Programmed to forget

If you don't use it, you lose it - that's the message from experts and lobby groups who warn that the use of computers is damaging both memory and imagination, reports Haydn Shaughnessy

The next generation of computers will be found in our clothes, perhaps even on our skin, according to Luis Rodríguez Roselló, director of the European Commission's future technologies research and development programme. They will also be found in just about every component of every product that moves around the globe. The EU is betting its next generation of research euros on what it calls the GRID, a global network that connects computers which reside in everything and on virtually everybody.

But sceptics warn that the computer's influence has already gone too far and that its negative effects can be witnessed in the anti-social behaviour of the attention-poor generation that prowls the Saturday-night streets. The doubters argue that computers have a peculiar mental effect: apart from being omnipresent, there is also their gradual encroachment on the human capacity to remember and, as a result, on the capacity to build and maintain social values.

Surveys in countries with high computer use show a consistent drop in adult and child memory capabilities. For example, in the US, where even two-year-olds are now using computers, the majority of people can't remember the name of the president who ordered the atom bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima. The majority of British people don't remember the name of their constitutional document, the Magna Carta.

On the face of it, a decline in this type of knowledge might simply be attributed to poor teaching methods or changing priorities in the curriculum. Not so, say educators such as Prof Stephen Bertman, author of Cultural Amnesia, a treatise on the dangers of forgetting. He describes memory as a social activity in which the failings of individuals reflect a decline of collective values.

In the real-time "now" culture of the 21st century we no longer have, as Bertman puts it, the luxury to contemplate, nor do we prize contemplative activities or the sensibilities that go with them. We are using computers as surrogates for the brain and, inevitably, when the brain, particularly the memory, doesn't have to work, it atrophies; the wires rust. But more than that, the power of imagination declines.

Computers, according to the Alliance for Childhood, a lobby group with chapters in the Americas, Europe and Asia, squeeze imagination out of the learning process. Teaching now focuses on enabling children to get machines to retrieve facts rather than on fostering childhood imagination.

These theories have a scientific legitimacy. Memory, scientists now know, operates like a series of transactions in the brain. New information is dealt with in an area called the hippocampus. The hippocampus allocates facts to different parts of our long-term memory. Accurate recall depends on finding the right stimulus to remind the hippocampus where exactly the information is stored. We each need to understand what works as stimuli for us, and the whole process takes practice.

Why bother? Because, argues Bertman, the link between social values and memory is essential to civility and cultural progress. The two are intimately bound up with artistic imagination.

The late historian, Frances Yates, in her book, The Art of Memory, pointed out that an artistic imagination began historically with the need to remember. Like Bertman, Yates was a classicist who read widely in ancient Greek philosophy to understand the origins of modern ways of thinking. She traced the link between artistic imagination and memory to Greek poet Simonides.

Simonides developed a system of memory and recall based specifically on the architectural structure of buildings. Like artists in many primitive cultures, he externalised the workings of the memory. The rooms and partitions of Simonides's building acted as categories for information. For example, a bedroom might be the surrogate for information about warfare. This link would then be made memorable by the extreme images associated with it, perhaps a grotesque beheading (imagery relevant to today). Simonides's structures and images acted literally as the building blocks of human memory, and as the first categorisation systems, the equivalent of today's Yahoo. Through them, memory, imagination and art became intertwined.

Yates speculated also that Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was designed in part to reflect the techniques of visualisation taught by Simonides. The Shakespearean actor, treading the boards, had in front of him the architectural associations that Simonides said were essential to memory. Shakespeare is known to have associated with memory experts, and his puns and jokes are typical of the memory devices in use before writing was widespread, techniques reprieved by Joyce in Ulysses.

In other words, in literature as well as in visual art, the external world of images and words are ways of helping us to make life memorable. In using the computer as a memory surrogate, a question arises: are we killing off artistic sensibility? Imaginative memory was a highly prized human faculty in antiquity.

Augustine (354-430AD) wrote: "I come to the fields and spacious places of memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses."

The American chapter of the Alliance for Childhood, whose members include academics and policy advisers, is campaigning to curtail computer use in schools so that children can get back to traditional forms of education whereby they use their imagination and interact more with each other.

Nobody, says the Alliance, has yet investigated the effect of computers on the structure of thought, even though governments across the world have moved to install them in every classroom. In the absence of research into the negative impact of computers, they say, we need at least to be conscious of the dangers of learning through them, especially as computers are increasingly used in the classroom.

Personal signals: Memories are made of this

When people remember, we use an area of the brain called the hippocampus, which transfers short-term memories to long term. This also acts as a signalling system that, having allocated memories to particular areas of the brain, processes signals to retrieve them.

The signal or stimulus for retrieval is personal, but it might be by association - a tune, a sight, a smell or a metaphor. The hippocampus has been shown to function through reducing the detail of what we need to know, so working out personal categorisation systems as well as associative thinking helps retrieval.

Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century Dominican monk and mnemonic expert, was burned at the stake for his views on memory. He, like Simonides, developed intricate metaphorical systems to aid recall. Here are a few safer techniques.

Entertaining complexity: Listening to complex music has been shown to improve mental capacities. Children who listen to Mozart before exams enjoy improved test performances. Virtuosity and memory appear to be linked.

Association and visualisation: These are watered-down versions of Simonides's techniques. The principle is to find physical structures, colours or patterns that you can use to associate with categories of information.

Grouping: When a list is being memorised, the first two items and the last two items on the list are usually the easiest to remember. Therefore, breaking long lists down into smaller lists actually makes it easier to remember the total volume of information.