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Some of you may remember the days when you actually remembered your friends phone numbers. Those days are long gone. I know my own, I don’t even know the ones of my family — really. Why should I?
Examples like these are often used by older people, admittedly probably my age, and above, who start to go on a rant of how this so called technology is making us more stupid, replacing our memories and the human race slowly become a gormless mass of people glued to their devices.
A brief look back in history though will see that we said the same of TV, and of radio, yes really, and of cars.
Over the years many people have asked this question and another recent paper out of the University of Cincinnati tries to give comfort on the matter.
What Anothony Chemero and fellow authors outline is that smart technology does change how we use our cognition but this is not necessarily bad and can often be beneficial. We may not need to remember the route to our holiday destination thanks to GPS but…
