Smartphones may be the smart way to outsource your memory

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The smartphone may be blotting out our brains.

The conclusion comes from a new study which asked 6000 Europeans and 1000 Americans about things such as phone numbers they memorise and what they do when they need to remember a fact.

Among Americans, half said they would try to look up an answer online before trying to remember it, and 29 per cent said they would probably forget it again right after.

Europeans weren't quite so bad, but pretty similar: 36 per cent said they Google first and think later; 24 per cent admitted they would forget the Googled thing as soon as they closed their browser.

Across the board, everybody was obsessed with their smartphones: More than 40 per cent said their phone contained "everything they need to know".

Granted, you probably don't need a laboratory study or a large-scale survey to confirm a phenomenon you've observed yourself.

How many people memorise phone numbers any more? How many get around without consulting Google Maps?

But while it's undeniably true that we rely on technology as a sort of memory aid, the jury is still very much out as to whether that's a positive or negative thing. Your brain has only so much space to store memories -- rather like your phone.

This brings us to the spectre of "digital amnesia": the idea that our computers somehow hurt our memory. But when you remember that we've always stored memories, and that we don't have the capacity to remember everything, the phenomenon looks less like amnesia and more like prudent outsourcing.

That was, in fact, the conclusion of three psychologists who studied the "Google effect" in 2011: although their results were interpreted as evidence that Google makes us forget, the researchers themselves were more optimistic. "We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools," they wrote, "growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found."

The Columbia law professor Tim Wu has written what is perhaps the clearest defence of this development: If a time traveller from the early 1900s encountered a modern-day person with a smartphone and spoke to her through a curtain, what would he think? He'd be amazed by her ability to solve complex equations, to answer obscure trivia questions, to quote things in foreign languages. To him, she would seem like some kind of genius.