Technology remembers everything for you?

In the CNN article “Do digital diaries mess up your brain?” the author is discussing whether digitally chronicling everything in your life is actually hurting your brain. The author first starts out with a few little scenarios. “The meal you ate the first day you started working. The first exam you aced in high school. The shoes you wore to the prom.” Do you remember these things? If you do, it is most likely because they happened to you rather recently. However, when you are fifty years old or eighty years old, will you remember the shoes you wore to the prom? I know I will because I had to get the smallest heeled shoe I could find because my boyfriend is only an inch taller than me and I did not want to tower over him too much and to top off the fact that I had to get small heeled shoes, which I do not like, they cost me one-hundred dollars! That is entirely too much money for shoes I do not really like and shoes I will most definitely never wear again. But the only reason I will remember the shoes is because something happened involving them. Who knows, maybe I will not remember them; I just think I will now. The article continues telling you about technology we have today that helps us to remember those minute details that happen in our lives. For instance, we have Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and blogs that will help us to remember what we were doing at an exact moment in our lives or what we were thinking or feeling and through pictures, what we were wearing. All of these technological devices help us to remember. Microsoft is even developing a new camera that will automatically captures photos of everything you see and do all day. They are calling it a SenseCam.
One of the many arguments that come with all of our technology use is it cannot be good for our brain to outsource daily functions to a piece of technology. However, that argument is contradicted in this article. According to David Bucci, associate professor of psychology at Dartmouth College, as long as your brain is being stimulated in other ways it is not necessarily bad to use technology. The examples given within the article say we no longer need to memorize multiplication tables or remember telephone numbers because we now use calculators and smart phones, respectively. However, it has never been proven that not remembering these pieces of information is actually hurting our brain. Contrary to what some people believe, Bucci believes learning to use technology is as good for your brain as say doing a puzzle or learning a new language.
It is said within the article that one day there may be a microchip that could be implanted in your brain to make external copies of your memory. If this technology is actually created, it is believed it could possibly help early-stage Alzheimer’s patients. Helping these patients see their own memory could add “another 10 years of cognitive life”, says Dr. Gary Small, director of the UCLA Center of Aging and co-author of the book "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind." A recent study from Small’s group at UCLA found that searching the internet for an hour a day for two weeks increased activity in key areas of the brain among middle-aged and elderly adults.
Another source within the article, Barry Schwartz, professor of social action and social theory at Swarthmore College, thinks “relying on digital documents, moreover, may take away from the learning process.” As a professor, Schwartz used to give take-home exams, allowing students to use any sources they wanted to help them on the test. He quickly realized students were not actually processing what they were doing on the test and they were not learning like he had wanted them to. This is when he quit the take-home exams and now only gives closed-book tests. "You can't walk around through life carrying all of your books under your arm," he said. "It's possible that these devices that people now rely on will discourage anyone from doing this disciplined learning that we always used to do."
It is also believed that if these documented memories are available for others to see, people may actually do things differently. "If we have experiences with an eye toward the expectation that in the next five minutes, we're going to tweet them, we may choose difference experiences to have, ones that we can talk about rather than ones we have an interest in," Schwartz said. I can definitely understand where Schwartz’s statement came from because if you know people are going to see you pictures on Facebook or your status updates on Twitter, you are much more likely to do something more interesting for personal gain.
One last important thing mentioned within the article is over time your memories start to become fuzzy but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Because you do not remember every little detail about your life, you can come up with a “coherent narrative” about what your life has been about. Being able to compress a lot of experiences and summarize them well is part of the very nature of human intelligence, said Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid."
After reading this entire article and really thinking about my personal views I had before reading this article, I think documenting everything about your life is not bad at all. I believe there is a limit to everything. I do not think you should rely on the documentations to remember everything by because just like Hofstadter said, being able to summarize your memories is part of life. I do not think you should have every detail memorized. But I think it would be a lot of fun to go back and look at things from the past and remember the experience and feeling associated with it. That is why I love taking pictures now, because they are something I can go back and look at later and help me to remember what was going on in that exact moment in my life.