logoalt Hacker News

giancarlostorotoday at 7:23 AM2 repliesview on HN

Smartphones I think did the most damage. Used to be you had to memorize people's phone numbers. I'm sure other things like memorizing how to get from your house to someone else is also less cognitive when the GPS just tells you every time, instead of you busting out a map, and thinking about your route. I've often found that if I preview a route I'm supposed to take, and use Google Street Maps to physically view key / unfamiliar parts of my route, I am drastically less likely to get lost, because "oh this looks familiar! I turn right here!"

My wife had a similar experience, she had some college project where they had to drive up and down some roads and write about it, it was a group project, and she bought a map, and noticed that after reading the map she was more knowledgeable about the area than her sister who also grew up in the same area.

I think AI is a great opportunity for learning more about your subjects in question from books, and maybe even the AI themselves by asking for sources, always validate your intel from more authoritative sources. The AI just saved you 10 minutes? You can spend those 10 minutes reading the source material.


Replies

zelphirkalttoday at 9:35 AM

About the phone numbers thing: I am now 35yo. Do I still remember the phone number of one of my best friends from primary school back then? Hell yeah, I do! These days though, I am struggling a bit with phone numbers, mostly because I don't even try. If the number is important, I will save it somewhere. Memorizing it? Nahhh... But sometimes my number brain still does that and it seems some weird pattern in the number. Stuff like

"+4 and then -2 and then +6 and then -3. Aha! All makes sense! Cannot repeat the digit differences, and need to be whole numbers, so going to the next higher even number, which is 6, which is 3 when halved!"

And then I am kinda proud my brain still works, even if the found "pattern" is hilariously arbitrary.

voidnaptoday at 9:16 AM

The worst part about smart phones is their browser/social media. Technically, even dumb phones like the nokia 3310 had contact lists so you didn't have to memorize phone numbers. And land lines had speed dial. And my family used a phonebook with a rotary dial telephone. It's not like people had memorized as many numbers as they now have stored in their telephones.