Ask Lemmy

The faces of our fathers.

I know about 4 phone numbers by memory:

1. My childhood home phone
2. My childhood best friend’s home phone
3. My cell phone
4. My ex-wife’s cell phone

Two of those numbers no longer work, so if I ever go to jail there is only one person I can call. 😬

Good idea to recognize, but bad examples.

The issue isn't even using devices to replace cognitive functions. That's anprim shit, I'm not gonna do 5 digit numbers on my head, imma use a calculator, especially if it's something important or there are stakes to getting it wrong.

The issue more than anything is agency.

I memorized my friend's phone number. It's because she's a lawyer, and that seems like a good number to have memorized.

Bus numbers and it's connections. Growing up in a metropolitan Asian city, I enjoyed taking buses everywhere. To school, to grandparents place, to friend's houses, to friend's grandparents houses etc, I could give routes that went through posh neighbourhoods, or food recommendations along the routes.

It was my super power before Google maps came along 🥲

That’s entirely up to you. Do you not have phone numbers for your main people memorized? I also have my library card memorized. This level of memory work isn’t rocket scientist level functioning, it’s a choice.

Do you really want to be in a hospital, after a car accident, with no phone (destroyed/lost in crash), and have no idea how to call your parent, spouse, or child? This occurs more often than you’d think.

Stored phone numbers and GPS sre reliable though. I never remembered most numbers or birthdays anyway due to ADHD, so those being easily accessible was a benefit.

GPS directions also include construction and more accurate time estimates. I never learned alternate routes because remembering the ones I knew was enough effort and I still learn those. Going to new cities is way easier now!

I continue to remember phone numbers and birthdays. No Google or Facebook for me and I'm waiting for the AI bubble to pop.

Edit: GPS, I thought you meant Google play services. I do use an offline map on my phone if I'm going to an unfamiliar area but I have no problem reading a map.

This is /possibly/ part of a long term trend of decreasing human reliance on brainpower.

Brain size doesn't neatly correlate to intelligence, but it's still kind of used as a proxy, over human evolution. It gets bigger for a long time, then starts getting smaller again, starting maybe 20k-3k years ago.

This has been attributed to group size, agriculture, writing or statistical error. So maybe it's not a thing.

In the year 2525

Except for those that are closest to us, we never would have remembered any of those things anyway; all of it would have been written down in an address book. Now the address book is digital, and is part of an LLM for some reason (selling your data).

If smart glasses with heads-up displays become normalized, you will eventually have married couples that don't remember each other's names.