I no sooner accepted the meeting notice for a public training event in Europe that my mind began to race. The dates were setting off bells in my head for some reason so I pulled out my cell phone and checked my calendar.
The only thing now scheduled for those dates were the training events in Europe yet for some reason I still could not let go of the thought that I had something else scheduled for those dates.
Damn this cell phone anyway! For the first 40 years of my life I was somehow able to keep my calendar year stored in some little compartment in my brain. Doctors’ appointments, meetings, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, vacations, my kids sports and school activities; you name the date and time and I could tell you if I was busy or available.
The computer age was supposed to make life easier. Just enter the events in your calendar as they come up and with a couple taps of your fingers you can see a week, a month or specific date and time. Yep, technology will save us all! It will keep track of dates, expenses, files, contacts and phone numbers.
Yet somehow I miss the days when I had the phone numbers of all my important contacts (Wife, Parents, Kids, Siblings, Aunts, Uncles and Friends) all stored in my head. Today I know my wife’s phone number and my parents land line.
Has the use of technology caused that once active part of my brain to somehow become lazy?
I once read that Albert Einstein didn’t believe in memorizing phone numbers. That he believed that memorizing facts that can easily be found in a book was a waste of the brains storage capacity. If this is truly the case we all have a bunch of unused capacity lying around in our brains waiting to learn more or make some kind of connection that results in a fantastic idea or invention.
What I do know to be true is that invention is not going to come from my brain this morning because I know I had something else scheduled for the first week of March in 2016 and I just can’t stop thinking about it.
I’m convinced my pre-technology brain would have sorted this problem in a millisecond. My post technology brain… well it relies on my cell phone and if one forgets to hit enter it has no recall whatsoever!
Some might say I’m just getting old, I prefer to blame technology!
This is actually a really interesting idea that I’ve thought about before. Especially now that we’re in a time where most things can be googled, a lot of things that we would otherwise memorize are forgotten until the next time we need to look them up. Just knowing that we have the ability to look up whatever we need to know takes away from some of the motivation to remember things, which is unfortunate. I make an effort not to use technology as a crutch but it can be difficult not to at times.