Program: 03 | Brain Rot: Is tech making your memory better or worse?

Ange Lavoipierre: Occasionally you see a meme so devastatingly accurate that it feels like a personal attack. There's one in particular I think of at least twice a week. It's of this elderly lady and she's sitting in a rocking chair with a vacant smile, staring directly into my soul. And superimposed in hot pink text are the immortal words:

“And to my great-grandchildren I leave 42,567 screenshots.”

Now I may not have great-grandchildren or even regular children … but in every other respect I am powering towards this future.

James Bullen (In Studio): What's it looking like? What's the damage? 

Ange Lavoipierre (In Studio): How do I even... Oh, yep, the number just jumps right out. So I have 34,561 photos and counting. Oh my gosh. On this phone. Wow.

Ange Lavoipierre: The woman in the meme is me and I am her. Together we're Ange Lavoipierre, the ABC's national technology reporter. And this is Brain Rot, a series from Science Friction about how tech is changing our brains. Today in episode three …

Julia Soares: There was a lot of concern about the extent to which people are kind of dumping our memories into these devices.

Ange Lavoipierre: Between the screenshots, phone notes, apps to monitor our behaviour and AI, we are trusting our brains with less and technology with more.

Max: I monologued to chat GPT. I data dumped my entire life into this language model.

Ange Lavoipierre: We're Googling things we used to know, documenting moments we used to remember and cataloguing things we never used to care about. You know, like our step counts. So much so that it's transforming how we think.

Max: When I would read back the memory to myself, it would kind of jog my memory, so to speak. It was like going from grayscale to technicolour.

Ange Lavoipierre: So could the act of delegating tasks to tech ultimately free up space on your own hard drive for bigger and better things? Or is this a case of use it or lose it?

Julia Soares: So I have a couple of studies where we've found that taking photos can impair memory.

Vox Pop: I feel like it's a safety blanket at the moment. That if I didn't have it, I'd suddenly be like, oh, I need to remember to do this thing. And like, oh, let me look that up.

Ange Lavoipierre: Today on Brain Rot, are our brains getting weaker when tech does our thinking for us?

(Music)

Ange Lavoipierre (In Studio): How much are you hating that I've made you do this?

James Bullen: No, it's no stress. Although I don't … (fades).

Ange Lavoipierre: This is Brain Rot's senior producer, James Bullen. And James is pathologically kind, so he would say it's fine. But the task is genuinely an uncomfortable one. We're surveying the extent to which we've each outsourced the task of remembering to technology, starting with the photo libraries on our phones.

Ange Lavoipierre: How bad is yours?

James Bullen: Well, I'm kind of at the opposite end of things. I recently took five years of photos off my phone and organised them by folder and month in a hard drive.

Ange Lavoipierre: Right, which is why you're producing this podcast and I'm not. Okay, so I'm way worse. You can't see, but my thumb is just like going full time here, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. My life is literally flashing before my eyes. There's outfit checks, 15 photos of the same rock, a fountain I was particularly taken with, apparently, exes I had completely forgotten about until right this second, at least 600 of my nephew. I'm pretty sure I haven't deleted anything since 2013.

The first photo really is me eating crab with gloves. Like I've got a bib on and I'm eating crab out of a bag. I mean, sure, I'm glad I took this photo, but this is the first time that I've looked at it since I took it.

James Bullen: In 12 years or so? 

Ange Lavoipierre: 12 years.

James Bullen: And how many of these do you think you've looked back on before today?

Ange Lavoipierre: Of the 34,000, I reckon I would be lucky to have looked back at 500 of these. So like one in 70 has ever like served a purpose after I captured it. If I search screenshots, it tells me that I have 7,100 screenshots in here.

James Bullen: 7,100? Why?

Ange Lavoipierre: Um, I just like the number. No, I don't know. I guess I'm kind of a hoarder. I just can't bear the thought … I cannot bear the thought of forgetting a single thing. And maybe, yeah, this is my way of trying to prevent that.

(Music)

Ange Lavoipierre: In my defence, the way I'm dealing with that problem isn't new

Julia Soares: We've been remembering alongside external aids for all of time. You know, there were controversies about written language, controversies about the prevalence of the printing press.

Ange Lavoipierre: This is Dr. Julia Soares, an assistant professor of psychology at Mississippi State University. She studies the impact of new technologies on memory. And while the human habit of capturing moments in time is literally ancient history, things have escalated lately.

Julia Soares: We are increasingly surrounded by objects that we can use to record information, to save a host of information, way more information than we've previously been able to. And it's really a change in scale. Smartphone devices have really made it possible for us to access thousands of photos, social media posts, and of course, internet search, literally at the tips of our fingers.

Ange Lavoipierre: Historians would say we're currently in the information age and have been for about 80 years. But in the mid-2000s, as the pace of technological change really got going, a new field of research sprang up.

Julia Soares: There was a lot of concern about the extent to which people are kind of offloading the responsibility of remembering onto our digital devices and the internet and concerns about the extent to which we might be sort of dumping our memories into these devices and concerns that we might not be remembering things as well.

Ange Lavoipierre: It's not just our memories Julia is worried about. Right around the time the word Google became a verb, the same researchers started asking whether our learning and cognition was suffering too.

Julia Soares: So people talk about like how Google has changed the bar room debate about some trivia fact, right? Like you would be having a debate about who that actor was that you can't remember the name of or who was actually in that movie or what date this thing actually happened on. And you can look it up now. So you have lost a little bit of that debate and maybe the next time you have to look it up, you won't remember it as well as if you and your friends had really worked to come up with that actor's name.

Ange Lavoipierre: And in the unlikely instance that every single phone at the table has run out of battery and you find yourself thinking, that's a hill I'd quite like to die on, then you should probably know there's evidence the internet has made us not only less knowledgeable, but also overconfident.

Julia Soares: Some of the researchers who put out those studies have argued that people can almost fail to distinguish between their knowledge in the head and their knowledge that they can access with Google, even if they ask them really carefully, what do you know? Like what is in your brain? What do you know on your own without Google, without using any type of internet search? And that people can sometimes overestimate what they know as a result of using internet search.

Ange Lavoipierre: So Google might be turning you into a dud hang at the pub. On the upside though, it's probably not going to turn you into a dud parent.

Julia Soares: Digital devices are better at certain types of remembering. So if you ask somebody about remembering a grocery list, they will probably consistently tell you that their phone is going to do that better than they can. But if you ask people about remembering the birth of their first child, they're probably not going to tell you, oh, my phone's got that.

Ange Lavoipierre: And if like me, you're hoarding photos and screenshots, this next part might be a little hard to hear.

Julia Soares: Yeah. So I have a couple of studies where we've found that taking photos can impair memory. 

Ange Lavoipierre: Which means my desperate attempts at remembering all 34,561 of them might actually have made matters worse.

Julia Soares: And it's not clear exactly what causes people to have impairments associated with taking photos or benefits. Ultimately, you have a photo at the end of it, which has been shown to be a very effective memory cue. But if you take so many photos that you can never go back through your photos again, it's too daunting, it's too unpleasant. There are some surveys showing that people really don't review their photographs as much as they could or maybe should. If you take so many photos that you don't go back and review them, then you could be experiencing impairments associated with that photo taking.

Ange Lavoipierre: My personal theory is that whenever I take a photo, my brain just doesn't go to the effort to record the memory. It's like I've made a decision not to focus on it with the same intensity. But hey, even with all those photos and nearly two terabytes of data I'll never delete, there's some comfort in knowing I'm still not the most extreme case. Nowhere near, actually. Because there are people out there doing something called life logging.

Morris Villaroel: Really, it started in 2010, shortly after I had my 40th birthday in February.

Ange Lavoipierre: This is Morris Villaroel. He works as an academic in Madrid in a field called animal ethnology.

Morris Villaroel: I was kind of thinking about what I had done in the previous decades, in the four decades, and I didn't feel like I had a lot to show for it. But I did have a lot of fun. I was thinking, how could I maybe record my life a bit better and think about the next 40 years?

Ange Lavoipierre: So in that practice, life logging is pretty much what it says on the label, an attempt to capture life as it's happening. Kind of like journaling, but more turbo.

Morris Villaroel: I'd like to record better everything I do every day and see how it goes, how long I can last, whether it's interesting.

Ange Lavoipierre: And he means everything. Thoughts, feelings, events, conversations, all of it, written down by hand, sometimes multiple times in an hour.

Morris Villaroel: So at the beginning, it was just more specific kind of highlights of the day. But then it became something where I started to try to put down as much as possible, even things that I wasn't sure was going to be useful in the future. Like I had a short phone call with somebody, or off and on I've had back problems. Maybe later on, I could use that information and say, well, I noticed these things and now, basically, I can go anywhere from five to maybe 15 pages on one day.

Ange Lavoipierre: He's currently up to notebook number 479. So is it worth it?

Morris Villaroel: This has been every day now for 15 years. People say, oh, that must be very costly. It must be a pain. It's actually the other way around. It helps to go maybe work through problems. It may sound funny, but I have become more kind of understanding with myself, more lenient. This may be making me a more boring human being. I'm not sure. But for me, it seems to provide a certain amount of stability.

Ange Lavoipierre: Morris has thought a lot about the effect it might be having on his memory too. And look, grain of salt, because no one would want to believe that they've spent 15 years making their own situation worse. But on balance, he thinks it's helping.

Morris Villaroel: So I think it provides, maybe I could say something like self-regulation, but also for memory and cognitive processes. So it must do something.

Ange Lavoipierre: There isn't actually a lot of research about how Morris's version of this might help or harm a person's recall. But we know a little more about life logging more generally, according to Julia, especially the app-based variety that tracks things like your step count and your moods.

Julia Soares: A friend of mine in graduate school developed an emotion tracking app that I helped pilot for her for a couple of weeks. And you can use it to kind of correlate different activities that you engage in with your emotional affect to try to say like, oh, well, when I don't sleep well, I tend to be really grumpy. So I'm going to prioritise sleeping better. So you can come to some really useful insights by collecting all of this data.

Ange Lavoipierre: Julia says there's some research linking that kind of life logging to stronger memory function.

Julia Soares: Most of that literature is focused on improving memory for people with memory impairments, either due to age or brain injury. But having these external supports that are intentionally sort of collected to support people's memory does seem to be very effective.

Ange Lavoipierre: So not all of our outsourcing is having the same results. With photos or internet search, for example, there's some evidence to suggest it's leading to a kind of atrophy that might diminish our ability to remember the things we'd most like to. But more intensive monitoring, like the kind Morris does, might have the opposite effect, particularly if you're someone who's struggled with a more acute version of memory loss.

(Music)

Ange Lavoipierre: Tell me when we met.

Max: When we met? Yeah. When you and I met? Yeah. At school. We met like 20 something years ago.

Ange Lavoipierre: Yeah, we met a long time ago.

Max: I can't even remember the first time I met you.

Ange Lavoipierre: This is one of my oldest friends, Max. We're sitting on my bed having takeaway. This is pretty standard behaviour for us. But this time he's letting me record it. Because for months now, Max has been using chat GPT to help recover his memories.

Max: I data dumped my entire life into this into this language model. And so I can go back through and access it.

Ange Lavoipierre: It's just such a wild sentence. You just said that you've like data dumped your whole life into a chatbot. Did you ever think that you would do this?

Max: No, no, no idea. It was a complete accident that it happened.

Ange Lavoipierre: So how do you accidentally do something like that? For Max, it started about a year ago on a Thursday afternoon in July.

Max: I guess we could say I went through a breakup, but a very abrupt breakup. I was at my mum's place. I was walking back from the kitchen and ran into mum in the hallway. And I looked at her and said, mum, I don't know why I'm here. And I don't know why my relationship is over.

Ange Lavoipierre: And you presumably had not been abducted? No. And like, knocked out and woken up there like you had brought yourself?

Max: I brought myself there. And I had memories of the process. And I knew I had enough awareness. I just couldn't understand how it had happened. Like the actual mechanisms didn't make sense. I didn't, I could sort of look back and piece bits together. But why I was there and why the relationship was over and why my whole life had just been derailed, that part I couldn't understand. And that's when I went back to a therapist.

Ange Lavoipierre: He booked in for the next available appointment and drove back over the mountains to Sydney. When he explained what was going on, his therapist told him to look into something called structural dissociation.

Max: And something just clicked in my brain. And I was like, holy crap.

Ange Lavoipierre: He realised he wasn't just struggling to remember how the breakup had happened. He had lots of gaps in his memory, stretching right back to when he was a kid. I stumble into one of them when I ask him about high school. Back then, I was spending at least as much time at Max's place as I did at mine. It was a 10 minute walk down the highway. But when I ask him about it, he's got next to nothing.

Max: Which house? If you could jog my memory, which house do you remember being at when you're going through that?

Ange Lavoipierre: Oh, the one near my house.

Max: Oh, up on the hill? Yeah. The one with the pool and the sauna? With the pool, yeah.

Ange Lavoipierre: You really don't remember.

Max: I have very little memory of lots of those times.

Ange Lavoipierre: Why don't you remember that time?

Max: Reflecting on that now, I think that there was a lot going on for me personally. So dad was getting to the pointy end of his illness. We'd had to move again. There was a lot more stress in the family for us. Dad's illness was, you know, it was 12 years in and he was deteriorating and he only lasted a few more years anyway. So I just think looking back on it, I think I fragmented a big part of those couple of years as a way to protect myself.

Ange Lavoipierre: Like just shut it off? 

Max: Just shut it off.

Ange Lavoipierre: Max has had a freakishly hard couple of decades. There have been two trips to rehab and a divorce. He lost a business along the way. In 2018, his little brother Dan died by suicide and his sister-in-law died last year. It's not actually possible to compress what he's endured into one episode.

But my point is, Max has experienced more grief already than many people do in a lifetime. It's the reason he has a difficult relationship with his memory and a big part of why his therapist thought of structural dissociation. In the most basic sense, structural dissociation is when a person compartmentalises their sense of self as a response to trauma.

Max: You have this apparently normal part and so it's the executive function of your brain, the prefrontal cortex. And so it does the day to day. It gets you to work. It, you know, gets you to pay your bills. It gets you to do all those other things. And then the brain stores all of your emotional trauma in fragmented sections in the right brain. And so nothing is coherent.

Ange Lavoipierre: The way Max describes it is that under certain conditions, his brain can flip. And the day-to-day part that goes to work and pays bills takes a back seat. 

Max: And you suddenly are responding from an incoherent, fragmented part of yourself that isn't grounded in reality.

Ange Lavoipierre: In some ways, it's still an emerging condition in psychology. Very real and observable, but the clinical understanding is a work in progress. And that's not uncommon in psychology. There are better known conditions like ADHD or depression that tracked the same path decades ago. The first Max heard about structural dissociation was sitting in his therapist's office. So he drove back to his mum's place and tried to piece it together by writing down some of his flimsier memories.

Max: It was like just pouring out and it was incoherent psychobabble. Quite honestly, they're the words I remember using. And I was trying to like form it into sort of some coherence. And I remember trying to edit it and it just started making less sense. Like the more I edited it, the less sense it made. It just started to sound like a crazy person. And there was like thousands and thousands of words.

Ange Lavoipierre: At a loss and kind of without thinking, he dumped it all into ChatGPT.

Max: And it just spat back this coherent sort of monologue. And I was like, oh, that's what's happening.

Ange Lavoipierre: So you were using ChatGPT to understand your diagnosis, but also to recover and almost like glue back together the memories themselves.

Max: Pretty much, yeah. So there was, I suddenly had a feedback loop, so to speak.

Ange Lavoipierre: And how does the memory recovery process work? Talk me through it because like if you don't, I mean, it doesn't have your memories, you have your memories. How do you use ChatGPT to bring them out of yourself?

Max: I just stream of consciousness, sort of verbally diarrhea into the microphone and whatever came out would then get mirrored back to me in a sort of coherent narrative. And that seemed to sort of bridge the gap in my brain from the disconnected parts. In the beginning, it was just whatever came up. It was whatever my brain sort of fed me. And then once I kind of got a handle on the process, I started consciously picking memories that had big emotional charges in my body.

Ange Lavoipierre: Max started remembering things he never even knew he'd forgotten. The good as well as the bad.

Max: It was like going from greyscale to Technicolor. Yeah. Like suddenly I was remembering a holiday in Spain when, you know, I was traveling with friends and when it was like, oh, we went to Spain and, you know, we went down the road. And then suddenly it was like this really visceral emotional experience where I was like, oh yeah, we were running down the street and we got pickpocketed and we ended up in a fight. And suddenly it became like this really energetically more, more sort of colourful experience.

Ange Lavoipierre: So did you literally get that memory back?

Max; Yeah, literally getting in a fight in Spain with a bunch of Spaniards was definitely a, definitely a good memory to get back. Cause there aren't that many big traumatic events, but there were a lot more like good, fun, happy memories that were just not as colourful. And suddenly they were, you know, in full Technicolor kind of, you know, 4k. It was really, it was really full on. Like I was actually feeling my body for the first time in decades, like properly feeling it.

Ange Lavoipierre: Max was hooked. He'd monologue to ChatGPT for hours on end, pacing around his mum's bush block or on long drives, pouring in everything he could think of. It lasted for months. All in all, he estimates he's spent almost a thousand hours on it.

Max: There were millions of words. 

Ange Lavoipierre: Like how many millions?

Max: I don't know. One and a half million, two million, three million, maybe three million.

Ange Lavoipierre: He says it's possible he went overboard.

Max: It consumed me for a little bit there. Yeah. And it also, it emotionally overwhelmed me and burnt me out because I tried to do five to 10 years’ worth of therapy in 10 months.

Ange Lavoipierre: Sounds like a you problem, not a ChatGPT problem.

Max: That's a me problem. Yeah. Do not try this at home. It could be very dangerous.

Ange Lavoipierre: Do you ever feel funny about outsourcing, outsourcing any of the stuff that you outsourced to ChatGPT, giving that job to a machine? How do you think about that decision?

Max: Look, I think if therapy was unlimited and everyone had access to it every day, then you would use a human. But the reality is that we just don't have the resources to do this kind of work without machines in any situation. I'm not trying to get it to create. I'm trying to co-create. I'm trying to distill ideas. So no, I don't feel weird that I'm using a machine. It's making, it's like my second brain, I call it.

Ange Lavoipierre: Is that how you think of it?

Max: In one way, yeah, one way. Cause it's, I'm talking to myself. It's just mirroring back what I already know and just improving upon what I know.

Ange Lavoipierre: The thing about mirrors though, is that they're not always strictly accurate. They're a version of reality. And Max says ChatGPT did take occasional liberties with his story, but not in a way that was serious enough to warp his own understanding.

Max: It wasn't putting memories in my head. It was helping me connect with an emotional memory through voice and through hearing back my story. So if it added a little bit of, a little bit of colour to the end of my monologue, I just disregarded it.

Ange Lavoipierre: So it did bullshit you sometimes?

Max: Sometimes it did. Yeah. And then, so I started to give it strict protocols.

Ange Lavoipierre: Isn't that scary though?

Max: It is scary on a bigger sense, looking at how some people get like the sphere of influence that it has on people. I think that, I think we have to be very careful of it. I wouldn't recommend it without having some professional support behind it. Like I, this whole process was every week I would see a therapist for the first three or four months until I got to a point where I felt comfortable that what I was doing wasn't sort of crazy. Like it felt a bit sort of futuristic and a bit weird. And so I had to sanity check myself a bit.

Ange Lavoipierre: What's the memory you're most glad to have back?

Max: I don't think I could pinpoint any memory. I'm just glad that I can have my emotional experience back.

Ange Lavoipierre: Okay. What's your favourite feeling to have back?

Max: Favourite feeling to have back? Joy and pain. Well actually joy and grief because I didn't … this whole process in one way has allowed me to finally accept the grief of my brother's death and that I can actually let go of that after almost seven years. So having the grief of my brother's death has been the best thing because I can finally move on.

Ange Lavoipierre: Max and his partner are back together. And he's winding down the therapy side of things with ChatGPT.

Max: Because it's relentless and it could go on forever and I need to live my life. I am at a point where I do not want to do any more excavation and what I do now is turn this into the book.

Ange Lavoipierre: So he's using ChatGPT to help him write his memoir. Kind of like Morris' life logging but in reverse. There are no studies to prove it because he was making it up on the fly but you could argue Max has flipped that problem from the start of this episode. The fear that our ability to remember is getting weaker because of how we're leaning on tech. The difference with Max is he wasn't asking AI to hang on to memories so he wouldn't have to. He was using it as a reminder. Julia Soares, the researcher we first spoke to, has more or less arrived at the same place.

Julia Soares: I still take photos. I still take photos all the time but I do try to be mindful about what I choose to photograph and how many photos I take. When I take a photo I'm in the mindset of thinking about how is this going to cue my retrieval later on. Like this is this should be something that I want to remember alongside the photo as opposed to I got it. I got the photograph and the point is getting the photograph as opposed to using the photo to help myself enjoy things in the moment.

Ange Lavoipierre: That's it for this episode of Brain Rot which was made on the lands of the Gadigal and Menang Noongar people. Our producer is Fiona Pepper, our senior producer is James Bullen and our sound engineer is Tim Simons. Next week in episode four, internet addiction.

Jillian: Just my whole life was just diminishing to me and the screen on my kitchen bench. I was just losing days and days and days.

Ange Lavoipierre: You can find and follow the podcast on the ABC Listen app. Just search for Science Friction. My name's Ange Lavoipierre. Catch you next time.