashion — the way digital technologies deliver it by their very nature — might further restrict our ability to put it all together meaningfully. As Dr. John Edward Huth, a physics professor at Harvard, writes in The New York Times: “Sadly, we often atomize knowledge into pieces that don’t have a home in a larger conceptual framework. When this happens, we surrender meaning to guardians of knowledge and it loses its personal value.”
Biologically, we evolve very slowly. The way we remember information today isn’t much different from when we still threw spears at woolly mammoths. The difference today is how much more information we’re exposed to. The brain was never designed to synthesize so much so quickly and effectively retain or discard it as needed.
Still, Dr. Stephen Peterson, the psychiatry chairperson at MedStar Washington Hospital Center reminds us that the Internet isn’t functionally different from what we’ve always done. “Our new ‘just a click away’ knowledge base is a tremendous plus,” he says. “After all, we’ve always kept lists.”
But he points out that the harder it is to acquire knowledge, the better the chance we’ll retain it. “Having to go through all the trouble to research something using the skills we developed prior to the internet certainly did involve us developing a changed perception about the importance of the information,” he says. The final major difference between silicon and biological memory is that while the former doesn’t need time off to work better when we need it, the latter definitely does (which we forget at our own peril).
With even more to take in, Peterson means we need to address our brain’s need to wind down and do the sorting exercise in its own time more than ever before. “Do whatever gives us relief,” he says. “Watch movies, read, exercise, shop, work in the garden, get proper rest. These common-sense solutions will help when the world gets too much for us.”
This article is updated from its initial publication in Brain World Magazine’s print edition.
More From Brain World
- All in Your Head? Why Some Memories Last a Lifetime
- The Art of Remembering Everything: A Q&A with Memory Champion Joshua Foer
- Coffee Could Boost Your Memory
- From Building Brains to Brained Buildings: An Interview with Michael A. Arbib
- Getting the Best Performance Out Of Your Memory
- You, Rewired: How New Technologies Can Impact Your Sense of Self
