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Digital Amnesia: The Forgetting Society

How many phone numbers do you remember without having to check them on your cell phone? Thinking about your daily activities or need to program alerts to organize your day? Is the birthday of the important people in your life in your memory or do you use Facebook Reminders to send them a congratulatory message?

The sheer presence of digital applications designed to facilitate various tasks as mundane and routine in our existence, which consist, for example, of remembering someone’s phone number – and even our own, because it is not common to call ourselves – or gradually identifying an address It has generated such technological dependence that we consider It is difficult to save the data if it is enough for us to add it to the cell phone without the minimum mental effort that was previously involved.

The conflict comes when, for some reason, the source for storing that data is not available and required. Something similar happens with the raw information of the knowledge we used to force ourselves to keep in our memory, but that’s enough for today search on google, That is, add in the search engine the first three or four letters of a word or concept that we want to know, in addition to The Google It’s predictive, almost guessing our deepest thoughts when doing the research.

This is the experience of instantly forgetting information by entrusting it to digital devices, for it to be remembered for us. This act turns the mobile device into an extension of the brain. (Rosemary, 2017)

A study conducted around 2017 by the world-renowned security firm, Kaspersky Labrevealed that More than half of mobile device users in the United States and Europe could not remember the phone numbers of their friends and neighbors; 44% could not even remember the numbers of their relatives. Moreover, 79.5% of Europeans surveyed admitted that they use the Internet as a global reference book.

It also found that of all the people surveyed, more than 51% of North Americans and 40% of Europeans, especially women and young adults, realized that losing information stored on their mobile devices would cause them severe suffering. (www.cadenadial.com)

Psychologists call this phenomenon of amnesia digital amnesia or digital affect. The Google. According to experts, the concept refers to the tendency of people to forget information that can be stored on mobile devices or easily found by searching in The Google (You must have heard the now famous phrase “Ask the Saint. The Google“)

Something that seems to affect long-term memory, short-term memories and even, there are those who assert that this damage has reached intelligence. The fact is that this comfort zone means a decrease in retention, a decrease in attention and the absence of processing details, since data or information can be referenced at the required time.

Is it correct to believe that? alsolvidar is a form of learning that helps the brain to access important information more quickly? (Marin, 2022)

This is very similar to what we know as “selective memory”, which although science is not considered a type of memory per se, but rather a process that allows us to differentiate between that important information and those we choose to avoid. , it allows an explanation of this behavior. (Adsuara, 2020)

On the other hand, there are specialists who assure that this forgotten information has not really disappeared, but rather has become inaccessible. The above is based on the fact that memories are permanently stored in groups of neurons and the brain decides which ones to access and which ones are irrelevant, which promotes better decision-making. (Marin, 2022)

Regarding the quality of decisions based on this, it is advisable to approach them with caution, because although new technologies have distinguished before and after in cognitive processes, it is also important to maintain a healthy balance and exercise memory to prevent mental illness later on.