Looking away from my phone

My hack for memory recall

“Landscape at Iden” (1929), Paul Nash

I do the New York Times crossword most days on my phone. Every couple months, I participate in a trivia league online. In both cases, staring at a screen, I often find myself struggling to think of something I know, that I know I know—a place name, a factoid, a date. But if I turn the phone around in my hand, twist my neck and look aside, the thing pops up in my mind a moment later.

I remember the day about a year ago that I discovered the hack, that rotating of the phone 180 degrees. It was distressing. Had I really become so used to googling things? What did it say about my brain, my memory, that in the milliseconds before thought becomes action, or, frankly, in the milliseconds prior even to thought, that the internet is my mind’s preferred method of recollection?

Do I now prefer unconsciously to cognitively off-load to the web?

I’m not going to dig into the neuroscience here much; I’m a lay reader, similar to you, I imagine, and why trust me? Of course, there are interesting things out there. One study back in 2011 found subjects to be significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to retrieve it later with a computer. A more recent paper found people are using information stored elsewhere than their hippocampus—photos on Instagram, for example—as key pieces of how they recall important days in their lives.

I know it’s true that if I ask my mind to recall how a certain friend looks, literally what their face looks like, frequently it’ll pull up the last photo of them that I saw, rather than the last time the two of us were face-to-face.

I picked this topic as the week’s meditation because I was doing the crossword Tuesday, I performed my little trick, I marveled at how effectively it worked. But what does that say? Mental resilience? Mental atrophy? That same day, Tuesday, I borrowed a new electric truck from a car company and drove it about three and a half hours south and east—and it had the software onboard, and many, many cameras, to enable me to remove my hands from the wheel and marvel while it drove itself. Amazing! Terrifying!

You know who can’t drive trucks? Babies.

Sigmund Freud put forward a theory that everything we experience leaves a mark on the mind—“hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” he once wrote—marks the conscious mind can’t necessarily access, though the unconscious mind, the dreaming mind, can retrieve them, sift through them, grab fragments from childhood and later and weave them into dreams—without sense, without order—throughout our lives.

He also theorized that every dream is a wish, which to me is wild, something I often think about in the mornings and sometimes gasp at, especially if a dream’s been particularly wack.

Memory is malleable, memory is unreliable. Maybe that’s why I don’t stress too much about its recall, and don’t beat myself up for my Google use. Especially knowing that if I simply turn the phone around and look at the sky, all those memories—malleable, unreliable, and yet still the story of me—are there for recollection, at least for now.

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What the what

“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.

Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

For books, articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.