Will tech improve our kids access to memories?
How far back can you remember? What are your earliest childhood memories? I'm pretty sure that my earliest memory was the slightly traumatic event of being told off in nursery school, but after that its pretty sketchy until I was about 8 or 9. To be honest, even after that, I tend to remember events that have strong emotions attached to them and therefore they stick out in detail. I wonder if the memories that we laid down in our developing years are still there and we simply don't know how to access them, or are they just forgotten? Deleted as unnecessary data?
I was thinking about this whilst on holiday recently as my son, aged 7, has a very good memory that reaches back in quite some detail. He differs from me in that his memories are not necessarily tied into a strong emotion, he remembers a spatula that I bought him and the shop we bought it from, seemingly unimportant information. It made me start to question the role that technology may be playing in this.
As a teacher I know the importance of revisiting facts and information to embed them into a child's understanding and memory, this is well accepted already. We live in an age of digital enlightenment, we are increasingly using technology around our homes to make life easier, faster, immediate. It wont be long until technology becomes invisible in our homes, not because its not there but because its so deeply entrenched in our everyday lives that we fail to notice it.
Around our home, like many others across the world we have devices that both parents and children use regularly. Tablets, PCs phones are all a part of our everyday lives. In our home we store photos on these devices and we use both a kitchen monitor and the living room TV as a digital photo frame that constantly shows slideshows of pictures throughout our children's lives. The question I'd like to pose is this, does this constant revisiting, reviewing of photos mean that his memory will be improved from an earlier age? Has he laid down better pathways to these memories that means he will access them better as he gets older? Are they more more deeply embedded because of technology? Or does he simply have a better than average memory? It is a question that isn't easily answered but one that I think is interesting to pose. It's going to be a case of watch and wait and hopefully I wont forget to keep a track of his progress!
The Curious and frequently forgetful Fox