“Googling has, arguably, made Millennials less able than any previous group of twentysomethings to retain information. Recent research suggests that they use Google as a sort of auxiliary memory. In 2011 a team of psychologists led by Betsy Sparrow of Columbia gave 60 undergrads a bunch of trivia (on the order of “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain”) and asked them to type all forty factoids into a computer. Half were told that the file containing these facts would be accessible later; half were told the file would be erased. On a subsequent test of memory, the ones who thought everything would be erased remembered much more. When they believed their document would be saved, Sparrow found, they didn’t bother remembering it; they figured they could always find it (or, as it’s called outside the lab, Google it) when they needed to.”

“Even though we tend to think about memory being all about the past, it is really all about helping us prepare for the future,”

“But books are never just books. They’re markers, totems, memory keepers.”

“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”

“Until recently, memory problems indicated a deficiency in personal character, a shortage of “ethics or humanity.” This outlook was a sign of the times: Informational scarcity fueled an ethos of individualism. Today, advances in technology and technique enable vast quantities of networked information to be stored and retrieved cheaply, simply, and reliably. Information abundance fuels its own ethos where interdependency and mediation take center stage. Go to a party and brag about your ability to recall contact information. Nobody will toast your commitment to swimming against the tide of memory depletion. Instead, folks will tell you and your antiquated sensibilities to get a life and a smartphone.”

“Forget about forgetting,” says Robert Bjork. “People tend to think that learning is building up something in your memory and that forgetting is losing the things you built. But in some respects the opposite is true.” See, once you learn something, you never actually forget it. Do you remember your childhood best friend’s phone number? No? Well, Dr. Bjork showed that if you were reminded, you would retain it much more quickly and strongly than if you were asked to memorize a fresh seven-digit number. So this old phone number is not forgotten — it lives somewhere in you — only, recall can be a bit tricky. And while we count forgetting as the sworn enemy of learning, in some ways that’s wrong, too. Bjork showed that the two live in a kind of symbiosis in which forgetting actually aids recall. “Because humans have unlimited storage capacity, having total recall would be a mess,” says Bjork. “Imagine you remembered all the phone numbers of all the houses you had ever lived in. When someone asks you your current phone number, you would have to sort it from this long list.” Instead, we forget the old phone numbers, or at least bury them far beneath the ease of recall we gift to our current number. What you thought were sworn enemies are more like distant collaborators.”

“But this idea that knowledge can be separated from facts - that we can know without knowing - really needs to be challenged before it gains any further currency. It’s wonderful beyond words that we humans can look things up, whether in books or from the web, but that doesn’t mean that the contents of our memory doesn’t matter. Understanding comes from context, and context comes from knowing stuff. Facts become most meaningful when, thanks to the miracle of memory, we weave them together in our minds into something much greater: personal knowledge and, if we’re lucky, wisdom.”