We can remember more things that matter by cognitive offloading

It’s been a while since the last Edaith dispatch as I’ve been developing the skills framework and the first publication. It’s about time for some feedback, so if you’d like to see it first and be part of creating something special then stay tuned 

This is The Brief focusing on essential skills and ideas to be future ready. It’s a merger of the former two newsletters. Each issue focuses on one topic to help better understand and develop the most useful, in-demand skills to thrive in work and life over the next decades.

If you signed up for my previous newsletters, thank you for your support! I’m working to raise the bar with the continuing evolution of Edaith formats. It’s a learning curve, so any feedback is always welcome to hello@edaith.com

Tina 

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Cognitive offloading

Offloading cognitive demands externally, whether digitally or on paper, frees up valuable working memory resources. With this freed capacity we can more effectively focus our attention and process critical information.

Although the speed and volume of communication and information flows in daily life has dramatically increased, our capacity to think remains the same.

In The Culture, a sci-fi series set in a post-scarcity civilisation, the author Iain M. Banks imagines humans relying heavily on advanced artificial intelligences known as minds to handle many cognitive tasks, such as information storage, retrieval and complex calculations.

Elon Musk was inspired by The Culture in his involvement in the co-founding Neuralink Corp in 2016. Neuralink is currently working on minute implantable devices inserted by robots that can interact with brain signals to treat serious brain diseases. The long-term goal is human enhancement or even symbiosis with artificial intelligence.

In the absence of access to brain-computer interfaces, we can improve the performance of our day-to-day cognitive capacities by cognitive offloading with technologies on hand and routine behaviours.

Cognitive offloading is any action to reduce the cognitive demand of a task. We do it almost intuitively already by writing important things down, adding appointments and reminders to our calendars, using note taking Apps, searching the internet to answer basic questions or using a calculator.

Over the past decade there has been a wave of academic research into the impacts of cognitive offloading, particularly in terms of our increasing cognitive offloading to the internet for finding information and our reliance on external memory aids via smartphones and digital devices.

Across studies it’s been found that cognitive offloading can help us remember important information and access information that would otherwise be forgotten.

 

> Cognitive offloading assists memory formation

Offloading can help improve our memory of important information by reducing interference with less needed information. This is because saving information externally provides a means to strategically offload memory to the environment, which frees up working memory, allowing us to focus and process target information more efficiently (Storm & Stone 2014).

 

> Offloading needs to be undertaken with specific goals in mind

Although cognitive offloading improves immediate performance, it comes at the cost of long term memory formation for offloaded information. This can be countered if memory is an explicit goal when offloading (Grinschgl 2021). Then full or partial offloading can be an effective tool for learning.

Although we can benefit from offloading, it’s only a useful tool if the medium with which information is offloaded is reliable and accessible (Sparrow 2011). The older we get the more useful cognitive offloading becomes because healthy cognitive aging includes a reduction in our memory related abilities.

 

 

References

Storm, B.C. & Stone, S.M. 2014. Saving-enhanced memory: The benefits of saving on the learning and remembering of new information. Psychological Science, 26, pp.182-188.

Grinschgl, S., Papenmeier, F., & Meyerhoff, H. S. 2021. Consequences of cognitive offloading: Boosting performance but diminishing memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(9), 1477-1496.

Sparrow, B., Liu, J. & Wegner, D.M. 2011. Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science, 333, 776-778.