New research reveals that relying on your phone to store information triggers the same neural pathways as deliberate forgetting, weakening your brain’s natural memory retention.
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Do you keep a list of reminders on your phone? You might be sabotaging your brain’s ability to actually remember what you need it to. A recent study by researchers at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London found that cognitive offloading—putting a memory into external technology—can actually have the same effect as deliberate forgetting.
Both cognitive offloading and deliberate forgetting led to a weakened neural trace of the to-be-remembered information compared with instructions to remember. The study’s findings suggests that when people rely on external technology to remember for them, it can lead to a shift in memory away from the brain and into the external world.
How was the study conducted?
Researchers examined the brains of 36 participants between the ages of 18 to 34 in an MRI experiment. Participants were shown two sets of pictures with each set having a sequence of faces or scenes.
Between the first and second set of pictures, participants received a cue telling them to either remember the first set because there would be a test, forget them because there will not be a test or offload them because a test would be accompanied by an external reminder.
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After viewing the second set of pictures, an item from either the first or second set was shown to the participant with the requirement of them recalling its serial position within its set.
Due to this, participants always had to remember items from the second set as it was always a possibility they would be tested on them in contrast to the potential of forgetting or offloading items from the first set depending on the cue they were presented afterwards.
Study Results
Researchers reached two main analyses. When examining the cues of remember, forget or offload, the offload cues created similar neural activity to forget cues. This suggests there is an overlapping cognitive process between the two.