One evening this week, I went outside without my phone to water tomato plants. I stood there trying to gauge how long I was watering each plant and started wondering what life was like before smartphones. What did we used to think about and how differently did we used to live?
I decided to try and recite poetry I learned years ago to gauge the time as I watered the plants — poetry that in years past was easily accessible to my memory.
Not so fast, Buster.
Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" has rolled off my tongue since I memorized it in Mrs. Thompson's fifth-grade classroom. Standing there watering the tomatoes, no matter how hard I tried, all I could remember was the second stanza:
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love —
I and my Annabel Lee —
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
After I repeated that stanza a couple of times, I thought, "What about Romeo's soliloquy to Juliet?" Surely I remember that. Not only did I learn it as a ninth grader, but I listened to hundreds of ninth graders I taught recite it.
Foiled again.
I could get to the part about "arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon," but I couldn't get much further, which led me down a different path of concern.
Phone numbers.
I used to know dozens, perhaps more than a hundred, phone numbers. Granted, they were only seven digits then, but these days, I'm only able to rattle off two numbers by heart. (It was three, but the third, which belonged to my parents, has been rendered useless since my dad's death and my mom's subsequent move.)
Truth be told, I don't even know my office number. I have to look it up every time I need it.
I can figure out my older daughter's phone number by looking at a keypad (the last four digits of her number spell ORCA — she was really into killer whales when she was younger, and I was able to pick the number for her).
Much to my younger daughter's dismay, by the time we got a phone for her, the picking numbers feature of cellphones was gone. For the ten years she's had a phone, I have not been able to remember her phone number, even though I've tried. (As I've shamed myself writing this, I may have just found a word trick that will enable me to finally remember her number. Fingers crossed.)
The question is: What happened?
Unfortunately, research shows that my lack of memory probably has less to do with age than smartphone usage.
"If you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you’d likely end up with a smartphone," wrote Catherine Price in "How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life."
Price goes on to say that if you think this doesn't apply to you, "the more sleep-deprived people are, the more vigorously they may insist that they are not — possibly because their ability to judge their own mental state has been impaired.”
Her book has specific methods and tips on setting boundaries with phones for yourself and others. This example is a bit of tough love, but Price suggests if "you’re out to dinner with friends and everyone else is on their phones, try taking a photo of them on their devices and then texting it to them with a note saying, ‘I miss you!’”
Some researchers call the loss of memory tied to smartphone usage "digital amnesia."
Oliver Hardt, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, studies the neurobiology of memory and forgetting. Hardt says that we must forget in order to remember — that it's a part of life. However, he also believes the cost of the outsourcing our memories to smartphones, including GPS, could cause an enormous increase in dementia.
"The less you use that mind of yours, the less you use the systems that are responsible for complicated things like episodic memories, or cognitive flexibility, the more likely it is to develop dementia," he writes. "There are studies showing that, for example, it is really hard to get dementia when you are a university professor, and the reason is not that these people are smarter — it’s that until old age, they are habitually engaged in tasks that are very mentally demanding.”
Bottom line: I'm going to back off ye olde smartphone usage and start trying to remember phone numbers and a bit of poetry. Join me.
My favorite poem is Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay." I challenge you to memorize it on your own or with a friend. You say the first line. Your friend can say the second and then alternate through the poem's short eight lines:
Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.