Are smart devices making us forget how to remember?

Gone are the days when phone contacts, addresses, anniversaries and birthdays used to be on everyone’s fingertips, but no more. Gradually, we are losing this fundamental brain function: the ability to memorise, retain and recall information when needed. Our brain has taken a long lapse, as this functionality has been outsourced to gadgets and smart devices.
Digital amnesia, also called the ‘Google effect’, is a state where we no longer feel the urge to retain stuff in our minds, as we believe that smart devices are here to the rescue.
Why do kids need to retain those multiplication tables and trigonometric stuff when calculators are no longer barred from usage at the secondary school level? Why do you need to remember your mum’s or friends' contact numbers when calling them is just a voice command away? You no longer need to burn mental calories while setting out on the roads, 'thanks' is a small word for smart navigation systems.
The crude reading and writing skills are being eroded as we have inbuilt autocorrect and AI prompts to ease off the brainstorming with spellings and vocabulary. Who cares for the spellings, contacts, city or outside city navigation, composing a creative invite, or just anything that can be handed out to the AI?
Partially, there is nothing wrong with letting devices take over your automation tasks, digital errands and repetitive workload.
Happens with many of us that we are unable to recall the name of some random person whom we met a few days ago, had a brief, friendly chit chat, or a simple query conversation. Alternatively, you had been through a clip of a podcast and thought to watch it later. You missed adding to the watch list and now recalling the podcast’s title or the host’s name becomes a deadly memory hunt.
The raised forgetfulness and distracted behaviour are signs that memory and consciousness are far left in the lurch. Instead of retaining an actual piece of information, we are oriented towards where to find that information. We have access to oceans of information online as well as our own storage seabeds full of digital dumps, but extracting the required one and retaining it is the real concern.
The review paper published in the Indian Journal of Mental Health on Research Gate states, “Because information is only a click away, we don’t feel the need to remember it as it can quickly be looked up online and our digital devices can store that information for us. Such reliance on digital devices prevents us from learning a new-skill. Consequently, there is no information input to be rehearsed; when there is no rehearsal, there is a quick decay of information, leading to nothing being stored in the long-term memory system”.
The case is not to demonise technology, but what measures are we taking otherwise to sharpen our memory and focus? Now on, take notes of important to-dos manually. Seems typically traditional, but handwrite your daily journals, instead of your device doing it for you. Install mind-bending word games or mathematics, aptitude-based puzzles, or an activity.
Substitute your mundane offline time with some puzzle books or fun quiz activities instead of mindless scrolling.
While digital systems aim to make life smarter, you have to keep working on making your brain smarter and sharper. Minimise technology wherever possible, try to remember basic everyday stuff and incorporate brainstorming exercises. Remember, technology is a human invention and humans are the top tier of creation, designed to lead the technology.