Then again, it could be the other way around, more vague/less concrete memories of a topic make it much more flexible in the mind, less grounded in absolute memorized fact but more of a vague understanding which is more readily combined with other vague understandings simply because one isn’t stuck in a concrete well formed view.

Someone give me a grant!

Which is not to say if the research is true or false, good for us or bad for us, only to say that I’d be very interested in research which actually compared recall for information stored on line to information stored on paper (or in human form). This research isn’t comparative.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b012lj4m/Erased_Memories_and_Spotless_Minds/

See my post here: http://neurobonkers.com/?p=3329

and neurocritic on the matter here: http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-stroop-effect.html

Oh geez, that’s both depressing and validating at the same time. Great read, as always.

Now, we’re in a strange situation where bandwidth is so huge that we can download far more information than we can ever process. The real limits to our knowledge and productivity today are our attention capacity and processing speed, not bandwidth. I have wondered what skills people need to develop in order to deal with the world as it currently is.

I think that one of the most important things is to be aware that we need to set up some kind of attention filter, by being mindful of what media and information we consume. I don’t just mean critical thinking skills to avoid believing everything we read in newspapers or online, I mean like some kind of cognitive version of a spam filter in our email. For example, do I really need to read Mindhacks today? Should I be processing something more PhD related? There are several references in my PhD which I’ve found here over the years (e.g. the Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience paper) so I’ve decided its a useful if slightly random source of brain and psychology literature. My facebook feed is more spam-like however.

Another skill I could develop that would be massively useful to enhance my productivity would be speed reading. I have many friends who can read very much faster than they can speak, whereas I am stuck with an imaginary voice inside my head, processing words phonologically, (I think I remember more of the text than them though).

When it comes to memory, I have noticed my ability to track down the source, by remembering where to look, so the studies conclusions agree with my personal experience. I’ve also found that other external memory aids (like Endnote) make me feel as though my references are more organised *inside* my brain as well, as having them in groups by topic, and being able to recall them without error using the software makes me feel as though I’m consolidating my knowledge each time I do it. If I had to rely purely on my own memory recall abilities, I’d likely confabulate and form some slightly false memories over time, as Loftus and others have shown (I can’t remember what she calls these false memories, but I can remember her name to put into Google). No doubt, if I read one of her memory papers again it will be slightly different to how I am remembering it now.

I think external sources of memory are fantastic, seeing as we know quite how fallible and subject to change human memory really is.