[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/tech-gadgets\/your-smartphone-and-gps-device-may-be-the-reason-for-your-memory-loss\/#NewsArticle","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/tech-gadgets\/your-smartphone-and-gps-device-may-be-the-reason-for-your-memory-loss\/","headline":"Is your smartphone and GPS device the reason for your memory loss?","name":"Is your smartphone and GPS device the reason for your memory loss?","description":"That smartphone in your hand. It has increasingly become the personal assistant you reach out to for contact numbers, email addresses, information or even directions to get from point A to point B. While using external devices to keep track of things makes our lives easier, Dr Oliver Hardt from the Department of Psychology at […]","datePublished":"2022-10-07","dateModified":"2022-10-08","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/author\/editor1\/#Person","name":"Judith Tan","url":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/author\/editor1\/","identifier":57,"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/wp-content\/uploads\/Judith-Tan-100x100.jpg","url":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/wp-content\/uploads\/Judith-Tan-100x100.jpg","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"TheHomeGround Asia","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/wp-content\/uploads\/photo_2021-07-22-222533.jpeg","url":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/wp-content\/uploads\/photo_2021-07-22-222533.jpeg","width":640,"height":640}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/wp-content\/uploads\/Howe-Law-Firm.jpg","url":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/wp-content\/uploads\/Howe-Law-Firm.jpg","height":900,"width":1600},"url":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/tech-gadgets\/your-smartphone-and-gps-device-may-be-the-reason-for-your-memory-loss\/","video":{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"VideoObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j5xIOjGLrJo#VideoObject","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j5xIOjGLrJo","name":"The Power of Music | Catherine Loveday | TEDxLondonBusinessSchool","description":"What songs would you take with you to a desert island? Have you ever wondered why for some songs, you only need to listen to 1 second of it to immediately identify it? Even if it isn't a song you consider a favorite? Have you noticed how important music is to you, and how connected it is to your memories, relationships and experiences?\n\nThese are a few of the questions that Catherine Loveday, a PhD in the neuropsychology of memory, will answer after years of studying this phenomenon, including an in-depth study of the Desert Island Discs Podcast by the BBC. As a graduate of of the University of Westminister (formerly PCL) , Catherine began her career with a PhD in the neuropsychology of memory and ageing and continues to focus on the nature of normal and impaired memory. Catherine is an active member of the BPS, as Chair of the Psychologist Digest Editorial Advisory Committee and a member of the Research Board. She has a passion for public engagement with science and is regularly invited to give public lectures at festivals, community events and in schools. Catherine is author of \u201cThe Secret World of the Brain\u201d and frequently appears as an expert psychologist on BBC Radio 4\u2019s All In The Mind, as well as many other radio and television programmes. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. 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TEDx events are produced independently of TED conferences, each event curates speakers on their own, but based on TED's format and rules.\n\nFor more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request here: https:\/\/media-requests.ted.com.","logo":{"url":"https:\/\/yt3.ggpht.com\/1gDPO-4YPWFErfn3yQBnv0yxpkmiud1m5CrorApkOqUYdNd9FrZQ9xB9C9VmDt4EsgArnlwqAQc=s800-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj","width":800,"height":800,"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j5xIOjGLrJo#VideoObject_publisher_logo_ImageObject"}},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","@id":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j5xIOjGLrJo#VideoObject_potentialAction","target":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j5xIOjGLrJo&t={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"},"interactionStatistic":[[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","@id":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j5xIOjGLrJo#VideoObject_interactionStatistic_WatchAction","interactionType":{"@type":"WatchAction"},"userInteractionCount":2889}],{"@type":"InteractionCounter","@id":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j5xIOjGLrJo#VideoObject_interactionStatistic_LikeAction","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":60}]},"about":["Local","Singapore","Tech and Gadgets"],"wordCount":1369,"keywords":["Amber Yam","Apple Maps","Australia","Catherine Loveday","Chong Yao Feng","Chris Bird","covid-19","Gojek","Google Maps","GPS","Gutenberg","Hyundai Getz","iPhone","Jessinta Tan","Joshua Lee","Klaus Gramann","Maggie Chua","McGill College","Montreal","Moreton Bay","neurology","North Stradbroke Island","NUH","Oliver Hardt","Queensland","smartphone","University of Sussex","Waze"],"articleBody":"That smartphone in your hand.It has increasingly become the personal assistant you reach out to for contact numbers, email addresses, information or even directions to get from point A to point B.While using external devices to keep track of things makes our lives easier, Dr Oliver Hardt from the Department of Psychology at McGill College in Montreal said the constant use of external devices worsens our memories \u201cif we stop using it like we are supposed to\u201d.Memory researcher Catherine Loveday conducted a survey in 2021 that found that 4 in 5 people felt their memories had worsened following the pandemic since many used social media to distract themselves from during the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown, creating a greater reliance on smartphones.\u00a0Today, we use the calendar on our phones as reminders and take photos of important documents, allowing us to not use our memory, essentially outsourcing part of our memory to an external device.\u00a0While we were able to remember appointments, important birthdays, titles of songs playing on the radio and even contact numbers of family and friends, we now leave it all to our phones.While mum Jessinta Tan is starting to lose the ability to remember a laundry list of contact numbers, son Joshua Lee, 13, does not see the need as there is already a list stored in his smartphone. (Photo source: Jessinta Tan\/Facebook)A case in point is when former journalist Jessinta Tan was 13, the current age of son Joshua Lee, she could \u201cremember dozens of telephone numbers by heart and rattle them off from memory\u201d. \u201cToday, I only remember a handful, because I didn\u2019t want the hassle of retrieving pieces of paper on which I had jotted down numbers, or having to flip a hardcopy address book just to find a number that I needed,\u201d she tells TheHomeGround Asia.\u201cJoshua can remember two numbers for sure \u2014 his father\u2019s and mother\u2019s,\u201d she adds. Joshua says he did not commit his friends\u2019 mobile numbers to memory \u201cbecause there exists a contact list stored in his iPhone\u201d.Like Ms Tan, sales and operations manager Maggie Chua says she, too, could remember a list of numbers, ranging from her home phone number to contact number of friends when she was 15 \u2014 the current age of daughter Amber Yam.Among her friends’ numbers, Ms Maggie Chua (left) manages to remember only that of her best friend, while daughter Amber Yam, 15, only remembers her parents’ and grandmother\u2019s and not even her best friend\u2019s. (Photo source: Maggie Chua\/Facebook)\u201cAmber only remembers mine, her father\u2019s and grandmother\u2019s numbers but she cannot recall even her best friend\u2019s,\u201d Ms Chua says, adding that she can only remember her own best friend’s number \u201cbecause we call each other every day\u201d.\u00a0\u201cI am no good at remembering new friends\u2019 numbers,\u201d she adds.If we don\u2019t use it, we lose it\u00a0\u00a0The contact list is not the only convenience. The global positioning system or GPS is said to make people less geographically knowledgeable than they would be if they were using a traditional paper map.As drivers here grow more and more dependent on navigation services like Waze, Apple or Google maps, the brain actually stops \u201cdoing the heavy lifting necessary to create and maintain mental maps\u201d, turning drivers into what the Japanese call h\u014dk\u014d onchi, or \u201cdeaf to direction.\u201dMr Aaron Toh, who drives for Gojek, says, “The GPS app is convenient because we don’t really have to think. The app will direct us to the destination and as drivers, we just concentrate on the safety of driving and getting customers there in one piece.”A group of Japanese tourists depended on the GPS that told them they could drive from the mainland to nearby North Stradbroke Island. They were stuck when the tide came in. (Photo source: ABC News)And it is this “not thinking” that led a group of Japanese tourists going to North Stradbroke Island on the Queensland coast in 2012, to drive their rented Hyundai Getz into Moreton Bay. They were guided by their GPS which had forgotten to show there is a 14.5km stretch of water between the island and the mainland.Such instances were what German psychologist Klaus Gramann was looking into. The results of his research, involving new ways of giving directions, were published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2017.While there is no silver bullet for healthy ageing, medical experts agree that a key ingredient is keeping the brain active. Now if spatial navigation is an essential element to keeping mentally alert then the question should be why outsource this critical skill to our smartphones?According to Dr Hardt, \u201cthe convenience has a price\u201d and that price is the deterioration of your memory. He thinks it will get worse and \u201cpossibly lead to an increase in people with dementia\u201d.But neurologist Chong Yao Feng disagrees, calling \u201cthe risk of digital amnesia\u201d an evolving topic. \u201cThere is much that is still unknown and it is premature and a tad simplistic to conclude that smartphones and computers will impair our cognitive functions\u201d.No different from using paper and post-it padsProfessor Chris Bird from the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex says, \u201cWe have always offloaded things into external devices, like writing down notes, and that\u2019s enabled us to have more complex lives. I don\u2019t have a problem with using external devices to augment our thought processes or memory processes. We\u2019re doing it more, but that frees up time to concentrate, focus on and remember other things.\u201d\u00a0Prof Bird, who runs research by the Episodic Memory Group, thinks we use our phones to remember the kind of things most humans find difficult to remember. According to him, we take a photo of the parking ticket so we know when it runs out, because it\u2019s an arbitrary thing to remember. \u201cBefore we had devices, you would have to make quite an effort to remember the time you needed to be back at your car,\u201d he told The Guardian.\u201cIf we were to say that by \u2018outsourcing\u2019 memory work to devices, we are making our brains lazy, then often we \u2018outsource\u2019 memories by recording and writing down on notebooks. How different are those from relying or offloading to smartphones and computers?\u201d asks Dr Chong, an associate consultant with the Division of Neurology at the Department of Medicine in the National University Hospital (NUH).Concerns about \u201cdigital amnesia\u201d, or the potential of smartphone habits wrecking the \u201ccache\u201d of your brain are only the latest in a long history of concerns over the impact of \u201cnew technologies\u201d.\u00a0The ancient Greek philosophers worried that the development of writing would render people less likely to \u201cexercise memory\u201d. Similarly, concerns were raised when German Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press.\u00a0Some experts believe that outsourcing your memory to smart devices is no different from writing notes on post-its to remind us of appointments and things to buy at the supermarket. (Photo source: Windows Central)\u201cDespite these concerns, we are, today, taking both writing and the printed word for granted, and recognise how instrumental they are to the recording and dissemination of knowledge,\u201d Dr Chong says.He adds, \u201cIt is probable that, a century or two hence, future historians of the 21st century will be dissecting the effects of the use of computers and smartphones on humanity, and will debate about whether it had been a boon or bane overall. But what I think they will agree on is that these digital technologies would have become an inextricable part of their lives, in the same way as we do not question the existence or utility of writing or books in the year 2022.\u201d\u201cWhether it has a net positive or net negative impact on our lives is likely to depend on how we harness the technology, the context in which we use it, and how we use the mental resources which are freed up by the cognitive offloading afforded by these digital devices,\u201d Dr Chong says.RELATED: The impact of technology on caregiving in SingaporeJoin the conversations on TheHomeGround Asia\u2019s Facebook and Instagram, and get the latest updates via Telegram."},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Tech Gadgets","item":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/tech-gadgets\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Is your smartphone and GPS device the reason for your memory loss?","item":"https:\/\/thehomeground.asia\/tech-gadgets\/your-smartphone-and-gps-device-may-be-the-reason-for-your-memory-loss\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]