There was a time when everyone had to remember long strings of seemingly random numbers. It was a time when people had to use diagrams on paper or depend on road signage to get where they wanted to go.
And if you wanted to find something out that you didn't know, you had to consult a book or a newspaper (ask your parents, kids).
That was the analogue age, when phones had to be connected to the wall, and if you got lost in the wilds of Connemara, you’d have to depend on the kindness of strangers.
In this digital 21st century of ours, of course, everything is contained in our phones. It’s handy enough, but is it entirely a good thing?
On Drivetime, Claire Brock spoke to Professor Matthew Sadlier, a consultant and Old Age Psychiatrist, who’s not at all sure that it is: "There’s a very good amount of evidence coming out on this and this concept, which has been titled digital dementia."
Which is not to say it’s the same as dementia in the truest sense, that is the neurodegeneration of cells, but it’s more a case, Prof Sadlier says, of use it or lose it:
"If people don’t develop skills, if they over-rely on technology to do things, cognitive processes that we could do internally inside our own head, you don’t learn that skill and thus, when neurodegeneration does tend to kick in – which it will for all of us unfortunately at some age – you're coming from a lower base and you’re going to end up in bigger cognitive problems."
Prof Sadlier likens it to someone who never walks and instead drives everywhere. That person’s leg muscles will develop poorly or not at all, their cardiovascular health will be similarly underdeveloped and as they age, because they’re not coming from the peak position they could be at, they're going to develop problems at a very early stage.
What makes things more interesting at this stage in our phone-dependent lives is the fact that there is a large portion of the population that grew up in the analogue age and used to know phone numbers and directions but have forgotten all that and then there’s the other large portion of the population that grew up in the digital age and barely know their own phone number.
Both of these cohorts are in trouble, according to Prof Sadlier, but it sounds like it might be worse for the digital-only types:
"It is a serious, critical issue with the younger generations who never actually developed that skill in the first place. Things like moving away from rote learning in school, learning times tables, over-depending on technology, calculators, and this could do significant damage."
Prof Sadlier cites a report from Canadian academics which estimates that the rate of Alzheimer's dementia by 2050 could be six to seven times what it is now because of how we’ve changed how we teach our children without adapting neuroscience in our teaching practises.
Use it or lose it is a mantra that we should all adopt if we want to avoid cognitive offloading and keep our brains as healthy as they can be:
"Essentially, our brains are lazy. Essentially, our brains, like our body, will take the easiest route from A to B. It’s much easier to get in the car and drive the half mile down the road to the shops than it is to walk. And in the same way, it’s much easier just to get out the calculator and multiply 17 by 3 rather than do it in your head."
Another challenge of our all-screen, all the time lives is over-immersing ourselves in over-stimulation. The brain has a filing system which it uses to process memories and experiences, but it needs downtime to do that processing. If we’re constantly glued to our phones, then the brain doesn’t get the downtime it needs to properly log and file what we’ve experienced:
"If you constantly stimulate yourself, as we have people doing, where the average use of a screen is somewhere between three and four hours a day, where you are never giving your brain a chance to process the information that you have, going to events like a wedding or a concert and taking photographs – that moves you from being a participant in the event to being an observer of the event. It changes your memory of the event."
How do we try to fight against this erosion of our brainpower? Prof Sadlier has some ideas, but, well, you’re not going to like them:
"The danger of screentime is immersive, solo screentime where you are a passive recipient of information. Communally watching the television, going to the cinema, is a very different experience. The next thing is, go analogue."
There are apps that can turn your smartphone into a dumbphone, Prof Sadlier says, or you can cut out the middleman and just get a dumbphone.
If you’re sticking with your smartphone, Prof Sadlier recommends that instead of getting algorithmically-driven notifications from multiple apps on your home screen, you should turn off as many as possible, and stick with what's necessary.