Is it easier to remember information we read on a printed page rather than from a screen?
It’s
often been said that memory is like a muscle - exercise it and it gets
bigger and stronger - the more we remember the more we are able to
remember.
Many
of the features on the digital devices we carry today mean that we no
longer need to remember things in the way previous generations did.
Which presumably means our ability to remember is weaker too.
Is your phone smarter than you?
A
study published by the Telegraph and the New York Times in 2010 found
that 70% of people don’t remember their best friend’s phone number, 50%
don’t know their parent’s phone number and 90% couldn't remember one
single business phone number.
There
was a time when phones had big dials on them that turned very slowly
indeed. If you forgot a single digit you could spend an entire day dialing one person's telephone number, so you made sure you remembered
all the important phone numbers in your life.
Then
came phones with handy little key buttons, which were faster and easier
to use but still required that you know the number you were dialing.
When
phones went digital suddenly all numbers were stored and accessible
with a single click or tap and out went the necessity to ever remember
short sequences of numbers again.
The world in your pocket
The
ever growing features of handheld digital devices has had an impact
well beyond remembering your best friend’s number - or your own, come to
that.
How
many times have you been out with friends and found yourself unable to
remember the name of an actor in a movie or a song title? The name of
the restaurant you’re sitting in? How to calculate the square root of a
negative number?
No problem, you simply pull out your phone, search and in a few seconds the answer is in the palm of your hands.
The quid
pro quo for the quick and convenient ways we can access facts about
anything seems to be the flood of information that comes into our lives
via various social media platforms. Your stupefied memory confronted by a
whole world of trivial and vital news and information every minute of
every day.
Forget digital and remember print
Now
there is another aspect of our digital lives that may be damaging our
ability to absorb and retain information. Scientists are discovering and
analysing differences in how the brain interprets printed text and
digital text.
Researchers in the psychology department at the University of Leicester asked
one half of a sample group to read a number of economic text books on
e-readers and the other half of the group to read print versions of the
same texts.
The student sample groups were then asked the same questions about the texts they had read.
The
research team found that digital readers had to read the same
information several times to gain the same level of knowledge as print
readers.
Dr
Kate Garland, who led the research, explained that remembering is a
form of knowing “...something so well it just comes to you," by first
deciphering the context and then recalling the answer.
"What
we found was that people on paper started to 'know' the material more
quickly over the passage of time," says Garland. "It took longer and
more repeated testing to get into that knowing state with the computer
reading, but eventually the people who did it on the computer caught up
with the people who were reading on paper."
Neuroscientist Mark Changizi,
believes the physical space of print may also help with memory. Factors
like remembering whether you read something at the top or the bottom of
a page - or whether it was on the right or left hand side of a two-page
spread or near a graphic - can help cement information in the mind.
The age of forgetting
It’s
seems unlikely that the consummation of information via digital devices
is going to do anything other than increase. So does this mean we’re
going to lose our ability to remember?
Probably not. Alan Liu, chair and professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, says gleaning information from text isn't just biological or neurological, but social as well:
"Initially,
any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs
the balance between focal and peripheral attention... it takes time and
adaptation before a balance can be restored, not just in the
'mentality' of the reader, as historians of the book like to say, but in
the social systems that complete the reading environment."
Just
as the invention of the Guttenberg Press made the printed word
available to the public it also led the end of storytellers reciting
tales from memory and changed the way information was delivered and
received forever.
The digital age we live in is likely to have a huge
effect on the ways we process and manage information, personally and
socially.
How
we learn things has most certainly changed, but the digital information
age we live in means we all have access to a much wider range of
materials than ever before. The challenge for students and teachers is
how we utilise this to ensure learning experiences are still rigorous
but also better and broader.
Where
it takes us - will the effect on general mental cognition be positive
or negative - is open to speculation. But one thing is for sure, we are
living in an exciting and new information epoch - now where did I leave
my phone...
