Remember that in the previous chapter, something was mentioned about the doubling of information for the next couple of decades. This is a technological problem which perhaps only the digital world can solve and be responsible for. Remember, too, how it is correlated with what happened in the natural world for the past thousands, millions and billions of years. Every living organism has evolved from something that once was into something that is different today.
For example, horses used to have spread out toes, now there’s only one. Peppered moths were light-colored before, but with the pollution brought about by the Industrial Revolution they have mutated into dark-colored ones; another theory is that they developed dark skin tones to protect themselves from predator birds and to reproduce.
Cane toads in Australia have become bigger and developed longer legs. Because of their ongoing exposure to malaria, the presence of sickle hemoglobin cells in the people of Africa is considered to be a gene mutation which served to make them resistant to the disease. These are just some examples of how the changing nature of environment have altered and continues to alter the capacities of organisms out of necessity.
Our relationship with technology, however, seems to have created an environment which makes it hard for us to evolve along with the ongoing demands in this milieu. We want to make life easier by using technology. Instead of using our natural capacity to remember a to-buy-list, we write it on a paper instead. Worse, we encode it in our phone, which makes it seem all the more difficult for us live without using these digital devices.
The implication of the evolutionary theory in relation with the impact of data overload in the Information Age is that the human brain is supposed to develop qualities that will make it more accommodating to this volume of Information. It is supposed to develop the abilities that will make it easier, faster and capacitated to process more information.
And yet, it seems that among the living organisms that survived the Ice Age and every catastrophe that happened in the earth’s history, the human beings, of all species, invented a mechanism that relies on something other than the use of their innate devices.
The point here is that, despite this mainstream drive of people to rely on technology to make something easier, the individual who’s interested in becoming a better learner should make it his mission to go against this current, or perhaps, choose a different path. If you want to develop the habit of waking consistently at a certain time, then ditch that alarm clock and use your internal body clock instead.
Instead of your phone’s Notes or Reminders applications, use your brain and take a mental note. Is it feasible? Yes. If you can practically remember faces and their names, then you can remember the things that you ought to pick in the grocery or the list of activities you ought to do today. If you tried to start the habit of mental noting before but you kept forgetting, try harder.
You cannot say that you have a bad memory, that despite your attempts to remember, your memory fails you. There is no such thing as a bad memory; there’s only the kind of memory that is out of practice. Maybe, it’s really not the case that you kept forgetting, but you really did not register the information in the first place. Memory is permanent. If you remember something, it’s because it was stored in your memory.
Thus, doing cognitive exercises to strengthen your memory is important. Aside from keeping your brain active and formidable despite the natural decline brought by aging, a great memory will make you much more effective when learning something, in your daily activities and in anything else.
Learning is inseparable from memory. What you’ve learned is ineffective if you can’t retain nor recall the information or concept that you thought you’ve learned.