Jim Davies looks at research into how cognition is distributed throughout the brain – and throughout some of our devices, too:
Think about how many memory aids we use: We jot down phone numbers, and keep count on our fingers. Cognitive scientists Wayne Gray and Wai-Tat Fu showed that using these aids is not very different to remembering facts and figures ourselves. They gave participants a task which required access to a lot of information while varying the difficulty of retrieving that information from a computer screen. They found that the participants decided between using the screen and their own memories in a way that minimized the effort involved, without privileging one source over the other. This suggested that externalized knowledge is accessed like any other memory, and that we treat “memories” on a computer screen just like memories in our head. Something to keep in mind the next time you wonder whether your phone is making you smarter or stupider.
Meanwhile, Clive Thompson considers how the “elderly have long been masters of devising clever tricks to compensate for mental failings, turning objects all around them into cognitive props”:
Medicine might be left on the kitchen table, its presence there a daily reminder that pills need to be taken. To-do lists on Post-it notes serve as scaffolds for their memory. If you’ve already lost cognitive function, and brain training can only go so far, you find other ways to cope. It might very well be that equally promising technology for our brains will augment rather than improve them. Already technology firms are developing methods to help the elderly by offloading memory and cognition, creating digital tools more sophisticated than oversize purses. The company Vitality, for example, has created GlowCaps, pill bottles that track when they’ve been opened. If users forget to take their pills on time, LEDs in the bottle cap might light up as a reminder; if it goes unopened for hours, the bottle sends an alert by email or text. A 2010 trial found that users of these smart bottles had a 98 percent rate of taking meds on time, compared with 71 percent in a control group.
The Dish 