Is tech changing how we remember?

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This week we’re quoting…

The unnamed narrator in Transcription, a novel by Ben Lerner 

What that narrator said: 

“Then I reached for my phone, which I’d set in the small steel tray attached to the mirror. I somehow knocked the phone into the water.” 

What’s this got to do with LEAP? 

We’re going to make some connections here to take you from the quote (about a fictional character knocking his phone into a sink full of water) to our perceptions of technology. Give us a minute to get there – it’ll be worth it. 

We just read Transcription. And it set our minds thinking about the relationship between memory and technology – and how those two things have become inextricably intertwined for most human beings. 

There was a time when forgetting was part of everyday life. You’d misplace a phone number or forget the route to a friend’s house. You’d argue over the lyrics to a song because there was no easy way to check. Memory is imperfect, and that imperfection influences how we experience the world. 

With evolving technology though, the way we remember things is changing. 

• Our phones remember where we've been. 
• Our cameras preserve thousands of moments we'd otherwise have forgotten. 
• Voice notes capture conversations. 
• Smartwatches track our sleep. 
• AI can summarise meetings, retrieve old notes and even help us pick up conversations where we left off.

We’re all recording our lives more and more. 

But is that changing how accurately we actually remember them? 

This was the question on our minds while we read the novel. We won’t give too much away, but the story begins with a problem: the narrator is on his way to interview his elderly mentor when he drops his phone into water, leaving him with no recording device. 

That forces him to rely on memory rather than technology to reconstruct the conversation and write the interview. 

As you move through the conversation and its aftermath, you remember that memory isn’t just the process of storing information – it’s also a process of interpretation. It relies on emotion; on the details our minds choose to hold onto, and the ones we let go. 

Technology has changed how memory works 

The details can all be recorded. But the second part – deciding which details to let go of – still comes down to us. 

Think about photography. We might assume that documenting an experience helps preserve it forever. But research (published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition) found that people who photograph objects can sometimes remember fewer details about them than those who simply observe them – a phenomenon known as the ‘photo-taking impairment effect’. 

When we know the camera will remember, our brain relaxes. It’s not that tech is making our memories worse – it’s just changing what we ask our memory to do. 

The same thing is happening with AI 

AI is becoming a memory partner. 

We ask it to summarise documents we've already read, organise information we've already collected or remind us of conversations we've already had. Instead of remembering where we saved something, we now have to remember which pieces of saved information are actually important to us. 

The tech can store the information – and do so in a way that allows us to retrieve it instantly when we want to. 

But we still have to decide what deserves to be remembered – because a vast amount of the data we input into AI, we’ll never retrieve again. 

Memory isn’t an archive 

It’s a living, active process. Two people can experience the same conversation and remember it differently. A photograph captures what happened; memory captures what it felt like.

And as technology becomes woven ever more deeply into our lives, we’re figuring out how to make sense of our own past experiences when they’re presented to us by technology in forms that don’t quite represent our own perception. 

So maybe the future of memory has to be collaborative – maybe we’ll develop new ways to bridge the gap between stored data and meaningful memory. Because our devices will continue to remember more and more, and show us moments we’d have forgotten on our own. 

But meaning doesn't live in the cloud.

Technology can record every keynote, every panel discussion, every meeting; it can generate transcripts, summarise conversations and remind us who we spoke to.

But it can't decide which idea changes the way we think.

That's why events like LEAP still drive real change in the tech industry. Because they’re places where ideas take root – where one conversation, one question, or one unexpected perspective that stays with us.

Perhaps that's the future of memory: not humans versus technology, but technology preserving the moments while we decide which ones are worth carrying forward.