Smartphone use improves your memory
We often think that our excessive phone use makes us less able to remember things. Fortunately, that turns out not to be true. Smartphone use actually makes us remember more. This is according to a study by University College London.
Neuropsychology
Neuropsychologist Sam Gilbert and his students researched our enthusiastic smartphone use. Is that really that bad for the memory part of the brain, or is it not that bad? Fortunately, it turns out to be just right. This is not about reminiscing, for example, but about tasks that have to be done in the future. Think of taking medication before going to sleep, or setting your alarm clock.
It’s called prospective memory, and it’s a memory that doesn’t necessarily work well all the time. That’s why people often make mistakes: ‘oops, forgot.’ 50 to 70 percent of the things that should linger in that prospective memory don’t. So it makes sense that we use our smartphones to remember those things. Whether you put them on a Trello board, use your phone’s alarm clock app, or put it on your calendar.
However, that’s not why smartphone use improves your memory: by letting your smartphone do it for you. To understand how it works, we need to explain how the research was done. 158 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 71 were shown circles. They had numbers 1 through 12 and they had to swipe those away as well. The circles were not the same: there were short-lived circles in different colors and circles that represented greater value (which people then made more money from). The latter had to be swiped to the left and the cheaper purple variants to the right.
Better remembered by your smartphone
They had to do the assignment sixteen times with different colored circles each time. Half of the time, they were supposed to rely on their own memory to remember which circle went where. But they were allowed to set reminders for the other half. Of course, people mainly put reminders on those valuable circles. However, the cheaper circles also turned out to end up in the right place more often with those people.
In the second experiment, reminders could also be set, but only for the circles that were worth a lot. Participants appeared to remember even better where the cheap circles had to go. An interesting side effect. What exactly does it mean? That reminders actually help you to remember the less important things. By setting the alarm to that one task, you already remember it anyway, but your memory also appears to have room to remember less important memories. It’s called cognitive spillover, so if you want to read more about it, you should look for it.
Mind you, this is only about memory, so smartphone use is probably not too good for your sleep, your stress level and your eyes, for example.
What do you think, does it really help, or were these people put in such a different situation by the research that it’s not comparable?
