On Memory Loss

There is a moment in life, usually when you are sixteen and you are wondering about the meaning of everything, when you first stop to consider who you are and what makes yourself you, what makes you different from the other seven billion inhabitants of the Earth. A nihilistic answer would say that there is nothing that makes you truly unique, that physics prescribes that nothing is created, and nothing is destroyed, and you are just part of an eternal wave of being. However, the very unique element that someone calls personality, others soul, others brain does constitute something incredibly special in its distinctiveness: a combination of genetics, what you are taught, the people you have encountered and what you have learned on your own. In other terms, barring the effects of genetics, we are the results of what we went through and of the memories we carry. What happens then if we willingly or involuntarily renounce to part of those memories by entrusting them to someone or something else? Does the freed brain capacity make up for the loss of information, however temporaneous it might be? My paper tries to explore these questions, in light of the bigger trend we are witnessing in society which sees a radicalization of the debate around the impact of contemporary sensibilities and consciousness on the analysis and interpretation of history.

Digital Amnesia

The basic assumption behind every evolutionary theory is that humans progressively lose non-fundamental abilities, acquiring different skills to respond to new needs created by the surrounding environment. The advent of technology and highly sophisticated storage mechanisms brought people in the XXI century to constantly rely on an outside source of information, a sort of external hard disk where people could store a backup of what is in their brains. If we keep this analogy, then our brains become a sort of RAM memory and by saving somewhere else relevant information we get to free up space for new materials and data. However, since the hardware is not within our brain but granted by a separate technological equipment, we essentially "give up" the information, forgetting it in the certainty that we can easily retrieve it, just by typing some words on our keyboards. This tendency to forget information that can be easily found online has been defined as "Google effect" or "digital amnesia", by psychological studies which have found that people are less likely to remember data that they are confident to be able to retrieve or access online.

The Google effect takes its name from the most popular search engine in the world, because it's where people usually go looking for information. Still, people nowadays rely on Instagram to store their pictures, Facebook and Whatsapp to remember their friends' birthdays and numbers and on well-being apps to monitor their health. However convenient this might sound, we are allowing ourselves to forget even things we would not normally want to forget and that amounted together can give a pretty accurate representation of who we are. It is then only natural to question what remains in our brains when we have given up so much information, confident in the fact that it is going to be stored safely for us somewhere else. Studies on the Google effect report that even if we are losing cognitive functions where memory is concerned, we are gaining abilities in information retrieval. It could be argued, however, that information retrieval is nothing else than the evolution of the statement "I am very good at looking things up on Google". We know where to search for the information that we forgot, we remember how to retrieve it and from where, like a folder in our laptops. Subconsciously, this increments our trust in our hard disks, we believe that the information we look for is there, true and objective, unaltered from our last visit.

The effects on society

If this status quo effectively represents part of our relationship with the net as individuals, by broadening the lenses we can witness the impact it has on society as a whole. Some studies have found that people tend to rely more on familiar information, therefore a person who reads frequently the same news will probably consider it as true. Considering how our data are analyzed and shared among different providers, when the memory the net has of us and our activities online is resurfaced, it will provide the information we are looking for, sometimes even without us asking. The persistent availability of content consistent with our expectations eventually reinforces our opinions and convinces us that any dissenting side either does not exist or is unreasonable; in the end, we lose perception of the nuances and each debate is polarized, particularly the moral ones. If social media are showing us a world constantly agreeing with us (and if we can just stop following the people who disagree), we start assuming that everything should be in line with our current sensibilities, even our history books, until the point where these feelings become so pervasive that we feel the need to take action, resorting to some form of personal vengeance and "canceling" what we don't like. In a modern interpretation of a damnatio memoriae, we rely on the idea that what is not online does not exist and end up forgetting that what happened in the past is part of who we are.

Conclusion

George Santayana wrote "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". The value of our memories is mainly in the effect they have on our present. If we lose that connection, we are losing an incredibly valuable learning experience, for ourselves and for future generations. Maybe, it would be time to start retaining some of our memories and make an effort to remember the power of our brain. In the end, we might simply want to avoid a future one-dollar bill to cite "In Google we trust".