Anagha Sainath Week #16: Outsourcing my Mind
It’s not necessarily that I’ve forgotten these things. Rather, I have technology to remember it for me. With all the information shoved into my brain on a daily basis, it can feel much easier to offload certain responsibilities onto my overflowing notes app.
My brain, which was once a sponge for important dates and scribbled to-do lists, has been offloaded onto the Cloud. My phone holds it all, after all. My midnight thoughts, my billion-dollar business ideas, my many password variations. Each time I forget something, I defer not to the supercomputer that lives within me but rather the ever-glowing screen at arm’s length. But with every note I offload, I wonder what exactly I’m losing.
My grandmother doesn’t check her phone before she tells a story. Her words are loud and messy, true and entrenched, occupying every corner of my soul. Her words don’t require a fact-check—they are well-worn paths that have felt a million footfalls. In
a way, I aspire to be like her—unburdened by the crushing weight of constant access to technology, untethered to a glowing box that contains all the information in the world.
Since my realization of how little I can remember of my own accord, I’ve made a conscious effort to reclaim my life from the depths of technology. I try certain memory techniques like chunking and peg words to ensure deeper memorization of key numbers or dates. Here’s another tip, in case you’re not ready to let go of your memory cues just yet. Try writing your information. Studies have shown that writing by hand creates a stronger association to the words you’re writing, showing increased brain activity in the regions that encode information and handle memories.
Ultimately, in a general sense, my advice to my readers would be to stop letting screens control their lives. It’s difficult to separate oneself from the ever-present pull of technology, but it is essential to try.
Hey Anagha! I found your blog topic really interesting. You very descriptively explained what you were trying to say and it made me rethink how I remember things. My Notes app was so full in fact that it started impacting my storage and I had to delete many of the reminders and random things I had written in there. Now, all that is left in that app is the most important information I need and nothing more. But, while I decluttered my Notes app, I remember feeling a sense of attachment to all of those notes as if they were memories. I felt like I was deleting memories, losing them forever, by deleting the notes from my app. I wonder what I forgot because of that decluttering. So, I can definitely relate to your feeling of “losing” something when you write it down in an app. With all the information jammed into my head, I sometimes wonder how I could possibly make more space for memories. I worry that I will forget them, prioritizing learning how to write Taylor Series rather than the time my mother took me shopping. As a result, I can connect to your final statement and it sticks with me. It made me want to prioritize time away from my phone and spend more time with my family. I really enjoyed reading your blog this final week and I hope I get to read more of your work in the future!
ReplyDeleteHi Anagha! Just today, I was looking through all my old messages, scrambling to find my locker combination so I could open it to return some textbooks. Yesterday, when I overslept and woke up from a nap at 3AM, instead of trying to think of a solution myself, I just asked Google what I should do. Your blog really made me think about how much I outsource my thinking in my daily life, and how much my phone is involved in my thoughts. It’s somewhat of a jarring thought, but the thing is, this is how everyone lives, so it seems normal. I feel like if someone from 100 years ago heard that we use Google to think and our phone’s memory to recall things, they would think we were some insane hivemind, and it’s actually amazing how this became normalized in society. I think I will try to reclaim my own thinking, even if it’s just in small ways like not immediately turning to Google when I have an issue or doing simple addition and subtraction in my head instead of always using a calculator. This was a really thought provoking blog, and I enjoyed reading it!
ReplyDeleteHi Anagha! I completely agree that screens are controlling our lives every day. I realize that instead of writing down any to-do lists, I automatically reach for my phone and set a reminder. With all the information that we learn about and are expected to retain, I also realize that it has made me less mentally sharp, meaning that I feel as if my memory power is lower since I have just resorted to typing reminders or immediately writing down notes on my notes app to refer to later on rather than physically writing these to-do lists or tasks down. I really appreciate how you have discussed how addicted and dependent we are on technology because in this day and age, we often forget the "old way" where we write down everything we need to remember. I definitely agree that trying more memory games helps our brain work more efficiently and helps grow our memory power, which I hope to eventually integrate into my routine so I rely less on technology.
ReplyDeleteHi Anagha! I really connected with what you said about how authenticity makes presentations more engaging. It reminded me of a video I saw on Instagram where a presenter asked participants to speak for one minute with no prep and no script. Then, he gave them a transcript of what they said and had them present again by reading it. The difference was super noticeable—the second time, the tone, flow, and overall vibe were totally off. It shows how much more natural and powerful we sound when we're just speaking from the heart.
ReplyDeleteAlso, your point about being intentional with how we show up made me think of something kind of unrelated but still connected. My dad is always harping on keeping my passwords off my phone in case it gets stolen or I get hacked. It's kind of annoying because he keeps repeating it, but he definitely has a point. It's just so hard to break out of the convenience of having everything laid out for you—but that convenience could just as easily be laid out for a stranger.