One of the things that I most enjoyed when I came to this country was the travel with friends. Driving around in a structured environment such as lanes and highways was a brand new experience for me and the ease with which one could do it was even more exciting. Large books of maps from AAA was something that I was fascinated with and whenever I went to one of my close friend’s house, I would pick it up and start exploring it for long periods of time and literally commit to memory routes and places.

One thing that I was initially fascinated with was the TripTik travel planner from AAA, which had the whole trip planned out with folded pages of highlighted routing. Soon I began to dislike them. When you were traveling without these, there was an excitement about discovery and dynamic routing based on what you remembered. In addition, there was fierce competition amongst a few of us in the car for who had the most knowledge about maps and routes. You always used the books of maps in the car to subsequently prove that you had the superior routing skills. All of that vanished when you had TripTik, which was considered the expert opinion and therefore the best option.

This also resulted in me being really fascinated with problems such as traveling salesman problem and the minimal spanning tree algorithms (I submitted my completed program in record time for my data structures class!)

With the advent of GPS and Google Maps and Waze, I have completely outsourced this aspect of my life. I have also outsourced a significant portion of what I used to remember primarily to Google and some of the other technologies. It is true that aging also contributed to all of this and I am sure I am not the only one experiencing this.

This research article in Science by Betsy Sparrow perfectly captured the scenario I just described. “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”

As a youngster, my wife reminds me, I was pretty good at remembering things that I have simply lost interest and ability now. But I do remind her that I have always been strategic about what I wanted to remember. Whereas I have always remembered the tunes of many Indian film songs and classical music, I have always been terrible at remembering  lyrics. I used to explain it away by saying that “I can always look up the lyrics in books but not the tunes”. This is true because there were no written notations available for film music and for most recent classical music (things have changed recently). I am sure that this was an excuse because, it is just the way my brain worked, I believe…

Today, I simply use the technology wherever possible and the excuse is – it is so easy and simple, so why should I bother? I use Waze and Google Maps to get to where I need to get to. Despite the fact that I have worked at Wellesley for the past 6 years, I have no clue about the town of Wellesley and its surroundings. When my staff tell me “I live in…” I have no idea where it is, how far a commute it is. Sometimes I look it up on the map, but then I forget. Once upon a time, I would have taken great pride in suggesting routes that they can take to get to work faster.

I use the reminder function in Google Inbox or Google Keep for a variety of things that I used to remember with ease. Whether it is emails that I need to send to folks or bills to pay or even a trivial 3-4 item shopping list gets into one of these. And when an item or two don’t get into this list because my wife reminded me in the last minute, I often miss picking them up. I know that this results in the diagnosis of “early onset of Alzheimer’s”, but it is really the outsourcing issue and total dependence on these tools.

If I am reading a book or article online, I highlight the interesting sections and tuck them away and get to them if needed. In many cases, I have vague memories of what I read and where to find the details, but not the details themselves.

The unfortunate aspect of all of this is that once you are hooked, it is very hard to change the course. The brain cannot be void of information, right? So, what is getting stored instead, if anything? I am not a brain scientist to know, but may be that some of the trivial, nonsensical and irrelevant things are taking that place of what used to be stored.

Of course I am exaggerating things a little bit here, because I continue to remember a fair amount of things and function well despite this dependence and outsourcing. But this is a real issue and as with everything else, we adopt to our surroundings and such easy and constant access to information combined with the increasing use of artificial intelligence is going to have a definite effect on how the future generations evolve. Remember how we all used to do arithmetic calculations ourselves and how the calculators changed that?

OK, I have to go. Google just reminded me that I need to shower for 10 minutes, take my medications,  get on the car to drive to my appointment to make it on time based on the current traffic conditions and that on the way back I need to pick up some fruits (it did tell me which fruits are the best during this season) and milk in Stop and Shop in Middletown, CT. It also told me that the temperature this morning is in high 50’s and that I should wear a light jacket.