"‘Digital amnesia’, which the researchers define as forgetting information that we trust to digital devices to store and remember on our behalf, appears to be a problem for young and old alike, with 91.2 percent of respondents to a US survey indicating they “use the Internet as an online extension of their brain”.
What’s worse, our reliance on the all-seeing, all-knowing Internet is making us lazy too: approximately 50 percent of consumers surveyed said they would turn to the Internet before even trying to remember a particular fact, and more than one in four people are happy to instantly forget something gleaned from an online result as soon as they’ve made use of it."
http://www.sciencealert.com/digital-amnesia-on-the-rise-as-we-outsource-our-memory-to-the-web
And now even younger generations are using these crutches, like doing math using the calculator on their phones or asking Siri to remind them what the capitol of a certain state is, and then immediately forgetting the answer again.
“The younger generation, I think, is at a disadvantage because they aren’t using the memory skills that they need,” Vessey said.
They say simply choosing to go back to pen and paper could improve your cognitive skills dramatically and help you recall things like you used to.
http://fox21news.com/2016/02/08/digital-amnesia-are-smartphones-making-us-less-intelligent/
For Educators:
Blend learning modalities daily (visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), kinesthetic(moving), and tactile (touching).
Some researchers say to integrate technology into lessons no more than 55% of the time.
Don't forgo paper and pencil approaches
Require students to read hand-held books and passages that require longer periods of concentration.
Digital Amnesia prevents us
from learning how to remember
and it allows us to forget things more quickly.
Dr. Gayatra Devi, Neurologist,
Atlantic Health Hospital