• The first stage of the externalisation of memory was writing words, for instance on scrolls — now you only need to type a few key words in a search engine to find information. Picture: ISTOCK

  • The first stage of the externalisation of memory was writing words, for instance on scrolls — now you only need to type a few key words in a search engine to find information. Pictures: ISTOCK

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QUICK question for urbanites who own a car: how do you remember where you parked you car the night before?

You could memorise the street name and number, which is not very modern (prehistoric man already used his "internal" memory); you could take out a pen and write the address down, though that is so old media (writing and papyrus were invented more than 5,000 years ago); or you could take a picture of the parking spot with your smartphone. Not bad.

But you can get even trendier: downloading an app like Tuture that automatically remembers where your car is.

The deeper question is: how far will the externalisation of our memory go? Humans always used their creativity to devise solutions to save them effort. We have constantly subcontracted a part of the effort of our organs, like muscular work, to others (prisoners, slaves), animals (horses, donkeys) and then to tools or machines.

Memory did not escape this longstanding practice. "We’re living the third act of the externalisation of memory," French philosopher and historian of science Michel Serres declares. "First there was, in Mesopotamia in about 3,500 BC, the transition from oral to written communication, that allowed humans to transpose memory into codes, written words, on an external object, shelves, papyrus scrolls. Then, there was the invention of printing in the 15th century."

For Serres, the digital age we are living through has brought an extraordinary change on this front. "Writings, sounds, images — digital technology can save almost everything and spread it very quickly: half of humanity now has a cellphone."

Memorisation efforts to acquire and transmit knowledge have been drastically reduced. In the past, instructors from the oral tradition had to learn everything by heart; their successors from the written tradition were required only to remember where and how to find a book about any given topic. This effort is now unnecessary.

"Access to information is much better than the two previous revolutions: you only need to type some keywords in a search engine," Serres says.

This makes it tempting to entrust everything to "memory prostheses". A study conducted on 6,000 Europeans by Kaspersky Lab, a cyber security company, showed that 43% of the respondents from 16 to 24 years old believe their smartphone contains practically everything they need to know or remember.

Nicholas Carr, author of Does the Internet Make You Dumber?, believes that youth today suffer from "digital amnesia". This observation should be seen in relative terms. First, the experts’ views should be taken with caution, because they feel threatened by the current revolution, they tend to denigrate it.

"If the book was mostly a reading revolution, digital is a revolution that plays down the importance of writing for a large proportion of humanity," says Laurence Allard, a specialist in innovative communication practices. "So elites, who until now were the only ones to have access to writing and knowledge, are perturbed. Secondly, there is still a lack of perspective regarding the phenomenon of digital amnesia," says Allard.

"It’s important that we think about the impact of new technologies on education and children," says neuropsychologist Francis Eustache, director of French research unit INSERM.

Scientists do know that if humans want to remain social, keep understanding the world, stay imaginative and delay the effects of aging, they have to ensure their memory is functioning. "We should give children the time they need to read, learn poetry, sing songs … everything that constitutes our collective memory," says Eustache. "Otherwise, our society might lose common ground."

Memory is also essential to an improved personal life. "Children are capable of looking to the future when they can remember yesterday," says Michel Desmurget, a researcher at INSERM. "Memory is the indispensable foundation of intelligence and creativity: without it, great minds would not have established links between two pieces of information that had never been compared before."

But in addition to intelligence, critical minds and curiosity will remain essential, if only to sort the information proposed by the future’s memory props like connected watches and companion robots.

"Google organises knowledge according to mysterious algorithms: we have to provide our children with judgment skills and critical thinking that’s, sort of, the trademark of French education, inherited from the Age of Enlightenment," says Catherine Becchetti-Bizot, former director of the French Ministry of National Education programme, Digital for Education.

On the other side of the life cycle is another consideration: to stem the effects of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, researchers say it is important to stimulate the intellectual activity that calls on memory, known as "cognitive reserve".

New York Times