On a recent late afternoon, I was having trouble remembering. My browsing history for the day suggested I'd read over a dozen news articles, numerous

I outsourced my memory to AI for 3 weeks

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2023-01-24 18:30:07

On a recent late afternoon, I was having trouble remembering. My browsing history for the day suggested I'd read over a dozen news articles, numerous Slack messages, plenty of Twitter threads, and a bunch of notes for my next assignment. Yet, somehow, I couldn't recall much of it. I remembered some vague contours of the content I had consumed but lacked the details.  

That afternoon wasn't particularly special — a few days later, I struggled to recollect the details of a lengthy COVID story I had read during a conversation with a friend. These instances weren't some crises of memory, nor were they due to a head injury. I just had too much rattling around in my brain. No matter what or how much I read online, my mind can't help but forget it shortly after. I don't blame my brain, either. Most people consume an overwhelming volume of text every day — hundreds of thousands of words — so it's no surprise that our memories struggle to retain more than a few scant details. "Humans have worse memories than we think we do, and memory for text, in general, isn't great," Virginia Clinton-Lisell, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of North Dakota, told me.  

The internet only makes this brain-capacity problem worse. The online-reading experience is full of obstacles that prevent our brains from locking the information we consume into our long-term memories. When you read a book, things like page numbers and the physical ability to hold and turn pages help your brain make a mental map of the information the book presents you with. Websites, however, don't have those kinds of memory triggers. Because of this, multiple studies found that participants who read offline performed better in comprehension, concentration, and recall than participants who read online.  

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