Remembering and Forgetting

in the Age of Technology

TEACHING AND LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
James M. Lang, Series Editor

A list of titles in this series appears at the end of this volume.

 REMEMBERING
AND FORGETTING
IN THE AGE OF
TECHNOLOGY
Teaching, Learning, and
the Science of Memory in
a Wired World

Michelle D. Miller

West Virginia University Press

Morgantown
Copyright © 2022 by West Virginia University Press
All rights reserved
First edition published 2022 by West Virginia University Press
Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978 -1-­952271-46-5 (cloth) / 978 - 1-­952271 - 47 - 2 (paperback) /

978 - 1-­952271 - 48 - 9 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available from

the Library of Congress

Cover design by Than Saffel / WVU Press

For my mother, Dr. Darla Ferris Miller
 CONTENTS

Introduction: Machines, Memory, and Learning 1

1. What Technology Does to Us (and for Us):
Taking a Critical Look at Common Narratives 19
2. Why We Remember, Why We Forget 45
3. Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters
(Even though Google Exists) 87
4. Memory Requires Attention 133
5. The Devices We Can’t Put Down: Smartphones,
Laptops, Memory, and Learning 171
Conclusion: How Memory Can Thrive in a Technology-­
Saturated Future 211
Notes 227
Acknowledgments 253
Index 257
 INTRODUCTION

MACHINES, MEMORY,
AND LEARNING

Our minds are made of memories, and today, those memo-

ries have competition.
Where we once depended on human memory — our own,
other people’s, the collective knowledge of a society passed
down orally and in books — we now turn to digital records.
Computers ranging from tiny wearables to vast AI-­driven
networks are what we rely on to remember, to remind, and
to reminisce. For most of us, these machines have seam-
lessly integrated themselves into every corner of our lives.
We are at a point in history where it’s impossible to talk
about human memory without also talking about the digital
memory mechanisms that run alongside our own.
And make no mistake, we do need to be talking about
memory. For one, there’s simply more to know today than
there ever has been before; name almost any subject area or
professional specialization, and there’s a vast and exponen-
tially growing knowledge base that goes along with it. There
are also greater rewards now for people who’ve cracked the
code for acquiring and using knowledge, who know how to
2 Introduction

deliberately practice and improve on what they know and

what they know how to do, who can learn deeply but also
efficiently. There are greater rewards for people who know
how to manage cognitive resources and direct them produc-
tively, despite the intrusions of a frantic and hyperconnected
world. These expert mind-­managers will have the greatest
competitive edge, the most options, and the best chance of
living well in the world we now inhabit.
Memory is important for everyone, but for those of us
who teach, it’s absolutely critical. I say this in spite of the
bad reputation that the topic has within education circles.
Everybody has now heard the adage that a real education is
about learning to think, not about memorizing facts; while
this may be true, it hinges on a dichotomy that contempo-
rary researchers know to be a false one. Committing infor-
mation to memory isn’t the be-­all and end-­all of learning,
but it is assuredly one important part of learning. Far from
competing with thinking skills, having a well-­established
base of knowledge actually supports the ability to reason in
a given topic area. And fortunately, with new research-­based,
superefficient memory techniques, there’s really no reason
why learners can’t do both.
Clearly, people who care about education need to care
about memory. As far as who ought to care about education —
well, today, that should be all of us. We now live in a time
when quality education is the difference between succeeding
wildly and falling tragically behind, both for individuals and
for whole societies. This doesn’t just refer to the transfer of
knowledge that takes place in formal educational settings,
although that is a big part of it. It also means the ways
in which people continue their educations, through self-­
teaching and dipping in and out of just-­in-­time, informal
learning throughout their lives.
 Machines, Memory, and Learning 3

To promote this kind of lifelong learning, we can tap into

the techniques developed for higher education — in other
words, the kind of teaching that’s geared to adults. There’s
recently been an explosion of interest in advancing and
refining college-­level pedagogy, and developments in the
field show no signs of slowing down. Techniques for making
higher learning more accessible, more inclusive, and simply
more effective now fill scholarly journals, periodicals like The
Chronicle of Higher Education, books, and entire book series
(like the one that this volume is a part of).
This interest in creating great college pedagogy is a major
development, and one with real potential for positive social
impacts. I’ve taught college classes for around a quarter cen-
tury now, with most of these courses being offered at a public
institution serving students from across the social and eco-
nomic spectrum. Over and over, I have seen for myself the
incredible promise of what college can do when it’s working
as it should. Getting that degree, and more importantly the
skills and knowledge that go along with it, radically expands
the range of options for what students can do with their
lives. I can only imagine what will happen as more people
all over the world get the same chance at these options that
my own students do, whether it’s through obtaining formal
degrees, taking advantage of online classes, or learning on
their own. This is world-­changing stuff, and it’s exhilarating
to get to be a part of it.
Today is also a great time to be a teacher because of rad-
ical improvements in the advice given out to people who
are looking to build or improve their teaching practices. The
wisdom dispensed to generations of instructors used to be
heavily based in the philosophical stance and personal ex-
perience of whoever was dispensing it, and not a whole lot
more. Now, guidance for teachers is increasingly grounded
4 Introduction

in good-­quality empirical research in the learning sciences —

an umbrella term that includes psychology as well as related
areas like education and neuroscience. Research in these
fields has reached a real critical mass in recent years, re-
vealing not just what works in education but also why these
techniques work. There are now well-­developed, precisely
articulated theories of how we think and remember that
go well beyond the simplistic models that used to populate
textbooks for teachers. Take, for example, the three-­box
theory of memory, the one that shows information passing
through sensory, short-­term, and long-­term memory as if
your memories were widgets on an assembly line. Today’s
researchers know that there are many more components of
memory and many more influences on what we remember
than that. They’ve turned their findings into more nuanced,
and more practically useful theories. And more than ever
before, faculty across disciplines are using advice derived
from these theories to devise more compelling, more effec-
tive learning experiences.
In addition to giving a much clearer picture of how
memory works in the context of learning, these models also
let us make better predictions about what will happen when
new factors such as cell phone cameras or search engines
are thrown into the mix. Pundits may editorialize about
whether smartphones are killing our inborn ability to re-
member experiences, or whether Google is somehow making
us stupid, but good theories let us put these opinions to the
test. Theories point us toward the underlying dynamics we
should zero in on as we try to predict the likely impacts of
all these new factors. Put another way, if we start by ground-
ing ourselves in the fundamental principles of how memory
works, those principles can act as a filter that lets us sort
plausible claims from wildly improbable ones.
 Machines, Memory, and Learning 5

Technology and Psychology Go Back a Long Way

Concerns about cognitive impacts of technology may seem

as though they were touched off for the first time by the
spread of cheap, addictive, infinitely portable computing
devices — the smartphones, smart watches, tablets, and
so on that are the highly visible hallmark of our time. But
although it is true that the links between technology and
human cognition have reached a new level of practical im-
portance, the idea that we should look at one in light of the
other is not new. Technology and the study of the mind have
a long and complicated relationship, one that goes all the
way back to the inception of the field where I’ve spent my
academic career, cognitive psychology.
Cognitive psychology focuses on the ways in which people
take in, process, and use information. These mental pro-
cesses are elusive, imperceptible, and maddeningly hard to
pin down, even compared to other constructs that research
psychologists might study. So when the creators of the field
were hashing out their first tentative ideas of how human
beings process information, they needed a way to talk about
these invisible things going on, rapidly and mostly uncon-
sciously, within the mind. This was a problem, because back
in the 1950s and 1960s when cognitive psychology was first
getting started, research psychologists studiously avoided
the whole subject of mental processes, considering these
to be a minefield of intangibles that could never be pinned
down through empirical research techniques. Determined
to maintain their legitimacy as real scientists, they refused
to engage with all the invisible stuff going on in the head,
preferring to concentrate on outward behaviors that they
could see, measure, and quantify. Today it seems a little
bizarre that behavioral scientists would deliberately ignore
6 Introduction

the mental machinations that lead to visible-­and-­countable

behaviors in the first place. But for the first psychologists,
focusing on invisible constructs such as memory was a slip-
pery slope down which the whole science could easily tumble,
down into the realm of mere armchair speculation.
Enter the computer metaphor. Despite the fact that at
the time, computers were exotic things well outside most
people’s experience, likening mental processes to algorithms
brought cognition into the realm of subjects fit for scientific
study. Computers made information processing tangible,
something that happened predictably and systematically
through the workings of the programs they were running.
Especially in the case of memory, computers also gave us
a model for what it means to take in, store, and retrieve
information, providing a way to think about these processes
as well as the terminology for talking about it.
This new conception of minds-­as-­computers was a turn-
ing point for our science, demonstrating that even though
thought processes were (and still are) impossible to observe
directly, they could be studied quite systematically. The met-
aphor was the toehold we cognitive psychologists needed
to lift ourselves up into the realm of real, credible, quanti-
tatively based science, and for that we are forever grateful.
Even today, the analogy remains part of our disciplinary
DNA, coloring and shading the ways in which cognitive
psychologists look at the mind.
However, the link between human memory and digital
memory has now turned from a useful metaphor into a
literal relationship, with each one shaping and influencing
the other. And the relationship isn’t always a friendly one.
Cultural commenters, and some scientists as well, are now
asking whether technologies invented to help us are instead
 Machines, Memory, and Learning 7

undermining our ability to remember and even to think.

Now that computers have moved from being ultra-­technical
pieces of equipment housed in research facilities to being
personal belongings that rattle around in our pockets along
with loose change and car keys, the interplay between their
digital brains and our biological brains has moved from a
theoretical question to a practical one.
On the one hand, this relationship could be described
as a sort of benign symbiosis.1 Human beings bring digi-
tal memory devices into existence, and then they populate
those devices with knowledge. In turn, humans depend on
those digital devices to help us cope with the demands that
life throws at us. One major way devices do this is by shoring
up our own fragile memories and extending our ability to
use what we know. Digital memory plays this supporting
role beautifully; it holds more, stays more consistent over
time, and works more predictably than human memory ever
could. It’s possible to exploit this complementary relation-
ship quite strategically by using computers to do things our
brains don’t do well, which in turn frees those brains up to
do all the things they do manage well. In this ideal scenario
of brain-­machine symbiosis, technology opens up untold po-
tential for human beings to reach new heights of reasoning,
productivity, and personal achievement.
On the other hand, though, is the nagging question of
over-­reliance, such that the technologies that were meant to
enhance our own inborn cognitive abilities end up eroding
them. Like midsections turned soft because of cushy desk
jobs, are our modern minds weakened by an excess of sup-
port? Or if not weakened exactly, are they subtly reshaped
by the expectation that technology will always be there to
help backstop our failures of memory? How often are people
8 Introduction

simply not bothering to create their own memories, knowing

in the back of their minds that they can always fall back on
external aids?
Even more unsettling is the question of distraction, which
has moved from an unfortunate side effect to a feature de-
liberately designed into apps, social media, and into mobile
devices themselves. Distraction has pernicious effects on
memory, and even when we know this fact on an intellectual
level, we’re terrible at predicting when and how badly a lack
of focus is going to affect our ability to take in and store
information.
These now-­pressing concerns shape the questions at the
core of this book: Does technology enhance memory, and by
extension, all of our other cognitive capabilities that depend
on memory? Or does technology erode memory, making us
dependent and getting in the way of creating new memories?
Does it do some combination of all of these things, depend-
ing on the setting and activity? And importantly — what
does this mean for teaching and learning? How much does
it matter that today’s young adults grew up totally immersed
in digital media and computing, and how much should we
change our teaching (if at all) to take this into account?
There are multiple perspectives on, and multiple answers
to all of these questions. However, I have no intention of
throwing up my hands and calling it a draw. There may be
a wide spectrum of thought on these issues, and certainly
plenty of nuance to consider, and yet there are some firm,
defensible statements that we can make based on the science
to date. These include intriguing links between knowledge
and thinking ability. There are also the clear connections
between distraction and forgetting, which have played out
in numerous research projects on the ways in which devices
can interfere with learning. Finally, there are examples of
 Machines, Memory, and Learning 9

ways in which technology has been used to amplify and ad-

vance cognitive processes — whether by enhancing memory
in the context of learning or in other aspects of everyday life.
Technology does not do one simple thing to memory or to
any other cognitive process, for that matter. But it does have
a number of systematic effects that we can draw conclusions
about based on the research to date, interpreted through the
lens of theories that we’ve developed.

Structure of This Book

The ideas above are what I will be making a case for through-
out the book, starting with a critical look at the assumptions
about technology that we, as a culture, bring to the table.
These assumptions go surprisingly deep, and can be found in
one form or another throughout the history of how our cul-
ture has received new technologies; they’re reflected today in
what we write and say about our tech. After taking a critical
look at these assumptions about what technology actually
does and doesn’t do to us, we’ll go into the reasons why we
remember and forget what we do, based on the principles
of memory that have coalesced from of hundreds of studies
on the subject. From the theory, we’ll turn to practical ques-
tions: Is memory still relevant to teaching and learning, and
if so, what does research say about the best ways to build and
improve it? And in order to make this happen, we also have
to consider the question of attention, which is needed in
order to form any new memories and which is increasingly
divided in our click-­driven world.
Next, we’ll turn to the question of how all of these cogni-
tive processes interact with the kind of mobile technology
that travels around with us, starting with the iconic device
of our age: the smartphone. Even during their short time
10 Introduction

in existence, smartphones have generated a flurry of new

research on how they affect thinking and memory, and this
research has practical applications that can help us make
decisions about how to manage phones in our classrooms
and other areas of life where memory is important. This topic
leads to the next issue, one that has sparked an astonishing
amount of polarized debate in education circles: laptops
and the controversy over whether note-­taking by hand is
superior to note-­taking via keyboard.
In the concluding chapter, I’ll return to big-­picture ques-
tions involving computing and memory, and what these
mean for all kinds of learning, broadly construed. Is there
really a generational divide in how we think and remember,
and if so, how consequential is this divide for learning?
How might our attitudes about and approaches to memory
continue to evolve in a world where so much information
can be retrieved online? And lastly, what can we all do to
promote learning in this world of ubiquitous, sometimes
intrusive, and rapidly evolving computing and communica-
tions technologies?
To get at these kinds of questions throughout the book,
I’ll be tapping into research from my academic background
as a cognitive psychologist. This means I’ll be citing stud-
ies that are mostly, but not always, based on experiments
done in laboratories, or sometimes, done through the use of
surveys. While these methods aren’t a perfect way to get at
what goes on in the mind, we in the field have made a lot of
progress in refining them in recent years. And so I’d argue
that these tactics are still the best option if we want to get a
handle on why we remember, forget, and think in the ways
that we do. I will also bring in some cognitive neuroscience,
meaning research that looks at the same kinds of questions,
but gets at them by examining physical structures and
 Machines, Memory, and Learning 11

processes in the brain. It’s important to keep in mind that

these kinds of studies aren’t necessarily more illuminating
or more reliable than their laboratory counterparts. But they
can add new insights, when they are designed and executed
using the same kinds of quality standards — and who’s not
at least a little excited to know more about what’s physically
going on in the brain when we do things like remember and
think?
However, there is going to be more to my approach than
just reviewing the scholarly literature. I’ll also be drawing on
another experience I’ve been fortunate to have in my career:
talking directly to “traditional-­aged”2 college students them-
selves about the role of technology in their lives and what
they think it means for learning. Too much of the discussion
about technology’s effects on young people is conducted
about them, not with them, and I think this is a shame, for
two reasons. For one, it leads to a prescriptive approach to
technology that’s heavy on scare tactics and light on useful
advice. You’d think that after decades of risible attempts at
intergenerational fearmongering — think Reefer Madness or
Your Brain On Drugs — adults would have learned to take a
more subtle and open-­ended approach. A glance at anti-­tech
op-­eds, however, suggests that we have not. For another,
staying stuck in the mode of lecture-­from-­on-­high causes
those of us in an older demographic to miss out on some of
the best ideas out there for how to manage the down sides
of ubiquitous technology. After all, who could be better at
finding the best hacks than people who’ve handled these
challenges since they were old enough to hold an iPad?
I’m fortunate to have a better window than most middle-­
aged people do into what traditional-­aged, Generation-­Z
college students really think about technology. This is not
just because part of my job is teaching college courses;
12 Introduction

it is because of a specific course that I’ve gotten to teach

over the last ten years or so, a seminar called Technology,
Mind, and Brain: Using Psychology to Thrive in a Wired World.
In this course, we read research articles and develop proj-
ects, as one typically would in a seminar. More importantly
though, this class presents one of the only opportunities
my students — and I — get for in-­depth, no-­judgment, cross-­
generational discussions about what they really think about
the technology that defines their demographic. Their view-
points are varied, as you might expect. But on the whole,
they are sophisticated, thoughtful, and couldn’t be further
from the stereotype of glued-­to-­the-­phone digital natives in
thrall to every kind of online diversion.
The last source of insight for this book is my fellow faculty.
I’m fortunate to be able to tap into the experience I’ve had,
through my research and also my work in university-­level
course redesign, working with instructors across disciplines
to reflect on and refine their teaching. Especially in the years
since my last book (Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with
Technology), I’ve been able to be a part of many, many dis-
cussions with highly accomplished faculty, watching and
listening as they wrestle with the biggest challenges of their
profession. I can say this group has an awe-­inspiring level
of devotion to the mission of helping students advance in-
tellectually, professionally, and personally. Their wisdom is
woven throughout these pages.

Who This Book Is For

More than anything else, I wrote this book for my fellow

faculty, people who create and deliver courses in colleges and
universities. Increasingly, college instructors have begun to
 Machines, Memory, and Learning 13

see themselves as being in the business of changing minds

and brains, and are eager to see the latest research on how
these change processes work. If some or all of your career
portfolio consists of teaching, and if you’re curious about
the processes that underlie learning, this book will fit that
bill. Today, teaching in higher education is also far more
of a team effort than it has historically been, drawing on
the talents of people who may not be in front of students
each day but who make contributions of all kinds outside
of the classroom. Instructional designers, coaches and tu-
tors, academic skills instructors, student success program
directors — all of these professionals now work to help push
the quality of courses forward and support students as they
progress through those courses. If your professional port-
folio looks like this, you’ll also find a lot that you can use
in this book.
There’s another important group for whom I wrote this
book. These are people who don’t have teaching listed as any
part of their job descriptions, but who are deeply engaged
in helping other people develop their own skills, knowledge,
and insights. More than ever, these kinds of development
efforts are critical to progress, both the progress of indi-
vidual careers and of our human society as a whole. I’ve
come to believe that in our contemporary, knowledge-­and-­
technology-­focused era, it is not only lifelong learning that
provides the key to success. It is also lifelong teaching.
Especially as the concept of college-­level teaching has
evolved from a narrow focus on presenting information to a
more sophisticated emphasis on designing and orchestrating
learning environments, the broad applicability of teaching
techniques has become more obvious. Great teaching is, after
all, the art and science of clear explanation, of persuasion,
14 Introduction

inspiration, and moving people to action, of selecting the

best information and getting it across in ways that stick and
stay in memory. Health care, marketing, customer service,
even designing good web sites all involve skills that are ready
and waiting in the teacher’s toolkit. Especially any time
these tools involve making something memorable for your
listener, user, or customer, this book will show you how to
accomplish that goal in a contemporary environment awash
in technology.
And lastly, I wrote this book for anyone with a keen in-
terest in memory. This interest might grow out of practical
concerns — coping with aging, gaining an edge in hobbies
or work, or just the hope of being a little less forgetful as
one moves through life. Or it could be because you share
the same lifelong fascination with memory that I do. It has,
after all, been something that has intrigued storytellers and
puzzled philosophers for ages — how it is that we write our
life story in our own minds, hour after hour, saving some
moments forever and letting the rest slip into oblivion.
Questions about memory go to the heart of who we are
and how we see the world. And so, I still experience a sense
of wonder every time that I sit down to write about it, even
after so many years studying the subject. It brings to mind
the dying words of Blade Runner’s war android Roy Batty,
as he contemplates the end of all that he remembers: “I’ve
seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire
off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-­beams glitter in the
dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be
lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Memory is, in
a sense, existence. And in that way, to know memory, and
to gain just a little more control over what we do and don’t
remember, is to get that much closer to making the most of
our time on earth.
 Machines, Memory, and Learning 15

What to Expect from This Book

This book will explore memory from both the practical and
the abstract side, with the aim of ferreting out the specific
ways in which our contemporary technology alters this key
aspect of our psychology. Besides the big overarching ques-
tions I listed above, there are those that tie directly to our
teaching practices: Should we remove laptops from learning
environments? Do learners remember less when they can fall
back on technology? How can new technologies be used to
boost learning and amplify what we’re able to do with our
brains alone? To help make this book as useful as possible as
you apply it to your own teaching, I’ve provided a summary
at the end of each chapter, listing key principles and the
pieces of advice that flow from those principles.
I should also say a few words about what this book is
not. Although it’s heavily influenced by my background as
an ed-­tech researcher, it’s not an instruction manual on
how to incorporate technology into our courses. Nor is it a
textbook packed with comprehensive reviews of different
general theoretical frameworks for learning; there won’t be
discussion questions, exercises to do, or checklists. It is not
a general guide on how to teach, although it will help elevate
your teaching practice in ways that add to what you can learn
from all the other great guidebooks out there.3 And finally,
the book isn’t, and indeed could never be, the last word on
this subject. Even though the study of memory has already
generated a massive research literature, new studies and
new perspectives are added every day. Although it seems
like technology can’t get any more sophisticated or more
pervasive than it already is, the next revolutionary change is
really just one product launch away. Because of this, nothing
I say is going to be timeless, nor definitive.
16 Introduction

Here’s what I want to deliver to you by the end of this

book. If you are in a traditional teaching job, especially if
it’s focused on teaching adults, you will come away with
the best understanding that current science has to offer on
how to craft learning experiences that jibe with the ways in
which people learn. You will be able to make highly informed
decisions about policies and practices that have been the sub-
ject of fierce, polarized, and often completely inconclusive
debates. These informed decisions will balance the positive
aspects of what technology can do in a classroom with the
risks and downsides. You will also be able to give your stu-
dents good advice about how to manage their own cognitive
capacities in a wired world. Should they engage in tech fasts?
Should they be vigilant about certain kinds of distractions,
and how should they follow through on tech management
plans? Which of the dire warnings blared out about technol-
ogy should they pay attention to, and which can they safely
ignore? With the right information, we teachers can offer the
kind of informed and effective leadership that our students
look to us to provide.
Besides advice, I promise that you’ll come away with a
deeper understanding of the reasoning behind the advice.
Especially if we’re going to be ready for whatever the next
technological wave turns out to be, it’s not enough just to
have a list of do’s and don’ts — we need to dig down into the
inner workings of the mind that underlie why we remem-
ber and forget what we do. Attention, too, is an area where
myths and misunderstandings thrive, and it’s another area
where this book can offer an understanding based on the
current science. For those readers who are lifelong learners
and lifelong teachers outside of traditional higher education,
or who want to use this book to learn how to coexist better
with their own technology — these foundations are what
 Machines, Memory, and Learning 17

will allow you to do that. Research will expand, computing

will change, but the bedrock principles of why we remember
and forget are going to last. It’s that beautiful heart of the
science of memory that I want to share with you in this book.
More than anything, I promise that this book will offer
good explanations and research-­tested perspectives in an
area where there hasn’t been much middle ground between
contentious clickbait articles and opaque technical research.
With this, I hope to help us all plot a better way forward
as we navigate lives saturated with more technology and
more to know than any human beings have ever experienced
before.
 CHAPTER 1

WHAT TECHNOLOGY DOES

TO US (AND FOR US)

Taking a Critical Look at

Common Narratives

Consider what these commenters have had to say about the

impact of rapid technological advancements on the human
mind:

“The current explosion of digital technology not only is chang-

ing the way we live and communicate but also is rapidly and
profoundly altering our brains. . . . Because of the current
technological revolution, our brains are evolving right now —
at a speed like never before.” — Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan,
“Meet your iBrain”1
20 Chapter 1

“The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without

external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all con-
strained. But human intelligence is highly flexible and adap-
tive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome
its own limits. The real powers come from devising external
aids that enhance cognitive abilities.” — Don Norman, Things
that Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of
the Machine2

“Technology can potentially improve education, dramatically

widen access, and promote greater human creativity and well-
being.”—Gene Tracy, “How Technology Helps Our Memories”3

“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking

havoc on our children.” — Athena Chavarria,4 parent quoted in
a New York Times article titled “A dark consensus about screens
and kids begins to emerge in Silicon Valley”

Once you start looking into the question of how technol-

ogy affects memory — and by extension, learning — you enter
a thicket of opinion and commentary, much of it heavy in its
pronouncements about what tech can do for us, or is already
doing to us. The impacts of various digital innovations are
now an evergreen source of material for news feeds, blogs,
and other various forms of editorializing. This has created
an arms race of sorts about who can make the most extreme
claims about how these play out in our lives, our minds, and
even within our brains. Many of the more out-­there claims
are of the alarmist variety. Others allude to the wonders of
technology and its unlimited potential to transform for the
better all the ways that we get through life, from shopping
to socializing to learning.
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 21

So out of all the contradictory opinions like the above

examples, which are actually in line with the science of how
we think and remember? Are any of them?
One of the reasons I set out to write this book was to ad-
dress exactly this kind of polarized discourse about the ways
in which living in the contemporary world is affecting our
minds. Throughout our culture, the voices of caution, in par-
ticular, are beginning to meld into a chorus of increasingly
­familiar complaints. They go like this: Technology distracts
us and distorts thinking. It blunts and dilutes our natural
abilities to remember, to record, to reason. It’s a cognitive
crutch that makes us lazy.
What’s the support for ideas like these? Some are based
purely on opinion or personal anecdote, but increasingly,
critics point to research from psychology and neuroscience
to make the case for the cognitive dangers of digital devices.
Whether the research in question consists of findings from
high-­tech, cutting-­edge studies of the brain, or data coming
out of more traditional laboratory experiments run by re-
search psychologists, there is supposedly ample scientific
reason to look on our personal technologies with suspicion.
And many of us do look on these things with, if not
outright suspicion, ambivalence. When the Pew Research
organization5 queried a group of technology experts and
health specialists about the changes in human well-­being
that might happen because of advances in personal comput-
ing technology, the responses reflected a characteristic mix
of worry and hope. On the one hand, most of Pew’s experts
predicted that technology’s impacts would be generally posi-
tive. They cited outcomes such the option to connect socially
with people all over the world and the ability to access infor-
mation on everything from science to health to safety. This
22 Chapter 1

is nothing to sneeze at, given that these kinds of resources

are now available to a wider and more diverse swath of the
world’s population than ever before in human history.
However, the pro-­technology vote wasn’t exactly a
landslide, with only 47% endorsing this positive view-
point. 32% said the impacts would likely be bad, and
a minority — 21% — said that there wouldn’t be much
change at all in well-­being specifically due to technology.
Especially telling were the specific kinds of harm that the
anti-­technology camp cited when they predicted that tech
would send well-­being on a downward spiral. Of the themes
that Pew pulled out of the responses, four out of five were
psychological. “Digital distrust” was one, characterized by
deepening divisions among people as a function of having
their worldviews and beliefs pitted against each other on
social media. Similarly, “digital duress” reflects a decline
in social interactions and face-­to-­face relational skills that
some experts believe is happening as a function of moving
so much of our social lives online. This kind of distress is
exacerbated by advertisers’ constant push to make people
feel less satisfied with their possessions, lifestyles, and life
circumstances. Social media also encourages unhealthy
comparisons by constantly exposing users to the intimate
but sanitized-­and-­idealized details of how other people
live. Lastly, straight-­up internet addiction was another,
not-­surprising psychological hazard that made the list of
potential ills.
Notably, though, there was one threat at the very top of
this list: declines in cognitive capabilities. In other words,
according to Pew’s experts, the constant connectivity and
inherent distractions of contemporary technology are doing
harm to our ability to think, to pay attention, and most im-
portantly for the purpose of this book, to remember.
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 23

Could this be true? Could using mobile computing

devices — cellphones, tablets, laptops — impede formation of
memories? And if so, would that impediment be transitory,
something that dissipates when you put the device down?
Or, would it be something more ominous: a global degrada-
tion of our ability to retain information? This is the kind of
risk that we hear the direst warnings about. It is a sobering
thought indeed, that even when our devices are off and
out of sight, they have rewired us in some permanent way.
Under these circumstances, even a digital detox might not
be enough to restore us to our prior state of mental clarity.
If this viewpoint is correct, the damage is real, and for most
of us that damage is already done.
Hold up, another group of skeptics would say. The idea
that tech is toxic to your mental faculties is a fairly recent
one, but there’s a familiar ring to the warnings. Could it be
that similar dire predictions have blared out for the tech-
nologies that came before our mobile devices, and the tech-
nologies before them, going back through the twentieth cen-
tury and perhaps even before? Well, yes, the pro-­technology
side would say, because today’s technology critiques have all
the hallmarks of the fallacy known as moral panic.

Is Technology Provoking Moral Panic, Once Again?

“New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the

printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were
all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brain-
power and moral fiber,” cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker
wrote in a 20106 New York Times opinion piece. Sociologist
Stanley Cohen coined the term long ago to talk about the de-
monization of certain strains of 1960s youth culture, but the
idea seems surprisingly timely even today. As one 1990s-­era
24 Chapter 1

commentator put it, moral panic is “characterized by a wave

of public concern, anxiety, and fervor about something, usu-
ally perceived as a threat to society. The distinguishing fac-
tors are a level of interest totally out of proportion to the
real importance of the subject, some individuals building
personal careers from the pursuit and magnification of the
issue, and the replacement of reasoned debate with witch-
hunts and hysteria.”7
“Witchhunt” is probably too strong a term for anti-­
technology sentiment in our culture; to my mind, this sen-
timent seems to have settled into a low-­level ambient hum
of complaint, criticism, and concern. Nor has the sentiment
triggered a serious or organized movement toward stopping
the march of tech into daily life. But even so, the subject
seems to take up an unusual amount of space in the public
consciousness, considering the actual proportions of the
issues at stake.
Take as an example the issue of screen time among young
kids. Anything connected to child-­rearing in our culture
tends to elicit powerful emotions, and people are quick to
conclude that today’s parents are somehow dropping the
ball. Combine that with worries about new technology and
the whole topic might unleash a torrent of judgment that’s
largely disconnected from empirical evidence. This is usually
what happens when I ask my own students to discuss tech-
nology’s influence on kids. Although most are traditional-­
aged students without firsthand parenting experience,
invariably some will speak up about a perceived epidemic of
parents obliviously checked out while kids run wild online.
Those who’ve worked as restaurant servers frequently heap
scorn on parents they’ve seen giving children smartphones
or tablets to pacify them during a meal.
This perception that parents these days are irresponsibly
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 25

shoving devices into kids’ hands just to give themselves a

break doesn’t jibe with the evidence, though. In another set
of Pew Research Center surveys, large majorities of parents
stated that they imposed limits on screen time and set up
other kinds of restrictions and safeguards.8 Most also said
that technology made it harder to parent children compared
to 20 years ago, and expressed a wide variety of related con-
cerns, such as the idea that smartphones will damage kids’
social skills, academic progress, and even creativity.
In forming these attitudes, parents are likely picking up
on guidelines issued by authoritative bodies such as the
American Academy of Pediatrics, which over the years has
issued strict and specific limits on how many minutes a day
should be allowable for children of various ages. But parents
might be surprised to know that the evidence base behind
these guidelines is somewhat thin. For example, one study of
a representative sample of nearly 20,000 American parents
sought to test whether preschoolers with higher screen time
scored lower on some accepted measures of children’s mental
health.9 The correlations that did exist were very small, on
an order of magnitude that would be invisible in normal
everyday circumstances. Some actually ran in the opposite
direction from what you’d assume, so that for some demo-
graphic subgroups of kids, well-­being actually went up as
daily screen time increased.
Of course, the study’s findings aren’t an argument for a
total free-­for-­all. The authors stress that factors such as the
quality of the activities themselves — a variable that wasn’t
measured in the study — probably matter a great deal. It also
couldn’t fully account for the opportunity cost of screen
time, meaning tradeoffs with other, healthy activities that
kids might otherwise be doing, if they weren’t on an elec-
tronic device. But the study does illustrate how easy it is to
26 Chapter 1

seize on a highly visible incursion of technology and assume

that it’s creating all kinds of serious problems.
I’d argue that the topic of screen time also does elicit
the disproportionate scrutiny that’s typical of moral panic.
Compare the energy unleashed by this one question — how
much tech is okay at what ages — with others that affect
young children today. There are the known and substantial
effects of childhood poverty. There’s the immense and com-
pletely preventable loss of human potential that happens
because of grossly underfunded schools. Or consider climate
disruption and armed conflict, both of which are clear and
present threats to the world’s children. Seen in this perspec-
tive, the worry, parent-­shaming, and indignation around
screen time seem outsized indeed.
What about the other component of moral panic, the part
about profiting from amping up public concern? This one
is a tougher call, because it’s hard to distinguish warnings
that come from a place of authentic worry from those that
emanate from less pure motivations. The rise of influencer
culture, in which attention equals clicks equals money, also
makes it hard to say where the intangible benefits of a mes-
sage leave off and tangible ones begin.
I don’t think that people who speak out in favor of less
screen time for kids are only in it for the notoriety, and
there is a real possibility that future studies will uncover
hazards that the research to date has not. However, com-
mercial products connected to technology distrust in general
do present a more clear-­cut case of profiteering. The rise of
goods and services designed around the ideal of a lower-­
tech, distraction-­free lifestyle is hard to miss; I know that
my own feeds are teeming with ads for things I can buy to
help clear my mind of techno-­fog. Bullet journals and gor-
geously designed paper notebooks invite me to dream of the
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 27

mindfully composed, handwritten to-­do lists that will turn

my life into a Zen vision of organized minimalism. E-­writers
that do everything except connect to the Internet promise an
unplugged experience for authors yearning to write without
pings, notifications, and the siren call of social media.10 In
the case of writers for whom a screen of any kind is too
much, there’s now a mini-­revival of typewriters going on.11
Delightfully, for fans of irony at least, there’s even tech-
nology you can buy to rein in your other technology. You can
install an app like Freedom to block yourself from accessing
social media, news, and other usual suspects across all of
your various devices. Another app, Forest, polices how often
and when you unlock your phone, growing a virtual tree
while you leave your phone closed for a preset amount of
time. If you cave in and unlock it before your time is up?
The tree dies. It’s not subtle, but it does grab your attention.
These tech-­control apps are not a bad thing; I’m a devoted
user myself of a freeware product called SelfControl that ap-
plies an impossible-­to-­evade block12 on sites that you specify
ahead of time, for up to 24 hours at a time. Anti-­tech tech
tools do make it much easier to set yourself up for success as
you resolve to spend less time in mindless scrolling. The kind
of “precommitment” strategy they support, where you lock
future-­you into a virtuous course of action, is something that
is supported by plenty of research13 on intentional behavior
change. Beneficial or not, though, most of these are products
created to generate money, often by channeling peoples’ wor-
ries about distraction into sales. It follows that the more upset
people are about incursions of technology into their lives, the
better those profits will be—exactly the kind of perverse in-
centive called out by the moral panic concept.
Classroom technology policies, site-­blocking apps, dire
warnings about the mental impacts of rapid technological
28 Chapter 1

change: All of this is timely, today’s-­front-­page kind of stuff.

And yet, history does seem to be repeating itself, nearly ver-
batim. As I observed in my own book14 published in 2014,
there is a startling amount of overlap between today’s tech-
nology critiques and the things said in mass media about
the incursions of radio into the lives of families many years
ago. Writing about this parallel, the communications scholar
Evelyn Ellerman pointed out that “dozens of scholarly books
were written, from the late 1920s into the 1940s, studying
the ways in which the new technology was reshaping per-
sonal relationships, the structure of the family, the literacy
of children, and the ability of people to think critically and
express themselves clearly. We have only to pass by the
shelves of any bookstore to see this whole process repeating
itself with respect to the Internet.”15
There is something about new inventions, especially those
that spread quickly and deeply into our everyday lives, that
sets off a particular blend of revulsion, fascination, and
worry. But this dynamic should raise red flags as we seek to
dig below the headlines and do our own critical reflection on
the issues. Yesterday’s threat is today’s quaint piece of nos-
talgia, and I for one don’t want to look back on anything I’ve
said about a technology and have it look laughably histrionic
by the standards of some future day. Nor do I want compli-
cated truths to be swept away in a tidal wave of premature
consensus about things that “everybody knows” are true of
contemporary technology.
The idea that technology would be bad for thinking in
general, and memory in particular, has circulated through
so much of our popular culture that it’s taken for granted.
But consider its polar opposite: the school of thought that
holds that technology isn’t just neutral for thinking, but is
actually a solid positive.
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 29

Can Technology Enhance Cognitive Abilities?

Maybe technology can enhance cognitive ability, but how?

The claim makes sense when we look at computing technol-
ogy as existing along a continuum with all the other objects
that human beings invent to extend our power and accom-
plish our goals. This is the stance Gavriel Salomon and David
Perkins took in a 2013 article titled “Do technologies make
us smarter? Intellectual amplification with, of, and through
technology.” As they observe:

The impulse to make what you do not have runs deep in the
human mind. Children design implements such as cranes
made of sticks, string, and house keys, and transform pairs of
socks into balls to play with . . . From the dawn of civilization,
people have created physical and symbolic devices that help
them do what they cannot accomplish through bare flesh and
bone: tools, instruments, machines, writing systems, mathe-
matics, and on and on. Such products of human invention ex-
tend both our physical and our intellectual reach.16

Salomon and Perkins extend the analogy between cog-

nitive tools and physical ones, pointing out that just as
attempting to do some physical tasks with bare hands is
fruitless, so is trying to do some kinds of cognitive work
with “bare brains.” In that sense, digital applications help us
do things that our brains don’t handle well. This doesn’t just
widen the range of tasks that we’re able to do competently —
it frees up capacity to focus more on things our brains do
handle well.
Take spreadsheets. You might be thinking, “please,” but
as those of us who predate Excel can attest, these maligned
applications are a fantastic replacement for the tedious and
30 Chapter 1

error-­prone work of recording information in ledgers and

logbooks. Spreadsheets keep your information organized
neatly and legibly, and they perform repetitive functions —
calculating percentages in columns, filling in dates, assign-
ing grades — accurately and instantaneously. You can copy
and share them, either prefilled or as an empty framework
for someone else to populate with whatever data they like.
Since neither copying neatly nor accurately performing the
same calculations over and over are strong suits of human
cognition, I count that as a big win for technology.
In theory, the time saved in recording and tracking data
can be funneled into the kinds of thinking in which humans
do excel (sorry). So for example, the time I save in having to
calculate the percentage of points earned by each student
in a class can be put into picking more challenging readings
or creating an interesting activity for them to do. In that
way, the technology may not be making me smarter, but it’s
allowing me to do a lot more with the smarts I have.
According to Salomon and Perkins, there are additional,
more subtle impacts of software such as spreadsheets. These
tools can change our mastery of the skills associated with the
software, producing intellectual impacts that persist even
when we aren’t actively using that tool any more. So for ex-
ample, my spreadsheet app might change the ways in which
I think about organizing quantitative information, helping
me develop a more sophisticated conceptual understand-
ing of how things like formulae work, thereby producing an
improvement in my cognitive abilities.17 Conversely, using
spreadsheets could erode my ability to perform calculations
in my head, something we’d categorize as a cognitive loss.
Or it might just predispose me to visualize data in particular
ways, a cognitive change that’s essentially neutral.
There is one last kind of impact, one that sits at the top
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 31

of the hierarchy proposed by Salomon and Perkins. The ex-

istence of calculation tools like spreadsheets doesn’t just
extend my abilities and it doesn’t just change my own mind.
It could change all of our minds as far as how we think about
data and calculation in general. In other words: Spreadsheets
change how we think about numbers. So did calculators, and
so did abaci. Word processing changes how we think about
language. So does the existence of a written alphabet.18 In
sum: The unique properties and affordances of the things
that we invent all color, shape, and eventually transform the
things we think about.
The notion that our tools make us smarter is not some
loopy fringe philosophy that sprang up as pushback against
mainstream anti-­tech critics. It has been around for years,
well before contemporary worries about smartphones and
laptops took over the discussion. In the time since its in-
ception, there has developed a body of interesting and
often-­surprising research evidence for the positive impacts
of technology. The educational psychologist Susanne Lajoie
likens digital tools to cognitive amplifiers or even a type of
prosthetics that extend the mind’s reach, putting complex
concepts within our grasp and accelerating the acquisition of
content knowledge. Well-­designed learning programs, Lajoie
argues, can do things like help students develop scientific
reasoning by engaging them in simulated hypothesis testing.
In some ways these virtual science exercises are even better
than the real thing, because particular aspects of the rea-
soning process can be isolated and reinforced. Learning can
also be scaffolded with extra resources so that students don’t
get stuck when they are missing a piece of factual knowledge
or particular vocabulary term.19
The eminent cognitive psychologist Raymond Nickerson
also proposes an amplification metaphor for technology’s
32 Chapter 1

impacts, pointing out that since antiquity, people have

invented tools that extend cognitive capabilities and let
us do a lot more with the brains we have. These tools for
thinking include computing devices that well predate even
the vacuum-­tube machines we think of as primitive today:
slide rules, gauging rods, mechanical calculators capable of
temporarily storing and moving around small amounts of
information.
Most critically for the questions at the heart of this book,
Nickerson also observes that amplification of memory has
been a focus of human technological innovation going back
centuries or more, if we count items such as almanacs and
encyclopedias. Like the Internet today, these served as re-
positories for more knowledge than any mind could hold,
and provided users with ways to retrieve what they needed
when they needed it.20 Clearly, people have wanted to sup-
plant their memories for a long time, reflecting both how
important memory is to us and also how puny our memory
abilities are in their natural, unaided state. What this also
shows is just how well-­suited technology, especially contem-
porary digital computing, is for buttressing and amplifying
human memory.
The concept of technology as a springboard to human
thriving was summarized best of all by Don Norman, a
cognitive scientist, design visionary, and the author of one
of the quotes at the top of this chapter.

[O]ver the years, the human brain has remained much the
same. Human intelligence has certainly not diminished. True,
we no longer learn how to memorize vast amounts of material.
We no longer need to be completely proficient at arithmetic,
for calculators — present as dedicated devices or on almost
every computer or phone — take care of that task for us. But
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 33

does that make us stupid? Does the fact that I can no longer
remember my own phone number indicate my growing feeble-
ness? No, on the contrary, it unleashes the mind from the
petty tyranny of tending to the trivial and allows it to concen-
trate on the important and the critical.
Reliance on technology is a benefit to humanity. With tech-
nology, the brain gets neither better nor worse. Instead, it is
the task that changes. Human plus machine is more powerful
than either human or machine alone.21

Does Using Technology Rewire the Brain?

Besides advocating for the net positive impacts of technol-

ogy, Norman’s quote calls into question another assumption
that tends to go along with an anti-­technology stance: the
notion of deep physical changes to the brain wrought by
computing. The idea that human brains have been funda-
mentally altered in recent times sounds ominous enough,
especially if you think these changes are for the worse. It
also resonates with the perception many of us have that the
world is changing at an overwhelming pace, and we humans
along with it.
However, this is another claim that sounds a little silly to
most psychologists.22 Within the field, our disciplinary lens
tends to direct our focus toward the underlying mental ar-
chitecture that humans have in common, much of which re-
flects the evolutionary forces that shaped that architecture.
If we’re being literal about it, there is no way that natural
selection could have acted so quickly on human brains to
physically change them in the time since computers were in-
vented. But even in a looser, nonliteral sense, there are limits
to how deeply the brain can be remodeled by any experience,
be it an experience with technology or anything else. As the
34 Chapter 1

cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, “Yes, every time

we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s
not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the
existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a
blob of clay pounded into shape by experience. Experience
does not revamp the basic information-­processing capacities
of the brain.”23
Psychologists like Pinker might be skeptical of the re-
wiring trope solely based on its face validity. But isn’t there
other evidence that technology changes us at a neural level?
This question gets especially interesting when you take
a close look at the study that’s frequently referenced in
support of technology’s special powers to change the brain.
This project, executed by a team of UCLA brain research-
ers, carried the intriguing title “Your Brain on Google:
Patterns of Cerebral Activation during Internet Searching.”24
Researchers asked 24 volunteers to complete a simulated
search task while in a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI)
scanner. Half of those volunteers were “net-­naive,” meaning
that they reported minimal experience with using the web or
search engines. (Keep in mind that this research took place
before 2009, when such individuals still existed outside of
hunter-­gatherer societies and hardcore minimalist circles.)
The other half of the volunteers were dubbed “net-­savvy,”
meaning that they reported using the web habitually in their
everyday lives. While in the scanner, both groups searched
for information in two ways, one using a simulation that
was much like a traditional paper book, and another with a
simulation of searching via web browser. The distribution of
neural activity25 was compared across both tasks and across
both groups, with the goal of determining whether the vol-
unteers’ brains responded differently to internet versus text
searching, and whether that disparity was different based
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 35

on the level of web browsing experience that volunteers had

(net-­naive versus net-­savvy).
The short story of the project’s findings is yes to both
questions. More areas of the brain fired up in response to
the simulated internet search task relative to the plain-­text
one, especially regions involved in decision-­making, visual
processing, and attention. However, this was only true for
people with prior web browsing experience, that is, the net-­
savvy group. Those with limited prior experience with the
web didn’t exhibit this same pattern of enhanced activation
in response to the simulated web browsing task. However,
after just about five hours of web experience, the brains of
net-­naive volunteers also started to show that fired-­up pat-
tern associated specifically with searching for information
via the web.26
From this set of findings, it certainly looks as though
using a computer creates lasting physical change in the
brain. But let’s dig deeper into the limitations of this par-
ticular study. Yes, 24 research participants is a fairly small
sample,27 but it’s not too unusual in the realm of fMRI
studies, which are usually designed to involve a fairly low
number of individuals given the time and money involved
in running people through the scanner. More importantly,
there is this problem: To this day, researchers don’t know
what it means to have more extensive activation associated
with a task, at least not in a big-­picture sense. We still can’t
answer the basic question of what it means when one group
is using more brain capacity overall, or a more extensive
set of circuits and structures to do a task. Are the people in
that group doing the task less efficiently? Are they more en-
gaged as they do the task? Are they processing information
in a way that is qualitatively different, compared to those
exhibiting less extensive activation? These problems have
36 Chapter 1

been discussed at length among neuroscientists but are still

essentially unsolved, which makes it hard to characterize
exactly what was different about the experienced Web users
in this particular study.
Even more importantly, there is the matter of the age of
these two groups of participants. Both groups were com-
posed of older adults, averaging 66 years old in the net-­naive
and 62 in the net-­savvy groups, and it’s worth noting that
this study was originally published in a source (the American
Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry) that is clearly focused on the
psychology of older people. The research group was trans-
parent about the focus on older adults, and there’s nothing
inherently flawed about such a design choice. Pragmatically
speaking, it also made it possible to assemble a net-­naive
group (something the researchers admit 28 was a bit of a
challenge as they were setting up the study). All of this
makes sense, but we have to keep in mind that the brains
of older and younger individuals are simply different, espe-
cially when it comes to memory, attention, and new learn-
ing.29 This means there are some fairly major limitations
on how far we ought to generalize the findings across age
groups.
But generalize many have. The findings regarding
technology-­c aused brain changes have most pointedly
been extrapolated to the brains of adolescents and young
adults — the people who are, after all, the main focus of the
lion’s share of articles about the dangers of technology. The
researchers in charge of the UCLA web browsing study them-
selves characterize the study as “exploratory,”30 offering the
caveat that they can’t definitively demonstrate cause and
effect given the correlational study design. And as is cus-
tomary at the end of such studies, the researchers plead for
caution in how the findings are interpreted. And yet, these
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 37

cautions were tossed out the window as the findings made

their way out into short research summaries and popular
press articles.31
Oddly, the study’s results were cited not only in favor
of the creepy-­rewiring idea, but also its mirror image, the
notion that interacting with the net is a brain-­building posi-
tive. As the lead author Gary Small said in a press release
about the work, “A simple, everyday task like searching
the Web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults,
demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can con-
tinue to learn as we grow older,”32 clearly characterizing
brain change as a good thing. As the original article says as
well, “Our present results are encouraging that emerging
computerized technologies designed to improve cognitive
abilities and brain function may have physiologic effects and
potential benefits for middle-­aged and older adults . . . our
findings point to an association between routine internet
searching and neural circuitry activation in middle-­aged and
older adults. Further study will elucidate both the potential
positive and negative influences of these technologies on
the aging brain and the extent to which they may engage
important cognitive circuits controlling decision making
and complex reasoning.”
Even beyond the unsettled issue of whether these brain
impacts are positive, negative, or neutral is the question of
how unique the changes associated with technology really
are. There’s no question among modern neuroscientists that
the brain is plastic, meaning that it physically reshapes itself
throughout our lifespans. These changes are frequently the
result of experiences: memories we form, compelling emo-
tions we have, and new things we learn how to do. Viewed
in this light then, it’s not surprising that our brains would
change as a function of engaging in tech-­driven activities,
38 Chapter 1

especially those that elicit emotions, require us to develop

new skills, or that simply take up a lot of our waking hours.
Flip the question around, and it would be weird if our brains
were somehow selectively impervious to this particular class
of experiences.
While the rewiring and reshaping of brain tissue might
sound unsettling, it’s also something that happens to an
even greater degree in response to other, nondigital tech-
nologies that we engage with.33 A perfect example is read-
ing. Written words are, after all, a technology of sorts, and
processing them requires major renovation of the brain. 34
Humans come prewired to process language as an auditory
experience, so in order to decode language using our eyes,
we have to sprout new connections between these language
areas (located mostly in the left temporal lobe of the brain,
near your left ear) and areas devoted to visual processing
(the occipital lobes, located at the back of the head). These
changes are deep, lasting, and consequential, yet in this day
and age nobody writes ominous opinion pieces about the
ways in which books are reprogramming us.
Even something mundane like learning to drive a car is
going to change your brain, and if you were to repeat the
UCLA study with drivers and nondrivers, it’s likely that you’d
pick up a similar pattern of results.35 The brains of experi-
enced drivers would show a heightened response within new
neural pathways they built to handle this engrossing new
activity; nondrivers would start without any such special-
ized neural activity but would acquire it in short order after
intensive practice with the machinery.
So what should we, as teachers and critical thinkers
about technology, take away from this line of research? It
doesn’t make sense to simply dismiss the findings out of
hand, although the study’s limitations — the number and
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 39

type of individuals in the sample, interpretation of what

it means to see more brain activation among experienced
participants — are substantial ones. Mainly, I think that this
highly publicized work spotlights the engaging nature of the
technology we use to explore new information, and there-
fore, its power to entice us into spending copious amounts
of neurally impactful time using it. It is that ability, and
not some unique power over our brain matter, that allows
technology to change us.
The research also raises another question, one that’s
useful to have in mind as we explore the landscape of
research, theory, and opinion on the subject: Why, if the
evidence for it is so thin, does the rewiring notion get such
traction? Perhaps it comes down to the same forces that
feed into all moral panic: worries about large-­scale social
transformation, coupled with intergenerational tensions
and a good dose of suspicion about new things that have
entered our lives. Headlines claiming that something new
“changes everything” are catnip for readers, resulting in im-
mense pressure on writers, editors, and pundits to spotlight
research that fits that idea while simultaneously suppressing
anything that contradicts the narrative.36
Why does this matter? Besides being hard to support
with good evidence, the rewiring idea can undermine our
teaching. One way it does this is by exaggerating differ-
ences among individuals based on their relative familiarity
with technology. This exaggeration gives rise to an educa-
tional philosophy in which the younger individuals being
taught — be they kindergartners, adolescents, or traditional-­
college-­aged people — are a fundamentally different sort of
being than you, the teacher. How much common ground
could there be, really, between people whose brains have
been drastically reshaped, compared to your own? In this
40 Chapter 1

sense, teaching becomes a matter of reaching across a

cognitive gulf, picking and choosing modalities that will
reach learners who are very different than ourselves. Good
perspective-­taking skills are essential to great teaching, to
be sure.
Staying aware of the dynamics that exaggerate technol­
ogy’s power, and counterbalancing them whenever we can, is
an important part of our own critical inquiry as educators. If
we really do care about thinking, memory, and learning, and
the cognitive processes that support all of those things, we
are going to need to look underneath the headlines and get
into the details of the actual research. It’s not that dramatic
impacts of technology never happen; there really are some
stunning findings in the area, and the rest of this book’s
chapters will draw on those remarkable studies, details and
all. But to see the true importance of the research, we need
to first self-­inoculate a bit against the trendiness, panic, and
hype that attach themselves to topics of technology and
social change. It’s especially needed in education, which has
long had a problem with fads based on shaky interpretations
of existing science.37

Better Ways to Look at Technology and the Mind

There’s one last caution I want to add, and it has to do with

a kind of othering we do when we talk about the technolog-
ical inventions of humankind. So many of our discussions
and debates seem to be predicated on the unspoken idea
that digital technology is something done to us, rather than
something we humans gladly and eagerly do to ourselves.
Smartphones, social media, notifications, and search en-
gines didn’t come from outer space, even though you might
think so given the way they’re talked about. Rather, these
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 41

things all sprang from our keenly felt human desires. There
is the desire to be connected to each other. To have access to
the information that our memories can’t hold. To share the
images and sounds that move us so deeply as human beings.
To be the first to know the important things happening in
the world, while they are happening. To chase our interests
to our heart’s content, find answers to questions, and have an
ever-­changing feed of content that is completely personalized
and thoroughly relevant. In a word, our technology is us.
Or, you could say that our digital innovations are a mirror,
reflecting back our own essence as a species — the things
we like, the things we want, the things we most love to do.
Perhaps the even more apt analogy is that of a magnify-
ing mirror — something that intensifies, exaggerates, and
occasionally distorts the features of our human character.
Granted, the picture isn’t always a pretty one, but it arises
directly from who we really are.
Technology is reflective, and cyclical, and it’s anything but
alien to our human minds. As Raymond Nickerson describes
it: “The relationship between technology and cognition is one
of dependency that goes both ways. There would be little in
the way of technology in the absence of cognition. And cog-
nition would be greatly handicapped if all its technological
aids were suddenly to disappear. Technology is a product of
cognition and its production is a cyclic, self-­perpetuating
process. Cognition invents technology, the technology in-
vented amplifies the ability of cognition to invent additional
technology that amplifies further the ability of cognition . . .
and so it goes.”38
Nickerson’s calm and optimistic take on the relationship
between minds and machines may not jibe with all of the re-
search we’ll consider in this book. But this kind of reasoned,
evidence-­grounded mindset is what we will need if we are
42 Chapter 1

going to help our students make technology a healthy and

positive force in their lives. Students look to us for that kind
of leadership, and we’re well positioned to offer it to them.
It’s also a mindset that helps us discern the right reasons
for including, or excluding, technology from our classrooms.
Teaching today means making that choice; even those of
us who want to opt out of adding technology of our own
can’t avoid it, as we still have to decide what to do about the
devices that students carry in to class, and we still have to
consider how our course material plays out in the context
of a decidedly technological world. When we can avoid fal-
lacies like moral panic and magical thinking as part of these
technology choices, we’re better placed to take advantage of
the good while sidestepping the bad.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• The idea that technology degrades cognitive capabilities

is a widespread one, but it is not clearly supported by re-
search. Some scholars have made the opposite argument,
that technology enhances and helps us make the most of
our cognitive capabilities.
• Some cautions about technology may also be rooted in
moral panic, a fallacy marked by concerns out of propor-
tion to actual danger, coupled with a profit motive. In
this way, some of the common narratives about technol-
ogy echo much earlier ones, such as worries about radio
and television.
• Technically, computers and mobile devices do re-
shape the brain through frequent use. However, other
 What Technology Does to Us (and for Us) 43

activities — notably, reading — do as well, and so this

concern is one that we can comfortably set aside.
• Generations are more similar than different when it
comes to basic cognitive functions such as memory and
attention. It is unlikely that human cognitive capabilities
have been changed at a fundamental level as a result of
innovations such as mobile devices.
• Some scholars have advocated for the idea that technol-
ogy strengthens our cognitive capabilities, pointing out
that we can do a lot more with technological aids than we
can with “bare brains.” Offloading routine processes onto
computers can free us up to concentrate on higher-­level
reasoning and even creative thought.
• The relationship between technology and the human
psyche is reciprocal and cyclical. We develop tools to
shore up our weaker capabilities and to meet core human
needs, and in turn, technological developments change
how we think.

TEACHING TAKE-­AWAYS

• Avoid recirculating the kind of simplistic, alarmist nar-

ratives about technology that dominate headlines in the
popular press. Present students with reasoned, evidence-­
based viewpoints, and encourage them to apply critical
thinking as they develop their own views and practices
relating to technology.
• Look for opportunities to develop students’ thinking in
new ways through technology. For example, statistics
programs can encourage students to explore data and
44 Chapter 1

practice interpreting statistical tests in a way that hand

calculation or simple spreadsheets cannot
• Avoid assuming that your younger students think funda-
mentally differently than you do because they’ve grown
up surrounded by mobile devices and the Internet. Some
are probably even less comfortable than you are with
these things.
• Consider the way that you use software in your own
teaching, for example, to handle routine communica-
tions, create materials, or track grades. You might be
able to strategically reroute more of your own capacity
into higher-­level, high-­impact pursuits like giving better
feedback or designing creative new learning activities.
 CHAPTER 2

WHY WE REMEMBER,
WHY WE FORGET

“Clara Peller!”
This what I blurted out to my husband, Rick, during one
of our many discussions about growing up back in the day.
I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, having nailed
the actual full name of the person who was briefly famous
as the “where’s the beef?” lady on a set of strangely compelling
1980s TV ads for the Wendy’s fast food chain. This feeling
lasted only until Rick reminded me of how just a few minutes
before, I had drawn a total blank on the name of the current
pope.
In my defense, my memory is great for a lot of other
things:
I know how to hold my yarn to do a long-­tail cast-­on
when I’m starting a knitting project. I know that bolo ties
are the official neckwear of my home state of Arizona, and
have special legal standing as appropriate attire for official
state functions. I remember in terrifying detail how I got
stung by a whole nest of enraged wasps when I was five.
There’s a decent amount of knowledge left in my brain about
46 Chapter 2

psycholinguistics, even though I acquired almost all of that

when I was studying memory and language back in grad
school. I also have a fine verbatim recollection of an elegantly
structured joke involving a motorcycle cop and a woman
who’s knitting while driving.1
But then again, here are some of the things I have thor-
oughly forgotten:
Whether I turned off the iron when I left for the office
this morning. Basically everything taught in the Western
Civilization class I took my freshman semester (I believe
we discussed Rome, but that’s about it). Most of the names
of the students who were in my classes last year. The scien-
tific name for wasps. The exact point in my notes where I
left off in last week’s Language and Cognition class lecture.
From which source I learned that appealing set of facts
about Arizona’s official neckwear (was it a friend? A book?
Wikipedia?). And, frequently, where I parked my car.
You’ve got your own list of memory wins and memory
fails, and when you look at all of those, the pattern is prob-
ably not all that different than my own.
Memory is a bit of a paradox. It’s at once orderly and sys-
tematic, governed by some reasonably simple principles that
cognitive psychologists have managed to get a fairly good
handle on. At the same time, it’s often undependable and a
bit chaotic, retaining some items permanently and remain-
ing stubbornly impervious to others. Sometimes the things
it’s impervious to are those we desperately wish we could
remember. Sometimes what memory serves up, preserved
in perfect detail, are things we wish we could forget.
Some of our memories can vanish over time; in other
cases, they last just fine but are distorted or even completely
wrong. Sometimes memories elude us, but only temporarily:
Picture yourself in the midst of a conversation about the
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 47

Guardians of the Galaxy movies, when you realize you can’t

remember the name of the guy who played Dr. Strange.2 It
sits there on the tip of your tongue, evading all attempt at
capture, then pops randomly into mind long after you’ve
given up and moved on.
All of these quirks make it clear that remembering isn’t
just a process of recording what happens around you then
replaying it all back later on. Memory is recording of a sort,
but the idea that we store information in any way resembling
what digital storage devices do is simply incorrect. And yet, it’s
an idea that many people believe—that memory is a record-
ing capability in the head that takes in information in some
kind of all-­or-­nothing, undifferentiated fashion. That human
memory is on some level basically the same as magnetic tape,
a laptop hard drive, or the video app on our phones.
This wrong assumption speaks to one of many strange-­
but-­true facts about human memory: Even though we all live
in our memories every waking (and dreaming) moment of
every day, the intuitions we develop about memory tend to be
wrong. This tendency is on full display in an ambitious study
conducted by cognitive psychologist Dan Simons and his
research team.3 They carried out a large-­scale phone survey
of over a thousand individuals systematically sampled from
the general United States population (i.e., not college fresh-
men in a psychology course), with the goal of finding out
what people thought about basic principles of memory. In
particular, they wanted to pinpoint discrepancies between
what survey respondents believed and mainstream scien-
tific understanding of memory. To do this, the researchers
presented 16 statements to their survey respondents, asking
whether the statements were true or false. They then posed
the same questions to 16 experts in the field. These state-
ments included:
48 Chapter 2

Hypnosis is useful in helping witnesses accurately recall de-

tails of crimes. 55% of survey respondents agreed; all but one
expert disagreed.
People suffering from amnesia typically cannot recall their
own name or identity. 83% of survey respondents agreed; all
of the experts disagreed.
People generally notice when something unexpected enters
their field of view, even when they’re paying attention to some-
thing else. 78% of survey respondents agreed; all but 3 ex-
perts disagreed.
They also directly queried people on whether they thought
that the brain works like a recording device, through the
statement “Human memory works like a video camera, accurately
recording the events we see and hear so that we can review and
inspect them later.’’ All of the memory experts said this idea
was wrong, but more than half of the survey respondents —
63% — said it was right.
This idea also came up in a study that colleagues and I
conducted that focused on higher education professionals
(faculty, administrators, and instructional designers) —
specifically how familiar these professionals are with a
number of key facts about how the mind and brain work.4
We asked our respondents to evaluate a variation of that
same statement about memory: Human memory works much
like a digital recording device or video camera in that it accurately
records the events we have experienced. Our sample scored better
than Simons’ did, with 74% correctly stating that the claim
was false. Still though, that means that 1 in 4 people in our
hyper-­educated study sample, individuals with whole careers
dedicated to helping people acquire knowledge, had this fun-
damentally flawed concept of what memory is all about.5
In sum, among both typical adults and people with spe-
cialized careers in higher education, memory isn’t something
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 49

that people just naturally have a great factual grasp of.

Intuitions are incorrect, our metaphors mislead us, and even
those of us who have thought about this kind of thing a lot
can stand to improve. As Simons and colleagues put it: “At
least for these basic properties of memory, commonsense
intuitions are more likely to be wrong than right.”6
The intuition that memory is essentially a recording, for
example, is clearly at odds with a well-­accepted concept
known as reconstructive memory. According to this idea, re-
trieval isn’t just a bit player next to the stars of the show,
encoding and storage. On the contrary, it plays a surpris-
ingly large role in what we end up remembering on any given
occasion.
This concept shows up in the unsettling fact that our
memories can be shaped by something as minor as a tweak
to the wording of a question. The classic demonstration of
this is the misinformation effect, something that’s now in
the pantheon of field-­changing psychology studies that you
see in just about every textbook. This phenomenon was the
discovery of legendary memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus,
who devised an ingenious way to quantify just how much a
person’s recollection could be affected through suggestion.7
Loftus and her research team asked volunteers to witness a
set of staged automobile accidents. These realistic crashes,
repurposed from traffic safety films, were set up under con-
trolled conditions, so that the researchers knew exactly how
fast the cars were going.
After watching the films, volunteers were asked to give a
straightforward estimate for how fast the cars were travel-
ing. This is where Loftus’s team introduced their small but
ingenious twist: They varied the exact wording of the ques-
tion. For some volunteers, the query was posed using terms
that implied a fairly mellow event, such as About how fast
50 Chapter 2

were the two cars going when they contacted each other? Others
got a version that implied a more spectacular wreck, such
as About how fast were the two cars going when they smashed
into each other?
Note that all of the research volunteers should have
started out with similar memories, since they did, after all,
watch an identical set of events. And yet, when asked about
these memories in different ways, the volunteers gave differ-
ent answers — about 9 miles per hour faster for the “smashed
into” version compared with the “contacted” one.
This pattern is totally incompatible with the record-­and-­
replay concept of memory, but fits well with a different met-
aphor: reassembling a set of parts, often with a few missing
pieces. Without realizing it, we compensate for those missing
pieces by plugging in content that doesn’t actually belong in
that memory. Usually this is just fine, since we’re probably
basing these invented parts on what’s plausible for the situa-
tion. However, it leaves us vulnerable to things like leading
questions, which ever-­so-­subtly nudge us to fill in missing
memories with confabulated details that match the tenor
of the questions.
The idea that memories are not replayed, but instead
remade when we retrieve them, is closely aligned with an-
other one of the fallacies queried by Simons and colleagues.
This is the notion that hypnosis can tap into detailed mem-
ories hidden somewhere in the psyche. True, hypnotized
people might relate far more detail about a memory when
they’re in this relaxed, suggestible state. However, those de-
tails probably come about through the person embellishing
and elaborating during the process of reconstructing the
memory, or simply because the person doing the remember-
ing applies less stringent criteria when deciding what they
think they remember.8
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 51

Similarly, the idea that one’s whole identity could easily

disappear in an episode of amnesia is easy to debunk. Much
more frequently, brain injury causes the reverse kind of
memory loss — the inability to create new memories, al-
though old ones are spared.9 And, people can and do easily
miss all kinds of things that come into their field of view, if
they’re concentrating hard enough on some other aspect of
their surroundings.10
These misconceptions matter. Simons and colleagues
stress the implications for court cases; it’s especially concern-
ing that in trials that hinge on eyewitness testimony, jurors
lacking a basic understanding of how memory works would
be evaluating that kind of evidence. Jurors who believe in
common misconceptions would be prone to do things like
place too much stock in the testimony of witnesses who seem
exceptionally confident in their memories, or accept testi-
mony based what witnesses might have said under hypnosis.
Nearly as bad, media might pillory a witness whose account
has changed over time or shown minor discrepancies, con-
cluding that the person was intentionally lying when they
were simply displaying perfectly typical patterns of recall.
Memory misconceptions have big implications for our
teaching as well. If we hew to that flawed metaphor of re-
cording, for example, it reinforces the idea that teaching is
about delivering information and learning is about being
able to play it all back on demand. We might assume that
just because some new piece of information was introduced
during class, students would naturally notice and remember
it. We might give bad study advice based on the idea that
when you simply look at information long enough, it enters
some kind of permanent store that students can just dip
back into when exam time rolls around.
Building up an accurate conceptual understanding of why
52 Chapter 2

we remember and forget what we do may be important, but

it isn’t easy. Not all memory theories are simple, and not all
are even close to complete. The good news is that cognitive
psychologists have studied this problem more than any other
problem in our field, and all of this hard work has paid off.
Researchers have developed a rich understanding of the
inner workings of our memory systems, one that doesn’t
just let theorists generate after-­the-­fact explanations, but
also reasonably accurate predictions about how these pro-
cesses will play out in different situations. There’s a lot that
memory scientists still need to figure out, but right now,
there is more than enough scholarly understanding to form
a solid base for good advice about teaching and learning. We
also know enough to begin to make good predictions about
how technology will and won’t affect learning. Or, even in
cases where the facts aren’t quite clear yet, there’s still a basis
for separating plausible possibilities from nonsense, moral
panic, and hype.
So what are the biggest landmark ideas in our under-
standing of remembering and forgetting? Can they tell
us anything about the typical patterns of what we do and
don’t remember? And what do they mean for teaching and
learning?
Let’s start with some of the classic theories.

Classic Theories of Memory

The Three-­Box Model: Sensory, Short-­Term,

and Long-­Term Memory

If you’ve taken an introductory psychology class, you prob-

ably at least vaguely remember a diagram that would have
appeared in the unit on memory. This representation had
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 53

three boxes, probably connected with arrows indicating

the direction that information moved as it arrived via your
senses (mainly vision and hearing). These boxes were desig-
nated “sensory memory,” “short-­term memory,” and “long-­
term memory.” Maybe there was a twist in terminology,
and instead of short-­term memory, it said working memory.
Either way, that middle stop was an important one, mediat-
ing the leap from sensory impression to lasting record. There
may have also been a circling arrow attached to short term
memory indicating something called rehearsal, the process
of consciously refreshing and replaying information that
you’re working to remember.
By way of illustration, the textbook probably explained
that rehearsal is like what you do when you’ve been told a
phone number but can’t write it down, which for most people
involves saying it to yourself over and over. (Today’s psychol-
ogy instructors have to cast about for new examples, now
that you almost never have to remember phone numbers
thanks to contact files and so on.) According to the theory,
this rehearsal process does more than just let you temporar-
ily hang onto a few pieces of information. It also helps make
the information permanent, increasing the chances that it
gets moved along the mental conveyer belt from short-­term
storage to long-­term storage.
This model has provided a clear, concrete introduction
to memory theory for legions of introductory psychology
students, but here’s the thing: Your mind is not a factory,
and your memories are not widgets rolling off a line. This
concept of memory may have been the definitive one for a
few years, but it is no longer believed to be literally true by
anyone in the mainstream of memory research, and even its
broad parameters are now rejected by many11 researchers.
Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin themselves moved
54 Chapter 2

on to develop other, more complex theories after developing

the seminal three-­box model in the late 1960s.12
So what’s wrong with it? One problem is that we now
know that, unlike a conveyor belt, the short-­term memory to
long-­term memory route isn’t a direct one. It turns out that
information doesn’t actually have to make a stop in short-­
term memory in order to become permanent. Dramatic
demonstrations of this principle in action come from in-­
depth studies of individuals with brain injuries affecting
specific aspects of memory.13 It’s possible for a focal injury,
such as a stroke, to wipe out the type of short-­term memory
that you’d use to repeat back a list of numbers someone just
told you. People with this problem might only be able to say
back two or three numbers out of such a list, compared to
the usual range of 5 – 9 that you would typically see. And
yet, people with this kind of selective lesion don’t display
amnesia, or anything like it involving long-­term memory.
In fact, you’d be unlikely to notice anything unusual about
them at all if you sat and engaged them in conversation, and
some experience few or no impacts on their day-­to-­day lives
despite having a major problem with short-­term memory.
This is totally contrary to what the conveyor-­belt model
predicts.
If you’ve ever formed a permanent memory instantly,
without anything like rehearsal or deliberate practice,
you’ve experienced for yourself the way that information
can bypass short-­term memory. This happens often when we
encounter something personally significant, or one associ-
ated with strong emotions such as surprise or fear. We may
rehearse these memories later on as we retell our stories to
other people, but we don’t need to do much when they are
happening in order for them to make their way into more-­
or-­less permanent storage.
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 55

This ties in to another shortcoming of the old model — it

doesn’t say nearly enough about the role of meaningful re-
lationships and interpretations, although those factors have
a huge impact on what we do and don’t remember. When we
can fit incoming material into some kind of a framework, or
if it links into something we already know, it is much more
likely to stick. This principle flows all the way down to how
we understand spoken sentences. Decades ago, researchers
theorized that when people were listening to speech, they
would need to engage short-­term memory pretty heavily,
because spoken words are here and gone in an incredibly
short period of time.14 Listeners would need to dump words
they heard into short-­term storage so that they could go back
and piece it all together later.
But then, researchers discovered that this isn’t what we
do at all. As soon as we decode a segment of speech, our
language processing systems almost instantaneously fit indi-
vidual words into an emerging concept of what the sentence
means. Then, they throw out the record of all the individual
pieces of that sentence.15 In other words, interpretation hap-
pens right away, and when it does, the interpretation goes
straight to longer-­term storage, no pit stop in short term
memory required.
There are plenty of other documented impacts of the
importance of meaningful interpretation for memory, par-
ticularly when it comes to saving things that are personally
relevant to us or that we’ve thought about in a way that
emphasizes meaning. Besides giving yet another reason to
reject the conveyor-­belt, three-­box metaphor, the role of
meaning and interpretation are important for our teaching
practices. And so, these are themes that will come up a lot in
this book — that we remember things we understand, that
relate to ourselves, and that we care about.
56 Chapter 2

Clearly, the old-­school, three-­box theory isn’t the best way

for teachers (or anyone else) to think about memory. So if
this theory is so far off base, why is it still the most com-
monly recognized and talked-­about conceptualization? Part
of it is that, although the details of the theory are almost
certainly wrong, its rests on a foundational assumption
that is almost certainly right: that memory isn’t just one
undifferentiated capacity, but is instead composed of distinct
subsystems that work alongside one another in more-­or-­less
coordinated fashion. Many researchers still believe in the
distinction between memory that’s immediate, conscious,
and transitory, and memory that’s longer-­lasting and that
lies dormant most of the time. Modern theorists tend to see
short-­term and long-­term subsystems as fairly independent
from one another, rather than linked in exactly the way that
Atkinson and Shiffrin first envisioned. However, most of us
agree that using information consciously, in the here and
now, engages a different set of mechanisms than putting
information into and taking information out of longer-­term
memory.
Let’s consider in more depth exactly why it matters that
teachers commonly still believe in this incorrect theory. The
three-­box concept may not be as pernicious as the memory-­
as-­v ideo-­recording idea, but it is still highly problematic for
our teaching. For one thing, it subtly biases us to think of
memory as a container of sorts, which in turn makes us
think of teaching as a straight transfer of material from
teacher to student, shipping information from the container
in our heads to the containers in theirs.
And indeed, leading thinkers have spent decades heaping
scorn upon the container-­and-­transfer concept of learning.
Paolo Freire, the revered Brazilian author of the classic
teaching manifesto Pedagogy of the Oppressed, called this
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 57

idea the “banking model” of education. He characterized

this as a malignant metaphor that ensconces hierarchy
and inequality into teaching, turning it into an exchange
between an all-­knowing teacher and students presumed to
know basically nothing.16 Ken Bain, the education expert
who interviewed some of the most successful college teach-
ers in the country for his book What the Best College Teachers
Do, noted that this was also a differentiating factor between
great teachers and poor ones. Discussing one of the less-­
successful college teachers in his study, Bain points out the
passive, container-­type language that professor used to talk
about his students’ learning. This description prominently
emphasized “transmission” of knowledge, with the teacher
hypothesizing that the stronger students were the ones
capable of “storing away” large amounts of information
and that weaker ones simply lacked the space for it in their
“memory banks.”17
Granted, it’s not Atkinson and Shiffrin’s fault that the
container and banking notions of teaching got started in
the first place; their roots run deep through our cultural
concepts of teacher-­student hierarchies and what learning
is really about. Nor were Atkinson and Shiffrin explicitly
trying to offer advice to teachers when they put the model
together — on the contrary, they were mainly trying to find
a way to make sense of the patterns that they saw in data
generated by highly controlled laboratory tasks. However,
when we fail to challenge their outdated theory, we are ac-
quiescing to the model of teaching as plunking information
into student’s heads.
There are a few other ways the three-­box model steers us
wrong. One is the idea that because there is a set number
of things that fit in memory, as long as you stay under that
limit in what you present to students at once, you’re golden.
58 Chapter 2

Like many other popular-­but-­counterproductive ideas about

memory and learning, this one formed around a grain of
truth. Closely linked to Atkinson and Shiffrin’s research was
another set of findings that came along during the early de-
velopment of modern memory theory.

Seven Plus or Minus One, Chunking, and Recoding

In the course of developing all of these theories, memory

researchers developed some agreed-­upon procedures for
measuring and quantifying short-­term recall. Most of these
involved different variations on saying back lists of numbers
or words in order. Through these, they found that people
showed a remarkable level of consistency in the number of
items they could reliably recall. “Items,” in this context, usu-
ally refers to individual words, or individual digits in a se-
quence of numbers. It can also mean other pieces of informa-
tion that hang together, such as combinations of letters that
mean something. Consider FBI, USA, LOL and so on — each
of these meaningful acronyms would make up one item each,
not three separate ones. The capacity limit of memory was
originally set at around seven of these “chunks” of data, a
number thought to represent fundamental limitations in our
ability to process and make distinctions among incoming
streams of information18 that we’re seeing or hearing. Later
research using different approaches that helped control for
the effects of strategy revised this number downward, to
more like four chunks at a time.19 However, that seven plus
or minus one number stuck in the textbooks and in the pub-
lic consciousness, aided by a classic 1956 article in which the
theorist George Miller dubbed this limit the “magical num-
ber seven” due to its recurrence across all kinds of human
cognitive capacities.20
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 59

The problem for teachers isn’t in the question of exactly

how many chunks (seven-­ish, four-­ish, or another number
altogether) fit into immediate memory. Rather, it’s in the ap-
plication of the capacity concept to actual teaching practice.21
It is a mistake to think that if you put seven bullet points on
a slide, you’ve ensured that students will be able to remember
them all. Each point may contain multiple concepts, each of
which would constitute an item in and of itself. Unstructured
or disjointed points, in particular, will likely end up being pro-
cessed as individual chunks, quickly overwhelming memory.22
Conversely, students might see conceptual relationships
among your seven points that enable them to collapse the
whole series into a single, memorable take-­home point. Or
they might fail to pay attention to your bullet points entirely,
meaning that none will end up being remembered, magic
number or no. (This point about attention is one we’ll explore
in a lot more detail in chapter 4.)
None of this means that George Miller was wrong about
short-­term memory. On the contrary, these caveats prove
one of his most enduring points, one that is frequently
overlooked when people reference that seminal article. This
is the incredibly important role of recoding; in other words,
the process of restructuring raw input into new forms as
we enter it into memory. When we make up a memorable
image to help us remember something new, we’re recod-
ing. When we notice that the letters F, B, and I represent
a single concept that we understand, we’re recoding. Even
something simple like pausing for the hyphen between the
parts of a phone number can be recoding, as we split up the
seven individual numbers into the familiar three-­digit and
four-­digit components. Recoding is something we do all the
time, sometimes deliberately, but often automatically and
unconsciously as we learn.
60 Chapter 2

Whether we recode information, and how we recode it,

can make or break our chances at remembering it. And so,
Miller’s recoding idea is an essential concept that has stood
the test of time, both in practical and in theoretical impor-
tance. We may not call it “recoding” when we encourage stu-
dents to organize information in particular ways as they’re
reviewing it, but it is. It’s also recoding when students make
up images or rhymes as mnemonics for particularly hard-­to-­
remember facts. Even converting from one sensory modality
to another — as when we visualize a scene we’re reading in
a novel, or verbally talk ourselves through a diagram we’re
looking at — is an example of recoding.
In sum, recoding information into chunks is something
most researchers still agree is important for memory, and
something that does hold relevance for teaching. Not so
for rehearsal. Rehearsing items, in the sense of repeating
them to oneself or otherwise refreshing them in conscious
awareness, doesn’t seem to have the power researchers
once thought it did for converting information from tem-
porary to long-­term storage. As noted above in the example
of emotional or meaningful experiences, plenty can end
up in memory without us rehearsing it multiple times, or
ever.23 Further complicating things is the fact that what we
might casually call “rehearsal” might not be rehearsal at
all. Quizzing yourself with flashcards, passively rereading
your textbook, or hearing something said to you over and
over might all seem like rehearsal, but none of them, strictly
speaking, are that. In practical terms, these activities would
all produce very different payoffs for the time invested (an
issue we’ll revisit in depth in the next chapter). Like the 7
plus or minus idea, the notion of rehearsal as the royal road
to memory can give students and teachers alike a false sense
of security about what they’re actually likely to retain.
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 61

Working Memory and the Idea of

Multiple Short-­Term Memory Buffers

Since Atkinson and Shiffrin’s seminal work, there have been

some other major updates to researchers’ basic conception
of how information gets into our heads. The most impor-
tant of these is the working memory concept, a school of
thought most associated with the memory researcher Alan
Baddeley.24 Much of this theory has to do with elaborating
on the component that was originally called short-­term
memory. Baddeley and colleagues made a set of compelling
arguments, backed up with data from dozens of laboratory
experiments, that this part of memory is actually made up
of a number of distinct subsystems.
These subsystems share a common purpose: to hold a
particular kind of information in a readily accessible way.
For example, the “visuospatial sketchpad” keeps pictorial
information in a kind of mind’s eye. It kicks in when we
are doing mental tasks where visualization is key: plotting
a new route through town, predicting how our living room
furniture might look in a new arrangement, working out
problems in organic chemistry, or the all-­important pursuit
of winning at Tetris. Mathematical prowess, too, draws on
this same ability to hang onto visual information as we work
out a problem.25
Other parts of working memory are dedicated to hang-
ing onto language-­related information. A number of these
components are short-­term buffers that help us juggle the
barrage of linguistic data that comes in as we speak, listen,
or read. After our brains have decided that a given sound is
speech, that input is shunted over to these language pro-
cessing mechanisms for analysis. (Or, if we are reading, our
brains convert the letters into language, usually by putting
62 Chapter 2

them into auditory speech sound format, and then they

hand the data over to those same mechanisms.) Linguistic
processing, especially speech comprehension, puts major
demands on short-­term memory, because it flies by so
quickly and because there are so many parts to link together
(sounds, words, phrases) in order to understand what’s being
said. No surprise then that we have multiple, highly spe-
cialized short-­term storage systems for specific aspects of
language. These include a system that holds speech sounds.
It’s possible that we even have specialized subsystems just
for holding the abstract meaning of words, one that we use
for comprehending language, and one that we use to store
the meanings of words that we’re planning to say in the near
future.26
Each of these different subsystems works fairly inde-
pendently, doing its own job without interfering with the
others. Holding them together, symphony conductor style,
is the “central executive.” Besides coordinating among the
players, the executive helps determine what is important to
hang onto; many theorists today consider its operations to
overlap a lot with what we would call attention.
Out of all these various subsystems, the one that’s been
most thoroughly picked apart by researchers is the one
that holds a certain kind of auditory-­verbal information,
specifically the sounds that make up spoken words. Called
“phonological working memory,” or sometimes the “phono-
logical loop,” it creates the experience of the “mind’s ear”
that we almost seem to hear when we are doing something
like consciously holding on to a sequence of numbers we just
heard or read. It is this mind’s ear that is involved in the kind
of rehearsal that Atkinson and Shiffrin were talking about,
especially for the kinds of materials used in classical labo-
ratory studies of recall — lists of words, letters, or numbers.
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 63

The rather impressive amount of research on phonological

working memory has turned up some key facts about how
it works. It’s best described as a high-­fidelity, highly limited
buffer; it preserves a lot of detail about the material within it
but can only hold a small amount at a time. This amount isn’t
best measured in terms of words per se, but almost literally
like a very short tape loop that holds a fixed duration of
speech. This does vary across individuals; some of us have a
larger loop that can hold more, and some fewer, resulting in
a typical range that’s basically the seven plus or minus two
that George Miller hit upon so many years ago.
We also know from the research that distinctiveness
plays a big role in how the phonological store does its job.
Distinctiveness in memory refers to how much overlap
there is among the different pieces of what is being stored
in memory, in this case, how many repeated speech sounds
there are — more repetition equals worse memory. With a
short thought experiment, you can see (or, rather, hear) this
for yourself. Try rehearsing a sequence of words with a lot
of overlapping sounds, such as awe, taught, chalk, shawl, hall,
doll, or c, g, d, b, t, v, p. If you’re like most people, these short
lists will overwhelm your phonological working memory to
a greater degree than lists made up of dissimilar-­sounding
words, like ask, view, rake, lamp, cheese. Why is this? It’s likely
because your mind, in making temporary representations
of those words in memory, is having to reuse the same
components, and as those become difficult to distinguish it
becomes difficult to maintain them all in memory.
It is impressive that researchers have nailed down so much
about how this one piece of memory works. Careful, though,
because just as with so many other classic findings, it’s easy
to misunderstand the role it plays in academic learning. Early
on in the process of developing theories about verbal working
64 Chapter 2

memory, researchers assumed, reasonably enough, that pho-

nological working memory must be responsible for big chunks
of language comprehension. For example, this memory buffer
might be responsible for retaining all the different words that
make up a sentence until we get to the end and can figure out
what the whole sentence means. But as I mentioned before,
it turns out that we rarely do this in language processing,
instead zipping straight to the process of creating an abstract
representation without needing to remember individual words
at all. So while the phonological loop looks like a superstar
during laboratory-­style tests involving lists, and is our best
friend on those rare occasions when we need to remember a
phone number, this component’s involvement in academic
learning isn’t immediately apparent.27
However, there is one single arena in which the phonolog-
ical loop is absolutely critical: learning new words.28 Whether
these are unfamiliar words in your native tongue or new
vocabulary items in a language you’re trying to learn, these
new additions to your mental lexicon are almost guaranteed
to make a mandatory stop in phonological working memory.
In this way, the phonological loop’s job is to replay and re-
fresh the pieces of the word’s sound, buying time while other
memory mechanisms create a permanent representation of
that new word.29
So unless you’re teaching foreign language vocabulary, or
perhaps lots of new scientific terminology, this one heavily
scrutinized part of the mind really isn’t germane to your
work. And while some principles governing it, such as the
importance of distinctiveness, are general ones, we should
be cautious about assuming that research primarily con-
centrating on verbal working memory tells us generalizable
things about how to promote memory in realistic teaching
and learning situations.
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 65

In sum, working memory theory is still considered cur-

rent, and in my opinion it should be required background
knowledge for anyone who teaches. In particular, it’s impor-
tant to take away the idea that memory isn’t just one piece
of the mind, but is many pieces, and that these parts all
work in concert to help accomplish higher-­level tasks (such
as understanding spoken sentences, building vocabulary, or
doing math problems).
It’s also important to be clear about what researchers are
really talking about when they relay their findings about
working and short-­term memory. When theorists use these
terms, they are talking about the immediate short-­term — the
information that a person is actively thinking about in the
here and now. Commonly short-­term memory is talked about
as synonymous with the recent past, as in, “my short-­term
memory is so bad, I can’t remember what I had for breakfast
today.” Unless you’re still in the process of pushing back from
said breakfast table, this isn’t really short-­term memory as
researchers would use the term. Once something goes out
of your immediate conscious awareness, it’s no longer the
province of short-­term memory, but rather, long-­term.

The Three-­Part Division of Long-­Term Memory

What do we know about how long-­term memory works?

This is a question addressed by another classic framework
for understanding memory, one that postulates three dis-
tinct types of memory, each supported by different systems
within the brain. Most associated with the researcher Endel
Tulving,30 the idea is that long-­term memory breaks down
these distinct forms: episodic, semantic, and procedural.
Episodic memories are those which capture a first-­person
experience of some kind. When I think back to myself as a
66 Chapter 2

teenager watching Walter Mondale on television in 1984

badgering Gary Hart with the “where’s the beef?” line — that’s
an episodic memory. When you walk into the university
parking lot at the end of the day and flash back on where you
left the car that morning, that’s also episodic memory. Other
highly context-­dependent recollections are also episodic
memory. Let’s say that people in a laboratory experiment
are given lists of words to remember, then at the end, there’s
a surprise test in which they’re asked to identify which words
they saw at any point during the session. The words would
be long gone from working memory, but people might have
formed a long-­term memory of having encountered those
words in that setting. If so, they could draw on episodic
memory to answer the question. As a last example, when I’m
struggling to recall where I left off in last week’s lecture, I’m
drawing on episodic memory. I haven’t forgotten the lecture
itself — just that particular class meeting where I was last
presenting it.
Whether occurring naturally or as part of a contrived
laboratory procedure, episodic memories are those that are
tied up with a specific setting in a way that more abstract,
factual memories are not. That emphasis on time and place
is what creates the subjective first-­person perspective that’s
the hallmark of episodic memory; these are memories that
unmistakably happened to you, not to someone else, often
including how you felt at the time, sensations that you were
experiencing, or a physical location in the world.
When we are talking about abstract, factual memories,
that is the semantic memory system at work.31 Semantic
memories make up our knowledge about the world, from the
trivial (Clara Peller was the “where’s the beef?” lady, the bolo
tie is the official neckwear of the state of Arizona) to the pro-
found (the knowledge base that makes up our disciplinary
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 67

expertise, our understanding of subjects like history and

geography, our vocabulary). This is obviously a vast amount
of information, so in order to be able to navigate it in any
useful way, our minds impose organizing schemes on all that
we know. Especially in the case of people who know a lot
about a particular topic, all these myriad pieces of informa-
tion are sorted, arranged, and connected up to each other
in meaningful ways.
In my book Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with
Technology, I related an informal case study in which I asked
a basketball fan to memorize a list of names composed of
the top twenty players of all time. First, he was allowed to
study the list of names, which I randomized before showing
them to him. Then during the test phase, his task was to
recall them in any order. Exactly how he did re-­order the
names was telling, as it revealed the scheme he used to or-
ganize the list items — first by the historical era in which
each player was in his prime, then by the teams they played
with and affiliations with other players (famous rivalries,
close teammate relationships and so on). In this way, my
basketball fan roughly replicated what has been observed
in the scientific literature32—that semantic memory isn’t
an undifferentiated mass of information, but rather reflects
the conceptual schemes people build when they acquire ex-
pertise in a particular area.
Linking related information together is one way we store
semantic memory in an organized way, and that helps us
when we face the daunting task of retrieving facts from this
vast repository. If you think about it, it’s rather miraculous
that out of the thousands upon thousands of items in seman-
tic memory, our cognitive systems select exactly the ones we
need, effortlessly and almost instantaneously. We hardly
notice the process, except when it fails. A classic example of
68 Chapter 2

this is the so-­called tip of the tongue phenomenon, which you

might have experienced when you tried to bring to mind the
name Benedict Cumberbatch earlier in this chapter. Tip-­of-­
the-­tongue errors produce that unmistakable mental state
where we know exactly what word (or name) that we want
to pull from memory, but simply can’t do it. The word isn’t
forgotten, exactly; if you’re prompted in the right way, it’ll
pop right into mind. It’s just momentarily irretrievable.33
One of the reasons why semantic and episodic memory
can be so hit or miss is that they are largely driven by cues.
Rather than, say, a filing system with everything sequenced
in chronological or alphabetical order, long-­term memory
is driven by multiple linkages among related things. Some
of these reflect conceptual relationships, like the teammate
relationships that my basketball expert relied on for or-
ganizing the player list. Others have more to do with the
context in which you first put the material into memory.
Even when we aren’t trying to do so, we take in information
that’s around us — how we feel, what we see, sounds, even
the time of day — and this gets wrapped up in other things
we’re putting into memory.
We see this involuntary encoding of cues in the case of
flashbulb memories, which are particularly rich episodic mem-
ories triggered by surprising, consequential events. The most
obvious examples of these relate to big public events —things
like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (1963),
the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger (1986), the
death of Princess Diana (1997), or the attack on the Twin
Towers on the morning of September 11, 2001. People com-
monly talk about these memories using some variation on
the hallmark phrase I remember exactly where I was and what
I was doing when . . . , reflecting the vivid and detailed set of
cues encoded alongside the event itself.
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 69

It’s important to note that these memories aren’t perfect,

indestructible records — despite the name’s association to
antique photography methods where a flashbulb perma-
nently burned all the details of a scene onto film. Research
volunteers questioned about Princess Diana’s death some-
times remembered seeing a video of the car crash that took
her life, even though no such video exists.34 Those recalling
9/11 sometimes remembered that they saw video of the first
plane striking the towers, although this wasn’t broadcast
until a day later.35 Similarly, details like when the Pentagon
was hit, or even one’s own emotional reactions as they
unfolded, fade and become corrupted over time.36 As com-
plete and intricately detailed as they may seem, flashbulb
memories still follow the key principle that memories are
never recordings of reality. But they do illustrate how our
minds compile richly interconnected sets of cues during the
encoding process.
Mundane memories, too, get bound to cues, enough to
make a difference in performance. In the most famous
demonstration of this principle, researchers set up a memory
test with simple information — word lists — to be remem-
bered under a set of circumstances that would provide a
highly distinctive set of sensory cues. Volunteers, all trained
scuba divers, learned the lists either underwater or on dry
land, then tried to remember them either under the same
or different conditions. Memory was better when the test
conditions (underwater versus dry land) matched the study
conditions, which researchers took as evidence of just how
important those sensory cues are.37 Provide the right set
of conditions, and you remember; take them away, and you
just might not.
Why would the mind set itself up to be so reliant on
reinstating the context in which a memory was originally
70 Chapter 2

formed? The reasons probably have to do with making

memory more efficient. When you consider just how vast
your memory stores are, it’s clear that locating the right
thing at the right time is going to be a challenge, especially
if you need to do so quickly. Using cues as triggers may help
us cut through to the right information we need for a given
situation, giving us a context sensitivity that lets us be se-
lective, accurate and fast.
Semantic and episodic memory are often talked about
together, because they have so many similarities: we tend to
be consciously aware of them, they can be triggered through
cues, they are organized along conceptual or contextual
lines. It’s worth noting though, that one can be formed
without the other, even for the same experience. A good
example of this is the phenomenon known as source amne-
sia, which isn’t a dreaded disease but rather something that
we all experience, sometimes embarrassingly, from time to
time. Source amnesia happens when we remember a piece
of factual information (bolo ties are the official neckwear
of the state of Arizona) but not where we learned it (like me
having no recollection of the actual first-­person experience
of having been told that fact). That source amnesia happens
helps us know that there really is a distinction between these
different forms of memory. It also explains one of the com-
monest memory failures that we have, one that gets even
more common as we get older.38 Teachers who emphasize
evaluating sources as part of teaching critical thinking
might notice this as well. It’s something that adds to the
already-­difficult job39 of developing critical faculties in our
students — they may not even remember where they heard or
saw something, let alone be able to evaluate whether that
source was credible.
The last of the long-­term memory systems that makes
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 71

up the classic tripartite theory is radically different from

the first two. It’s procedural memory, made up of stored in-
formation that lets us carry out processes and skills we’ve
learned how to do. My ability to do a long-­tail cast-­on when
I’m beginning a knitting project comes from my procedural
memory. There, I’ve neatly stored away a program of sorts
that, when I run it, tells my hands how to hold my yarn and
the motions to make as I twist each stitch onto the knitting
needle.40 Now that I’ve acquired the skill, I can no longer
easily verbalize each step of the process. This feeling of ef-
fortlessly executed nonverbal memory is what gives rise to
the misnomer of “muscle memory,” the phrase we commonly
use to talk about procedures we know so well that they seem
to have migrated from brain to body.
Of course these memories haven’t somehow slipped the
confines of the brain, but part of what makes procedural
memories special is how they’re handled within the brain.
Unlike other long-­term memories, which are distributed
throughout regions of the cortex (the folded gray matter
that forms the exterior visible part of the brain), procedural
memories are housed within the cerebellum.41 Similarly, it’s
possible to have brain damage that affects semantic and
episodic memory, but leaves procedural memory alone.
This leads to the surreal finding that individuals with this
pattern of amnesia can learn a new skill (weaving on a min-
iature loom, for example, or tracing moving shapes on a
computer monitor) but have no recollection of when or how
they learned it.42 All this together makes a strong case that
procedural memory is a special form of long-­term storage,
separate from our conscious memory of experiences or our
factual knowledge about the world.
Tulving’s three-­part concept of long-­term memory has
held up remarkably well over time. For anyone looking to use
72 Chapter 2

memory theory to improve student learning, the framework

is a useful thing to have. It can steer us away from thinking
of memory as one big undifferentiated bucket, while offer-
ing us definitions that let us be clear about what exactly
we mean when we talk about memory in a given situation.
The framework also puts needed emphasis on the active role
of the person doing the remembering, stressing that we’re
constantly sorting and interpreting everything we might
commit to long-­term storage. This is all to the good as we
strive to see our students as active participants in deter-
mining what they will remember, and in what form they
will remember it.

Deep versus Shallow Processing

There’s one last time-­tested point from memory theory that

all teachers should know about. This is the levels of processing
idea, a concept honed by the researcher Fergus Craik and
his colleagues through a series of ingenious studies focused
on showing that what we do with information when we’re
first encountering it has a big impact on whether we actually
remember that information.43 There are a few twists on the
procedures they came up with, but most of them have some
variation on the following. People are asked to look at a se-
ries of seemingly random words, and asked to make a quick
decision about each one. There are a couple of different kinds
of decisions that can be made, and this difference is the key
aspect of the experiment. In one condition, people are asked
to judge superficial aspects of the word they are looking at,
such as whether it happens to be printed in capital letters.
In other conditions, they are asked more conceptual ques-
tions about each word, such as whether it could fit in a given
sentence or whether it fits a particular category. At the end
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 73

of the judgment task, researchers spring a surprise test on

the subjects, asking them to go back and see which words
they remember. Compare performance on the surprise test
across conditions, and you’ll probably see a powerful trend
toward better recall for words that were judged on the basis
of meaning.
Note that across the conditions, the answers are exactly
the same (yes or no for each word) and the words themselves
are exactly the same. The only thing that is not constant
is the kind of question being asked, and by extension, the
mental processes that are going on as a person answers
the question. Presuming that people tend not to expend
any more mental effort than they have to, they’re likely to
think more intensively about the words they are making
conceptual judgments about, and to think less intensively
about the words they are making cosmetic judgments about.
This intensive thought, or “deep processing,” helps drive the
content into long-­term memory.44
This one powerful idea explains a tremendous amount
about remembering and forgetting in learning situations,
spotlighting the plain fact that simply being in the pres-
ence of course material in no way assures that it will be re-
membered. It explains why students do seem to take away
so much more when they are coaxed into thinking about
material on a deeper level. This coaxing can take the form
of the time-­honored compare-­and-­contrast question, but it
doesn’t have to. In fact, one of the strongest permutations of
deep processing has a distinctly more touchy-­feely aura to it.
Asking people to relate information to themselves — to say
if they’ve experienced something similar, or even just to say
if a term applies to them personally — induces the so-­called
self-­reference effect, an instant boost to memorability.45
Good teachers frequently hit on the depth of processing
74 Chapter 2

principle intuitively and through experience. Most of us

who’ve been teaching for some time develop a sense of what
kinds of thinking students are doing as they grapple with
course material, and we devise ways to push this thinking
deeper. Still, the depth of processing principle is one of the
discoveries about memory that’s most clearly applicable to
teaching, and works dependably across all kinds of topics,
subjects, and individual students, and so, it’s well worth
having a formal understanding of it.

The Flip Side of Memory:

Forgetting and Why It Happens

For everything we remember, there’s much, much more that

we forget. Like remembering, forgetting isn’t random; there
are some principles that reliably determine what slips away
and what doesn’t. And as we see with the research base on
memory, there are multiple distinct forms of forgetting.
The very first psychology textbook46 I ever read had a vivid
metaphor for the different kinds of forgetting. Picture a
house cross-­sectioned dollhouse-­style. There are three differ-
ent rooms, each with items representing stored information
in memory. In one room, the items are dusty and rotting
away, deteriorating purely because of disuse and the passage
of time. In another, they’re jumbled — intact but impossible
to find because of the lack of organization.47 A last room
is bricked off, with access deliberately blocked for some
reason — possibly because what’s inside is too dangerous to
deal with.
As metaphors go, this one isn’t half bad. However, it
should probably also include an empty room representing
things we failed to store in the first place. There should also
be another room where items have been added in layers over
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 75

time, with more recent items obscuring and blocking ones

the ones laid in before. This layered room corresponds with
the principle of distinctiveness, which we also saw at work
with the sound-­alike words used in tests tapping the pho-
nological loop. Similarity is the enemy of memorability, and
when we encode new information, it essentially overwrites
old information that is similar.48
You see this happening in the all-­time classic forgetting
problem of where you last left your car. You remember park-
ing it, all right, but the problem is, you’ve parked it many
times before, and those memories slide together to obscure
the most recent episode of parking. It’s the same thing when
we rack our brains trying to remember whether we per-
formed some routine but important task before leaving the
house — such as turning off the iron. Or, when you commit a
new batch of student names to memory, those start to take
the place of last semester’s students.
All of these forgetting metaphors hold up well in light of
current memory theory, with one exception: the bricked-­
off room. Psychologists once put a lot of stock in the idea
of “active” forgetting as a way to protect ourselves from
trauma; think of the Alfred Hitchcock movie Spellbound, for
example, whose plot hinges on amnesia caused by trauma.
These days, psychologists tend to think that active forgetting
is rare or perhaps nonexistent. Intentionally putting things
out of mind is actually fairly difficult,49 which you know if
you’ve ever done something like set your clock five minutes
ahead and tried to forget that you did that, in hopes of being
early everywhere you go. There’s also a suggestion, based on
a contemporary study of memory among people who had
experienced trauma, that we have better-­than-­average recall
of unpleasant memories compared to pleasant ones.50
Deterioration of memory over time is another concept
76 Chapter 2

that’s been hotly debated by experts, who point out that it is

hard to distinguish true time-­based decay from interference
stemming from other, newer items that have been added
to memory (or in our house metaphor, the room where the
recent items block the old ones). This academic controversy
aside, it likely is the case that age and disuse do degrade what
remains of a memory. As an example, in the first few years
after college, large proportions of factual information that
we acquire goes away and is gone forever.51
Other long-­lasting memories might remain in some form,
but decay warps them as their details are corrupted or con-
fabulated over time. One famous study focused on a group
of middle-­aged men who had, as teenage boys, filled out a
survey on some highly personal aspects of their lives: how
they got along with their parents, whether they thought
premarital sex was OK, and similar things that you would
think would be highly memorable. When the research sub-
jects were asked to replicate the answers they had given as
teenagers, they were no more accurate than chance — as if a
total stranger had filled the survey out purely by guessing.52
That’s enough to shake one’s confidence, but let’s also not
forget that what we encode in memory is but a minuscule
fraction of all we experience. That bare room, the place where
we neglected to actually put the things we might want later,
represents this fact of life — that memory is a leaky container
that catches only a tiny fraction of all that enters. For every
crystal-­clear Clara Peller moment we have, there are untold
numbers of life’s experiences that don’t make the cut.
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 77

Memory as an Adaptation for Survival,

and How Some of Its Bugs Are Actually Features

So are our memories really that bad? And if so, how have we
as a species managed to make it this far? This question goes
to the heart of what it means to have a good human mem-
ory. Let’s remember that we’re fundamentally unlike digital
recording devices, whose value is measured in the sheer vol-
ume that they can hold. Our biologically based memories, by
contrast, are judged by how well they do at helping the brain
accomplish Job 1: Survival.
If we understand that one fact, it illuminates a whole new
perspective on what memory is and what it is for. Instead of
being a place to store things, memory is an ability that our
minds and brains have evolved in order to keep us alive. Or
in more nuanced terms, memory is a set of capacities that
enable us to accomplish a range of important goals: commu-
nication, avoiding danger, prospecting for good things out
there in the world, replicating strategies that have served us
in the past, distinguishing friend from foe, solving problems
and acquiring skills.
Seen in this light, the fact that memory retains so little
begins to make sense. It is this selectivity, after all, that
makes it more likely that we’ll have only the most relevant,
most useful material on hand, and that we will be able to
actually pick out the thing we need when the chips are down.
It also explains the exasperating, now-­you-­see-­it, now-­
you-­don’t quirks of long-­term memory. Having memory be
heavily cue-­and context-­dependent might frustrate us when
we’re struggling to remember someone’s name, or dredging
up an obscure fact. The information is in there someplace, as
becomes abundantly clear once we get the right cue (a place,
a first sound of the name, even an emotion).
78 Chapter 2

So instead of cursing our (or our students’) colander-­like

minds and wishing they could hold more, we should feel
good about the ways that memory does in fact serve us.
There are ways to improve on it so that it picks up more of
what we want it to, and we’ll talk more about those hacks
in the next chapter. But lest we wish we really were human
video cameras, we should consider as a cautionary tale the
rare cases of individuals who really do save almost every-
thing. This rare and puzzling syndrome is called hypermnesia;
the most famous example is the case of “S,” reported by the
neuroscientist A.R. Luria.53
“S” remembered a phenomenal amount of minutiae: the
names of people he’d met years before, lengthy mathematical
equations, entire conversations, verbatim.54 While that last
ability came in handy for S’s job as a newspaper reporter, he
was a far cry from the cognitive superhero you might expect.
He had significant problems organizing and interpreting all
he knew, and struggled to live a normal life. In Luria’s view,
these difficulties had to do with S’s being unable to reason in
an abstract way about the world. Poetry, metaphor, deriving
meaning — these eluded him to an unusual degree.
It’s not clear whether the problems that tend to go along
with hypermnesia are the direct result of remembering so
much, or whether both of these things stem from an un-
derlying issue within the brain.55 But many scientists have
interpreted hypermnesia as proof of William James’ words:
“If we could recall everything, we would be as incapacitated
as if we could not recall at all; a condition to remember is
that we must forget.”56
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 79

Short-­Term Memory Meets Long-­Term Memory:

The Strange Case of Prospective Memory

In the time since the creation of the classic theoretical frame-

works on working memory and the three parts of long-­term
memory, researchers have started to look at a completely
different form called prospective memory. Even if we’ve never
heard the term, this form of recall is instantly recognizable
as the one we use when setting intentions. These intentions
can extend over a few minutes (remember to turn the iron
off before you leave the house) or much longer periods (re-
member to make a reservation for your anniversary dinner
once a year). Prospective memory is also what we use when
remembering not to do something that’s part of our typical
routine — like abstaining from food and water when we are
scheduled to have surgery in the morning, or like stopping
off to do an errand after work instead of following our usual
route home.
Some prospective memories, such as anniversaries, ap-
pointments, or medication schedules, are triggered by time
cues — when a certain time rolls around, we (ideally) remem-
ber to take the intended action. Others are triggered by en-
vironmental cues. Seeing your pills sitting on the counter,
for example, can trigger the intention to take them.
Prospective memory is a bit of an oddball, fitting neatly
into none of Tulving’s semantic, episodic, or procedural cat-
egories. It’s not even entirely a form of long-­term memory,
even though it’s stored in a latent, long-­lasting way. One of
the things that makes prospective memory unreliable (and
it is quite unreliable, as we’ll get into later in this book) is
the fact that some intentions have to stay active in working
memory in order for us to execute them. Think of the “door-
way effect” — the maddening experience of walking from one
80 Chapter 2

room to another in search of some object, such as scissors

kept in a kitchen drawer. While you’re walking, you stop
thinking about the scissors as your thoughts wander to other
things. Then by the time you make it to the kitchen, you’ve
thoroughly forgotten why you walked there in the first place.
You head back to your original room, enter the doorway and
voila — you remember what you needed, triggered by cues in
that original space.
This is another form that forgetting takes — an intention
that we remember perfectly well, but neglected to act on
at the right time or in the right context. Although it’s easy
to overlook, prospective memory is a vitally important
cognitive process. This is especially true given our heavily
scheduled, complex contemporary lifestyles. We can’t always
rely on routine or just follow along with what everyone else
happens to be doing, unlike our long-­ago ancestors. And
while many of our slip-­ups in prospective memory are trivial,
others are not, as we’ll see later on in chapter 4.

Why Do We Remember and Forget What We Do —

And What Kinds of Improvement Are Possible?

No one can say why, on any single occasion, we remember

any single thing. As to why I remembered Clara Peller during
that one conversation with my husband, and not the many
other things I might want to or need to in my life — that will
remain a scientific mystery.
But all of the theories and all of the models that have been
constructed so far can definitely predict overall patterns
of remembering and forgetting. Emotions are huge, espe-
cially ones on the negative side of the spectrum; that’s why
a painful but powerful memory like being stung by a swarm
of wasps will last a lifetime. Cues are critical too; even this
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 81

many years later, I predict that if I were standing in the back

yard of my old house in Alief, Texas where five-­year-­old me
ran afoul of that nest, I’d remember even more. It’s why the
smell of pipe tobacco — the home remedy my mom used to
make a soothing compress — still triggers a flood of sights,
sounds, and feelings from that day.
Then there is the role of self-­relevance and the connec-
tions between new information and what we already know.
I remember that bolo ties are official state neckwear because
I could hook those trivia facts to a rich database of other
things I know about my home state, and probably also be-
cause that information is personally relevant to me as the
spouse of an Arizona native who wears his own bolo collec-
tion on repeat. But in a classic case of source amnesia, I’ve
forgotten where I picked up those facts in the first place.
(Let’s hope that whatever my source might have been, that
it was a reliable one.)
Similar to being able to relate things to ourselves, the
presence of an organized knowledge structure is another
predictor of recall. Once I’d started to gain ground on learn-
ing the major discoveries, schools of thought, and landmark
studies in the field of psycholinguistics, I began to be able
to add to this knowledge base a lot more efficiently. Slotting
new information into an existing framework helps it stick,
and that structure creates additional cues and routes to recall
that make it more likely we can retrieve the information
later. Other kinds of organizing frameworks can also help;
narrative structure, meaning the familiar building blocks
and sequence we use when we tell stories, is one powerful
example. Coupled with the element of surprise and a dose of
emotions, narrative structure is what makes jokes (especially
good ones) stick in mind so well.
By contrast, overlapping, nondistinctive memories tend
82 Chapter 2

to fade: turning off the iron on any particular day, the details
of last week’s version of the Language and Cognition lecture
I’ve given dozens of times, the names and faces of students
in this semester versus the last semester and the one before
that. When you couple these less-­distinctive situations with
a failure to pay attention, chances of remembering plummet.
This is what happens with my typical parking job on any
given morning; with me on autopilot and failing to encode
what’s special about that specific morning, the memory of
one parking-­episode slides into the next.
Other times forgetting happens through simple disuse,
especially the kind where we don’t ever actively pull the
information out of long-­term storage. Because the brain
prioritizes storing what we need to know, it makes sense
to decommission rarely accessed memories. In my case this
meant the departure of the scientific name for wasps, which
I once memorized but haven’t needed to use for decades.
Sadly, this also appears to have been the case for the history
of Western civilization, at least the parts of it that I worked
so hard to acquire my freshman year but never revisited after
I dropped my final exam on the teacher’s desk and sauntered
out the door.
Knowing all of this, can we use these principles to set
things up so that we, and our students, remember more, in
a shorter amount of study time and with a good deal less
angst? In a word: yes. The next chapter explains how — and
why we should.
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 83

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Experts agree on a core set of features and properties

that make some information memorable. These include
personal relevance, an emotional charge, connections to
prior knowledge, structure, and organization.
• Conversely, we tend to forget information that is dis-
jointed, lacks meaning, or is disconnected from our im-
mediate goals and aims. Forgetting is also more likely
for memories that overlap with other, similar memories.
• Contemporary theories of memory have largely moved
beyond the idea that information passes through sen-
sory, short-­term, and long-­term memory. The idea of
working memory has been particularly influential, with
the idea that we have several limited-­capacity subsys-
tems for holding information that we’re actively working
with.
• Contemporary theories do continue to portray memory
as involving three distinct core processes: encoding,
storage, and retrieval. Long-­term memory is also fre-
quently divided into three types: semantic, episodic, and
procedural.
• Prospective memory is another form of memory involv-
ing the recall of intentions set in the past. It is typically
fragile and error-­prone, particularly in situations where
a person is distracted.
84 Chapter 2

TEACHING TAKE-­AWAYS

• Students are likeliest to retain material when they care

about, understand, and actively process that information.
• Although systems for holding verbal, auditory, and vi-
sual information are all distinct, our minds are good at
recoding information across different formats and mo-
dalities. It may be helpful for students to deliberately
recode material, for example, by visualizing a process
they’ve read about or by organizing material from a lec-
ture into an outline.
• Avoid thinking about memory as a container and teach-
ing as information transmission. Instead, think about
memory as a functional aspect of the mind, one that
selectively and strategically takes in only the most per-
sonally relevant and meaningful material.
• Commonly, semantic memory is the type of long-­term
memory that teachers want students to build, as it in-
cludes facts, definitions, and concepts. However, occa-
sionally other types, such as episodic and procedural
memory, might be relevant, so it is good to articulate and
reflect on exactly what we want students to remember so
that we best know how to help.
• Because memory is so oriented toward retaining what
we will personally need to know in the future, thinking
about information in terms of the self is a powerful cat-
alyst for memory. Have students ponder the meaning
of anything you’re asking them to memorize, and con-
sider asking them how that knowledge applies to them
personally.
 Why We Remember, Why We Forget 85

• In academic learning, it is normal for students to retain

relatively little, especially over the very long term. If we
want factual information and skills to last for a long
time, students need highly effective practice and deep
processing in order to strengthen those memories.
 CHAPTER 3

ENHANCING MEMORY AND

WHY IT MATTERS (EVEN
THOUGH GOOGLE EXISTS)

If you’d like to get a roomful of teachers up in arms, suggest

that their life’s work is all about getting students to mem-
orize facts.
If there was ever a school of thought in education that
triggered backlash, it’s this one: teaching that relies on
repetitive memory drills, with the measure of success
being how well students can parrot back information. It’s
an old school indeed, but the specter of the teacher-­as-­
memorization-­cop still fills us with indignation. Even those
of us who are too young to have personally endured an actual
rote-­memorization drill still somehow have a sense of what
such drills are like, and an associated sense of dread.
Taking shots at the idea of memory and memorization
is a signature move of education pundits. The late, beloved
advocate Sir Ken Robinson took this to a new level in his
wildly popular TED talk1 titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”
Throughout the presentation, Robinson explicitly and
88 Chapter 3

implicitly pits rote learning against learning that involves

creativity, self-­expression, and original thinking. The argu-
ment goes like this: Traditional education has suffered with
a fixation on what students can spit back in the form of
memorized information, and in doing so, neglects and even
actively obstructs students’ ability to engage in sophisticated
reasoning.
Some important context is that this kind of critique is
framed, in the United States at least, against a decades-­long
trend toward frequent, onerous, and high-­stakes standard-
ized testing in K-­12 education. This is a policy trend that
citizens commonly despise for myriad reasons; in the minds
of many, it’s tied to the practice of memorization-­oriented
teaching. The complications around standardized testing in
public K-­12 education are beyond my expertise as a higher
education faculty member, and one without a policy back-
ground at that. But I believe that tensions over this issue do
bleed over into opinions about college-­level teaching, leading
people to reflexively dismiss the idea of building a knowledge
base as any part of “real” learning.
We see this implicit assumption reflected in other ways
as well. Consider Bloom’s Taxonomy,2 a scheme taught to
generations of educators as a way to organize all the differ-
ent things we are typically trying to accomplish with our
teaching. If you teach, you’ve probably seen it in one form
or another, usually presented as a collection of verbs: know,
understand, apply, evaluate and so on, all corresponding to
things we want students to be able to do.
Bloom’s system is unapologetically hierarchical, which is
why it’s often illustrated with a pyramid.3 And in this hierar-
chy of teaching and learning objectives, memory is squarely
on the bottom. Whenever I look at Bloom’s Taxonomy, I’m
reminded of the U.S. government’s food pyramid, where the
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 89

bottom layer — remembering — corresponds to something

like white flour, and the rest — synthesizing, evaluating,
creating — lives up in the land of filet mignon, raw organic
kale, and wild-­caught Alaskan salmon.4 The implication here
is clear — excellent teachers don’t spend their time in the
bargain basement of learning, but concentrate instead on
the good stuff up at the top.
That’s the first objection to emphasizing memory in our
teaching. Here’s the other, more modern one: Now that we
have so much information available on the Internet, and
can access so much of it any time, any place, it’s simply not
necessary to commit things to our own individual memories.
In this way, expecting students to be able to recall facts is
about as up-­to-­date as the skills of the roving bards of an-
cient times, the fellows whose stock-­in-­trade was the ability
to reel off memorized epic sagas to illiterate audiences in the
time before books (and Netflix).
David Pogue sums up this idea in a piece titled “Smart­
phones Mean You Will No Longer Have to Memorize Facts,”
speculating that “maybe we’ll soon conclude that memo-
rizing facts is no longer part of the modern student’s task.
Maybe we should let the smartphone call up those facts as
necessary — and let students focus on developing analytical
skills (logic, interpretation, creative problem solving) and
personal ones (motivation, self-­control, tolerance).”5 Pogue’s
prediction in the piece is that the memorization aspect of
learning, once considered bedrock, will go the way of Morse
code and elevator operating as an obsolete skill — and good
riddance, because we instead want what modern life really
demands, robust critical thinking skills.
No one wants to be the teacher who is obsessing over
irrelevant, antiquated skills. Definitely no one wants to be
the teacher who is crushing students’ ability to think for
90 Chapter 3

themselves, their creativity, or their very spirit. So it’s under-

standable that memorization is ingrained in our collective
professional consciousness as something to avoid.
But there are good reasons to question our discomfort,
and perhaps to come to some different conclusions about
the value of memory and even rote memorization as part
of what we do.

What’s the Value of Memorized Knowledge

in the Age of Search Engines?

Memory Supports Robust, Transferable Thinking Skills

The first such reason comes straight from recent cognitive

science research on the relationship between acquiring
knowledge in a discipline, and acquiring thinking skills
in that discipline. As it turns out, when students acquire
a more solid base of knowledge in an area, and when they
do so using more efficient memory strategies, their think-
ing skills develop in specific, beneficial ways. The cognitive
psychologist Sean Kang, director of Dartmouth’s Cognition
and Education Lab, has led a line of research that backs up
this important relationship, demonstrating the ways in
which strengthening memory using particular techniques
leads to the ability to do things like engage in deductive
reasoning about what you’ve learned.6 We’ll get more into
those techniques later in the chapter, as well as looking at
how technology can actually help put them into practice.
Suffice it to say for now that there is a surprising amount
of research already that shows that memory and thinking
skills enjoy a complementary, not competitive relationship
within learning.
This new science reveals another critically important
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 91

relationship. It turns out that memorizing information

effectively, using active-­learning techniques rather than
weaker reread-­and-­review approaches, helps tackle one of
the most stubborn problems in learning: transfer. Transfer
is the process through which, for example, physics students
understand that the principles they are learning apply across
all kinds of different objects and processes — rockets, arrows,
anvils, you name it. It’s what allows a psychology student
to see and understand common ways of setting up study
designs across all kinds of different topics — things like con-
trol groups, experimental groups, and measurement scales.
Transfer is what leads skilled students of literature to reach
for a common set of analytical tools when approaching a
work, whether that work was written a thousand years ago
or last week. It’s the process by which students make concep-
tual leaps between what they’ve learned in a single micro-­
context — one module, one case study, even one course — and
new contexts where the concepts could be relevant. Transfer,
in short, is what makes learning useful.7
Unfortunately, transfer is also about the most elusive
thing we teachers ever try to achieve. This difficulty may
reflect the mind’s inherent bias toward efficiency above all
else; by activating knowledge only in the time and context
where it was originally acquired, we may save some cognitive
effort and avoid traipsing down cognitive paths that aren’t
guaranteed to lead to success. But as it turns out, this design
quirk of the mind is what makes it so hard to get students
to see and exploit the connections between what they’ve
learned and new material and contexts, especially when
they’re relatively new to an area. It typically takes students
a lot of practice and a lot of insight to achieve transfer, and
is an area where teachers typically overestimate how quickly
and well students really are achieving it. And so, it’s a big
92 Chapter 3

deal that reinforcing memory for basic facts in the field helps
speed this process along.

Acquiring Knowledge Helps Students Learn How Memory Works

Deliberately designing a memory component into learning

experiences has another side benefit. It pushes students
to develop metacognition, which we can loosely define as
knowledge about how your own thinking processes work,
coupled with the ability and motivation to do everything
you can to optimize those processes.8 Metacognition has
been a hot topic in higher education for a few years now,
and it’s not hard to see the appeal. It’s a concrete way to
get to one of our cherished goals, that of creating flexible,
lifelong learners — people who aren’t just holders of a crys-
tallized body of knowledge but people who can easily add
and expand knowledge over time, perhaps even leaping off
into brand new fields. It’s also turning out to be an effective
way of leveling the playing field for students who come into
higher education with lower levels of confidence about their
ability to achieve in higher education, or a less advantaged
background overall.9
So how does incorporating memory in one’s teaching
advance metacognition? One way is through encouraging
practice of effective techniques. I think here about a tradi-
tional exercise that elementary schoolchildren do here in
the United States: memorizing state capitols. In the age of
Google, knowing capitols by heart is about the least neces-
sary thing I can think of, except for this: It’s a great way for
kids to learn about the right and wrong ways to go about a
memorization project. States and capitols are essentially a
paired-­associates task, in other words, an activity that re-
quires you to remember an arbitrary link between two items.
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 93

As some kids discover on their own, and as other kids

learn from whoever is coaching them along the way, paired
associates respond particularly well to strategies like the
keyword method. This method involves creating a memorable
visual scene or story to trigger an association. When it’s done
correctly and for the right kind of situation, the keyword
trick works amazingly well. In fact, back when I was a kid, I
remember seeing ads on TV for a mail-­order “super learning
system” that appeared to be built mostly on this one single
technique. To this day, I remember the cartoon of the letter
R sawing a bunch of little rocks in half, which constituted
the miracle, no-­fail trick for remembering the capitol of
Arkansas.10
Regardless of what strategy is used, several other truths
are going to become evident as you work your way through
memorizing all 50 capitols. One is that just skimming the
list a few times isn’t going to work — study has to be active,
and it will work best if students tackle study in shorter
spaced periods rather than in one intensive cram session.
These are both bedrock principles of efficient study that we
will delve into later in this chapter. Especially if students
get explicit guidance in what strategies to try and why, and
especially if they engage in conscious reflection about what
worked and what didn’t, an experience like this can leave
them better equipped to tackle even more challenging self-­
teaching projects in the future.
Admittedly, this metacognition effect hasn’t been ex-
plored by systematic research to the same extent that other
connections have been, such as the connection between
memory and transfer of learning. Nor should we conclude
that it’s a great idea to assign meaningless memorization
projects to college students just so that they can learn
memory strategies. But I think that when we do incorporate
94 Chapter 3

authentically useful knowledge, it presents an opportunity

to help students figure out for themselves the best ways to
make memory do their bidding.

Memorized Knowledge Is Useful Knowledge

Lastly, there are simply practical reasons to have some infor-

mation down pat, even if it is something that’s searchable.
Consider what teaching expert James Lang has to say about
the need for memory:

[T]he Internet has made the storage and retrieval of informa-

tion a much easier task for all of us, but that doesn’t change
the fact that we rely on memory all the time in the practice of
our discipline and trades — not to mention in everyday life. An
emergency-­room doctor rushing a patient to surgery, a lawyer
brought up short by a surprising piece of testimony in a trial, a
sales clerk responding to an unexpected question by a cus-
tomer — in all of those moments, the professional in question
has to draw quickly from a memorized store of previous expe-
riences and information. No doubt the ability to apply the in-
formation from memory to a new situation, and respond ac-
cordingly, represents a different and more complex thinking
skill — but people can’t get to that more complex skill without
access to their medical, legal, or professional knowledge.11

It’s simply not practical to drop everything and run a

search during serious practice of a skill or profession, and
thus, memorized knowledge still has value. In my book
Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, I offered
the example of what my colleague Liz Brauer, an engineering
professor, had to say about her students’ occasional pro-
tests that they didn’t need to know basic principles of the
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 95

discipline. They’d pushed back on her requirement that they

memorize essential knowledge such as Ohm’s law, saying
that they could just look those facts and formulae up any-
time. Her blunt take on this argument was that “if you have
to look up Ohm’s law every time you work on a circuit, you
will not last as an electrical engineer.” I think there must be
equivalent sorts of knowledge in most disciplines — concepts
that will surely form a stumbling block to fluent practice
until you don’t have to look them up.
Educational psychologist Daniel Willingham expands on
the perils of the drop-­everything-­and-­search mentality in a
2017 editorial titled “You Still Need Your Brain.”12 Using the
example of beginning readers, he points out that having to
look up multiple words doesn’t just slow you down, it creates
distractions that cause you to lose the thread of the text.
Similarly, if you don’t know the multiplication tables by
heart, having to look up all the individual products as you
work through a complex math problem will quickly lead to
cognitive overload.
More subtly, but just as importantly, relying on our own
knowledge allows us to better take context into account,
compared to referencing isolated facts we’re searching on
the fly. This happens because the brain is so exquisitely at-
tuned to relationships and conceptual organization in the
way it stores and accesses information. Willingham offers
the familiar example of budding writers who use words in
totally inappropriate ways, reflecting their reliance on the
dictionary definition rather than a deep understanding of
the word’s meaning. Such a budding writer might look up
“meticulous,” find that it can mean “being careful,” and
write that someone meticulously fell off a cliff. That sort of
egregious error might be something most of us outgrow as
our vocabularies expand. However, it highlights the critical
96 Chapter 3

need to connect information to real-­world, complicated con-

texts in order for that knowledge to be useful. And that, in
turn, is something that our brains do well but computers —
including the ones we now carry around in our pockets —
do quite poorly.
Getting back to the relationship between about thinking
and memory, the linkage between the two should cue us to
look at Bloom’s taxonomy a little differently as well. The case
for knowledge as a foundation for sophisticated learning is a
strong one, but we should be cautious not to take the ladder,
building, or pyramid metaphors too literally in learning. We
should also be mindful of the fact that that researchers are
still learning about the way in which the process of learning
facts interacts with developing the ability to apply those
facts.13 Even if all the forms of learning represented by the
taxonomy really are in some kind of hierarchical pyramid
arrangement, that suggests the bottom layer is the most
important of all, because it holds up everything above it.
In sum, the argument for including memory in our edu-
cational approaches includes both theoretical and practical
pieces, all pointing to one important take-­home for teachers:
Thinking and memory aren’t an either-­or choice, and we do
our students a disservice when we treat them like they are.
That said, we still have to acknowledge that there is a lim-
ited amount of time and energy available within any course,
and thus, teachers have to be strategic about how much
time they allot to the bottom layer of Bloom’s taxonomy.
Fortunately, though, there are ways to fast-­track the process
of knowledge building — not just with a few tips and tricks
here and there, but powerful techniques backed by the kind
of research discussed in the last chapter. These are neither
onerous for teachers nor soul-­crushing for students, and
some can even be a little bit fun. The rest of this chapter is all
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 97

about how to put these techniques into practice, especially

with a boost from technology.

Factors that Accelerate and Enhance Memory

We’ll start with the short list of broad, overarching factors

that constitute some agreed-­upon principles for what makes
material memorable, especially in teaching and learning sit-
uations. Then, we’ll consider some more specific practices
and activities that accelerate memory. These practices also
happen to be things that align well with the affordances
of technology, so I’ll point out some ways to leverage them
using things like phone apps and the tools that are typically
available within learning management systems. Lastly, we’ll
take on two special considerations in the question of im-
proving memory with technology. These include the issue of
whether knowing we will be able to find something online
later affects our memory of it, and the impacts of techno-
logical aids specifically for improving prospective memory
(i.e., memory for intentions and plans to be executed in the
future).
As we saw in the previous chapter, the last few decades
of memory research have seen the early, relatively simple
conceptualizations of memory — the three-­box modal model,
working memory, and so on — shatter into a kaleidoscope
of different specialized subsystems and more narrowly
focused theories. Given this, it’s remarkable that there is
consensus on such a concise list of memory-­boosting factors.
Particularly when we are talking about real-­world settings,
such as academic or practical learning, psychologists largely
agree on what kinds of processing strategies and what qual-
ities of the information being learned matter the most for
memory.
98 Chapter 3

Here is what we tend to remember the best, no matter the

situation or the subject:
Meaning and structure. This principle goes back to the
idea that memory isn’t a container, but rather, an adapta-
tion that helps us accomplish our goals. Memory is most
adaptive — that is, helpful to our survival — when it retains
information selectively. Because we’re bombarded with so
much irrelevant and trivial information during every waking
moment, memory needs to be fairly ruthless about what it
selects. Just imagine if we saved every background conver-
sation we heard as we went about our day, every random
noise that entered our office during the workday, or every
detail of the wallpaper pattern in our dentist’s office. What
a waste of space!
Besides being a great shortcut for helping filter the impor-
tant from the trivial, meaningful interpretation also tells us
how to store the information, offering points of connection
to our existing knowledge. These organizational schemes
are hugely important for allowing us to get the information
back later. One organizational scheme that’s particularly
effective is narrative structure — that familiar format that we
use to build up, explicate, and resolve a story. Researchers
have observed that stories, even complicated ones, are es-
pecially memorable, probably for reasons that come back to
interpretation and understanding.
Visualization. Human beings are visual creatures; natural
selection has shaped us over eons to privilege our sense of
sight over other senses, as our snouts shrank and hearing
became less acute. The brain reflects this visual orientation,
with relatively vast amounts of neural tissue and computing
power devoted to processing the data that comes from our
retinas.
It follows that among people with typical abilities to see,
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 99

visual information sticks in a way that other input does not.

This isn’t because they are “visual learners,” a notion con-
nected to the now-­debunked theory of learning styles.14 Nor
is it something that’s strictly a function of the way the input
entered our brains in the first place. Internally visualizing
information that came in through some other sense also
produces a big bump in recall; this is one reason why the
keyword method works as well as it does, even when learners
make up all of their own images and experience them only
in the mind’s eye.
Other senses tend to heighten memory too, although
not in the special way that vision seems to. When we hear
something said in a particular way, or when there is a tactile
sensation that goes along with an experience, those sensory
details become yet another cue that can help lead us back to
a stored memory. They also help make individual memories
more distinctive, which as we learned in the previous chap-
ter is particularly important when we have lots of similar
memory records that overlap in some way.
Emotional charge. Emotions heighten memory, another
principle that seems to link directly to the organization of
the brain. Emotions and memories arise from structures
throughout the brain, but notably, the ones that are most
associated with emotions (the limbic system) and formation
of new memories (the hippocampus) happen to be particu-
larly interconnected. And like our other principles, this too
makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Emotions
exist in order to help move us towards some things and away
from others, so that we can survive and thrive in the world.
And so we preferentially retain experiences that connect to
those motivations.15
What particular emotions tend to heighten recall? There’s
some reason to think that negative emotions are particularly
100 Chapter 3

powerful.16 If you’re like most people, you know this all too
well — everything from trauma to the various cringey things
we say and do tend to stick with us, even when we wish
we could forget them. But positive emotion helps too, and
there’s decent evidence that we learn better within an emo-
tionally supportive and nonthreatening atmosphere. Lastly,
the emotion of surprise seems to act as a potent memory
accelerant. Plot twists in movies, unexpected conclusions we
reach during a research project — all of these hit us harder
emotionally and stick around longer than their unsurprising
counterparts.
Attention. Like emotions, attention has an accelerating
effect on memory. Unlike emotions, it seems to be necessary
for most kinds of memory, especially when we are building a
brand new memory. This is something that we’ll get into in
much more detail in the next chapter, which is all about the
interconnections between attention and memory. However,
it’s important to note the importance of focused attention
for practical reasons, especially given the folk belief that
learning can happen without attention — that is, the learn-
ing by osmosis fallacy. Some degree of focus is needed if
we’re going to remember an experience later, and in general,
the more intensely and exclusively we pay attention to some-
thing, the more we’ll remember later.
Connection to goals. As we can see from all these factors,
memory seems to operate on a strict need-­to-­know basis,
saving what’s likely to be useful and rejecting the rest. We
don’t tend to pick things up just because they might or might
not be useful later on. Even willing our memories to absorb
information because we think it might help us somehow in
the future doesn’t work without some contribution of all of
the factors above, as any student can attest if they’ve ever
studied for a high-­stakes exam and done poorly anyway.
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 101

This bias toward the immediately relevant shows up in

other ways as well. Reading instructions for a project stick
with us when we’re actually engaged in doing the project; we
suddenly grasp the intricacies of tax rules when we’re in the
middle of preparing a return; we learn obscure medical facts
when we’re worriedly reading about a condition we think we
might have.

Teaching Strategies that Capitalize

on Memory Principles

These principles all have clear and broad implications for how
we teach. “We do not teach brains on sticks,” one teaching
guide says, by way of explaining how critical it is to think of
students’ emotions if you want to maximize what they take
away.17 The same guide taps into the element of surprise too,
advising teachers to provoke as much curiosity as they can
from the get-­go. Asking open-­ended questions or assigning a
short exercise that students are just barely able to attempt at
their current skill level are both ways to do this. In one of the
faculty workshops on learning sciences that I help facilitate,
we do it by starting out each module with a short no-­points
quiz based on neuromyths. The questions essentially ask
people to sort facts from common misconceptions about
learning and the mind, and so when they get the answers
a few moments later, most people are surprised — and also
highly attentive, and ready to learn more.
Pre-­quizzes or other methods for getting at prior knowl-
edge also help instructors take advantage of the first prin-
ciple: that we remember information best when it links up
to what we already know. Traditionally, college courses start
out in more or less standard fashion, picking up wherever
students are assumed to be in their knowledge based on
102 Chapter 3

the prerequisites for the course. But as many teachers learn

from hard experience, individual students can be all over the
map in terms of what they already know when they come in.
When instructors fail to get the lay of the land with respect
to prior knowledge, we risk talking right past our students
with information that is highly unlikely to stick around after
they’ve heard it.
Similarly, the technique known as just-­in-­time teaching
(JiTT) helps us adjust for what might be missing in students’
knowledge bases.18 JiTT works by having students do some
kind of assignment, such as short “warm-­ups” or mini ver-
sions of more complex problems they will do later, before a
class meeting. Homework before class is pretty standard, but
what makes the JiTT approach different is how the assign-
ments are handled by instructors. They evaluate the work
before the class period, then adjust the lesson to take into
account what students did or did not do well on. Thus, in-
stead of reteaching concepts that students already grasp just
fine, the time is spent concentrating on the tougher material,
which, if not addressed, can prevent students from adding
the next round of concepts to memory.
JiTT also hooks into the principle that memory takes in
material that relates to present, immediate goals (as op-
posed to abstract, far-­off motivations such as an exam that’s
happening 2 months from now). JiTT is usually associated
with classes that emphasize a lot of active problem solving,
meaning that class is spent applying knowledge and not just
watching presentations. By the time a student arrives in a
JiTT class, he or she has already been primed for what the
content is going to be about, and is put in a situation where
the content needs to be used in the here and now. It’s about
as close to an ideal memory situation as you can get in an
academic setting.
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 103

Speaking of problem-­solving, another approach that

capitalizes on memory is PBL, or problem-­based learning.19
This technique focuses, not surprisingly, on problem solving.
However, PBL assignments aren’t typical short homework-­
style problems, but rather complex scenarios and case stud-
ies that students work through, typically in groups, as an
extended learning exercise. Like JiTT, PBL puts students in
the position of taking in information that they’re using in
the here and now, not in the far-­off future, thus accelerating
memory.
Because it typically involves realistic scenarios and issues,
PBL can also get students to care more about the material
they are studying. In this way, PBL fits within the broader
category of applied and real-­world teaching techniques in
general. Action research teams, for example, get students
involved in actual community projects addressing actual
real-­world issues, not as a one-­off “community service” ac-
tivity but as a way to take material they’re learning about
and put it into practice.
These kinds of programs can have big educational im-
pacts. A few years ago, one of my university responsibilities
involved advising our school’s action research program,
which linked a set of first-­year courses to a variety of applied,
real-­world projects. These included everything from build-
ing a community garden to leading discussions on immi-
gration issues with groups of local residents, with students
completing assignments along the way that connected the
academic and applied sides of the course. These courses were
a lot of work, but worth it, as it turned out. Our analyses
revealed that these action research linked courses had mul-
tiple benefits, most notably, raising retention rates among
female and underrepresented minority students. Students
described this kind of hands-­on work as challenging, but
104 Chapter 3

also engaging, emotionally rewarding, and relevant — in

other words, a winning combination for creating lasting
memories.
There are also the sensory aspects of the teaching ma-
terials and techniques we’re using. Touching, hearing,
seeing — all of these physical experiences add to the depth
of what we remember and create distinctive traces that help
make the memory stand out. One clear implication is the
value of physical laboratory and field experiences, whose rich
experiential qualities should lead to the creation of lasting
memories. As long as the actions and sensations are reason-
ably relevant to the concepts at hand, they should amplify
and complement learning. In other words, just having a lot
of sensations pouring in during learning won’t help, but if
those sensations are meaningfully linked to the learning,
they will help.
Because the visual superiority principle is so important,
much research has also focused on the impacts of visual ed-
ucational materials such as diagrams, animations, and info­
graphics. This research has uncovered quite a few guiding
principles, including the importance of conceptual relevance.
Once you know about the importance of visualization for
memory, it’s tempting to start doing things like littering
your slide decks with lots of random clip art. But based
on the research to date, it’s likely that decorative images
don’t enhance memory. Only those that convey content in
some way — showing how a process unfolds, for example,
or giving a pictorial representation of something described
in text — boost recall of concepts later on.20 Let’s not forget
as well that the power of visualization can be harnessed
without having to set up illustrations at all. Teachers can
ask students to create their own pictorial representations
of what they are learning, either on paper, as photo essays,
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 105

or even as purely mental images. These too will activate the

cognitive mechanisms that make pictures memorable.
All of the teaching approaches I’ve suggested — pre­
assessment, setting a positive emotional tone, just-­in-­time
teaching, project-­based and experiential learning, rich
multi­media — are beneficial for all kinds of reasons that go
well beyond memory. But what sets them apart is that they
all jibe with the reasons why our minds retain what they do.
And so, these approaches all have bigger and better impacts
on knowledge acquisition than many of the tactics that we’d
traditionally see in a university classroom. These traditional-­
but-­suboptimal tactics include presenting long sequences of
text-­heavy content for reading and reviewing, with actual
application just a speck in the far-­off future.

Targeted Techniques for Improving Memory

The suggestions above are all fairly general guidelines that

teachers can use to nudge memory along. Let’s turn now to
more narrowly focused methods that learners can engage
in to build memory.
Now, if you ask most people about specific techniques for
boosting memory, you’ll likely get a description of a short-
cut or two that they learned for memorizing information in
school. These include the first-­letter technique for remem-
bering a set of ordered items (Every Good Boy Does Fine,
Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, and so on). Similarly, sto-
ries or even songs can be put to work as organizing schemes
that help cue up information and make it easy to recall. In
other words, when most people think of memory techniques,
they’re referencing mnemonics.
The keyword method I mentioned earlier, where an image
is used to link a pair of items (R can saw — little rocks), falls
106 Chapter 3

into the category of narrowly focused mnemonics. So does

the “memory palace” technique21 that can be used to memo-
rize complex sequences of information, such as a prewritten
speech. Memory palaces work more or less the same way
as the keyword method does, except that instead of using
images to make associations between individual words, you
make a set of associations between concepts and stops along
a familiar set of locations. For example, you could associate
each one of the main talking points in your speech with a
location in your house, creating some kind of striking image
to encapsulate each one.
Memory palaces work by leveraging our brain’s built-­in
mechanisms for remembering spatial relationships and
routes, coupled with the visual superiority and — in the case
of weird or outrageous image pairings — element-­of-­surprise
principles. When you follow the procedure scrupulously, it
works like a charm. Once you’ve mastered the technique,
and once you put in the effort to create and rehearse your se-
quence of associations, you can recall a phenomenal amount
of information without using notes.
Mnemonics are great for this kind of one-­off memo-
rization task, and one I’ve used frequently myself to do
things like give speeches without notes or memorize a set
of names.22 And who would ever manage to learn all the
letters of the alphabet in order without the song — another
mnemonic device that takes advantage of the way music
is structured. However, mnemonics are not what I tend
to emphasize as strategies for academic learning.23 This is
because they tend to be one-­trick ponies, limited to only a
very narrow kind of material or situation. To the extent that
mnemonics encourage us to peek under the hood of memory
to see what makes it work, they’re a good thing. But there are
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 107

far more versatile techniques that we can apply specifically

to academic learning.
Here are the most powerful of these techniques:
Retrieval practice. This is far and away the star of memory
improvement techniques; it manages to be both conceptually
straightforward, backed by piles of empirical evidence, and
usable across a wide range of situations and subjects. The
term itself refers to retrieving information from memory, as
we do most commonly (but not exclusively) when we answer
test questions.24 This idea might take a bit of getting used to
in academic settings, where tests are usually cast as a way to
measure learning rather than as part of the learning itself.
But as we’ll get into in a minute, there’s plenty of proof that
learning is exactly what happens when we practice pulling
information out of memory.
In academic settings, retrieval practice can take the form
of answering exam questions. It can also happen through
low-­stakes quizzes, which have become popular in educa-
tion circles as a way to encourage frequent studying and
provide accountability for doing the reading before class,
while simultaneously reaping the benefits of retrieval. In
my courses, I often make these repeatable for credit, so that
students can keep taking each short quiz (with questions
sampled randomly from a larger database) until they achieve
a perfect score, if they want. Doing it this way defeats the
purpose of measuring and evaluating student work in a com-
petitive way, but that’s not the point — rather it’s intended
to reinforce learning, through as many attempts as students
need or want. And in a way, that’s the mindset shift that has
to happen in order for teachers to use this principle effec-
tively, acknowledging that tests aren’t just a measurement
device, but a learning device as well.
108 Chapter 3

There are examples of retrieval practice at work in all

kinds of everyday situations too. Consider that little gate-
keeper of contemporary commerce, the three-­digit CVV code
on the back of your credit cards. Do you pull out your card
and read the numbers off every time you need to order some-
thing with it? If so, you’re unlikely to ever commit that code
to memory. You might have to go check it every single time,
for as long as you have that card. But if instead you challenge
yourself to try to type it in without checking first, pretty
soon you won’t have to. Even if there are a few bad attempts,
trying helps, a lot. Similarly, if you want to remember a new
acquaintance’s name, the best thing you can do is try to use
their name in conversation. But what if you get it wrong?
You’ll endure a moment of awkwardness, but when you hear
it corrected, you’re much more likely to remember it in the
future if you just tried to do so on your own.
Retrieval practice has made some major waves in the
pedagogy field, and rightly so. Rarely have we seen a set of
findings with such clear and compelling implications for
learning. I first started writing about incorporating retrieval
practice into teaching in 2009,25 and many others have
weighed in as well, pointing out how this phenomenon can
be leveraged to help students build a stronger base of knowl-
edge, in less time.26 The research on retrieval practice started
decades ago, but amazingly, more findings keep coming out,
even today.27 Essentially, what the studies demonstrate is
that when students answer questions about material, they
remember it better and for longer, even if it’s material they
do not know well when they first try to answer the questions.
It’s a remarkably robust effect, one that is hard to mess up
no matter how you go about applying it. It works best when
students get immediate feedback, and when the questions
are open-­ended or short answer in style.28 But even the most
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 109

basic of multiple-­choice questions, even those with delayed

feedback or no feedback at all, tend to produce some degree
of improvement. This is particularly apparent when studying
via quizzing is stacked up against other common approaches,
such as rereading or reviewing material.29 These common
study activities may create an illusion of learning, as the
material becomes more familiar, leading to a comfy sense of
security that may not be warranted by the actual strength
of one’s learning.30 Rereading may offer some other kinds
of benefits, such as provoking reflection and encouraging
students to explore a text in depth. But when it comes to
memory, research reveals that rereading offers essentially
nothing.31 It’s hard to believe, given that the preferred strat-
egy for so many college students is to go at their textbooks,
hour after hour, with an array of highlighting pens — but
the return on time invested is vastly less than if they simply
closed the books and tried quizzing themselves about what
they just read.32
Furthermore, as I described earlier in the chapter, these
memory benefits aren’t independent from benefits having
to do with higher thought processes. One way to pinpoint
the development of these higher thinking abilities is to
pick specific kinds of conceptual leaps that learners make
in certain kinds of learning situations. Take the example of
a person learning different families of birds. It starts with
memorizing the individual species and the families to which
they belong, but eventually, the learner should advance to
being able to categorize new, never-­before-­seen examples
into the correct families. This important mental process,
called inference, develops more quickly when learners engage
in retrieval practice.33
The benefits extend to physical or procedural skills as
well. One study of people learning emergency resuscitation
110 Chapter 3

procedures, for example, found better scores on a final skills

exam when learners also took tests of their skills earlier
on in the course.34 Even mathematical relationships that
are hard to put into words are picked up more accurately
when learners actively attempt to answer questions about
the functions as they go.35 And all of these skills and abilities
are more likely to transfer to new situations when enhanced
with retrieval practice, making it more likely that they’ll
serve learners well in the future.36 In other words, when you
solidify your knowledge using better study methodologies,
it’s easier to use that knowledge in a wider range of contexts
where you might need it.
As if there weren’t already enough reasons to take up re-
trieval practice as a learning strategy, there’s even some sug-
gestion that asking and answering questions helps smooth
the pathway to remembering things you haven’t even studied
yet. Let’s say that you’re watching a lecture. Partway through,
the speaker stops and asks you to answer a few questions
about the material so far. The act of doing this actually
enhances what you’ll pick up later on down the line after
the lecture resumes, a phenomenon called test-­potentiated
learning. This dynamic helps power the time-­tested “SQ3R”
and “PQ4R” strategies that students are commonly taught
as strategies for making textbook reading sessions more pro-
ductive. The “Q” in both refers to questions, and the methods
take advantage of the fact that when you ask questions before
encountering concepts, that primes you to pick up more from
what you’re about to read, regardless of whether you answer
your original question. Even answering a test question incor-
rectly can promote learning amazingly enough, provided that
getting the answer wrong triggers a student to go back and
restudy what they missed.37 Normally, restudying does next
to nothing to boost memory, but retrieval practice creates an
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 111

exception to this rule, creating a special receptive window

during which restudied information actually does stick.
There are probably multiple reasons why retrieval practice
works, which in turn helps explain why it works as well and
as flexibly as it does. For one, it forces us to drop one of the
biggest barriers to effective study, which is overconfidence in
what we think we will remember.38 Putting ourselves on the
spot with a quiz exposes our weakest areas, which may not
always be pleasant or comfortable, but that tells us exactly
where we need to focus our additional studying. It is effort-
ful and attention-­demanding, which are both factors that
enhance memory. Especially in the case of test-­potentiated
learning, retrieval may prod you to be more attentive during
something like a lengthy lecture, providing a reminder to
stay focused because you might be asked questions about
what’s to come.
Retrieval may even help cue our brains to the usefulness of
what we’re recalling, because after all, if we have to produce
a piece of knowledge on one occasion, it’s pretty likely that
we’ll have to do so again in the future. It is also just generally
true that taking action tends to spark retention. Consider
all the times that you’ve been driven someplace as a passive
passenger. How confident are you that you’d be able to drive
to that same place yourself? Now consider places you traveled
to in the driver’s seat. You’re a lot better placed to navigate to
those again. The active role matters a lot, even if you made
mistakes or had to check your directions along the way.
Even with all of the great promise and substantial research
associated with retrieval practice, the idea can be counter-­
intuitive or even repellent to some. Especially among teach-
ers who are heavily invested in the philosophical stance that
tests are a creativity-­killing blight on education, having more
of them is just about the last thing they’d want to do. In the
112 Chapter 3

United States, we also have to remember that this is all play-

ing out against the backlash generated by K-­12 educational
policies that revolve around lengthy, frequent, high-­stakes
standardized testing.39 People hear “more tests,” and they
quite naturally picture the drills, stress, and constant time
pressure that have indeed been a blight on America’s public
school classrooms for some time.
These bigger philosophical and political contexts are
beyond our power to change, at least in the short term.
There are some more specific objections to using tests for
teaching, though, that can be easily addressed through the
research literature we already have. Here are some of the
most common themes you hear in criticism of learning that’s
stimulated by testing.
It doesn’t last. This is part of the “cram and purge” con-
cept that most of us have when we think of material learned
solely because of a test. While it is true that information
we don’t need or use will tend to be forgotten, there’s no
reason to believe that material learned in connection with
a test is subject to any kind of special treatment as far as
remembering and forgetting are concerned. Researchers
have also looked specifically at this issue, in order to verify
that the boost they see from retrieval practice in laboratory-­
type studies does in fact last for any practically significant
amount of time.
The results of these studies are encouraging. Attempting
to replicate the kind of content and time frame that would
be typical for a college course, one research study looked
at retention for the content of a set of art history lectures.
The lectures were initially spread over three days; research
participants playing the part of students were instructed to
study the material either through answering quiz questions,
or reviewing written lecture summaries. Those assigned to
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 113

quizzing did better on an exam held about a month later — a

long time, as far as memory is concerned, and also very much
in line with the time frames for retention that we’d expect
in a typical college course.40
It’s superficial, not “real” learning. Similar to the short-­
term learning idea, there is another common objection, that
there’s something fragile or fake about learning that’s tied
to testing. And we would want to be sure that the learning
established this way does have the well-­organized structure
and rich interconnection to other knowledge that cognitive
scientists think of when they consider the depth or quality
of concepts in memory. This is also the kind of learning that
does tend to be transferable, lending itself to new questions
or new applications in a way that superficially memorized
facts do not.
Memory researcher Jeffrey Karpicke takes on this idea in
an article titled “Retrieval-­Based Learning: Active Retrieval
Promotes Meaningful Learning.” He points out that retrieval
practice’s documented links to transfer and complex thought
processes (e.g., drawing inferences) supports the idea that it
is producing the development of rich, usable, high-­quality
memories, not isolated facts scattered here and there. He
also notes that the benefits don’t just hold for quiz questions
that are repeated verbatim across study and test; improve-
ments are seen even for questions that are quite different,
or require sophisticated applications of what’s been learned.
And finally, it’s hard to call retrieval practice’s results su-
perficial when they also apply to complex processes such as
learning functions, and not just to things like memorized
definitions or simple matching.41
Testing kills authentic enthusiasm for learning and heightens
anxiety. This claim can be a bit harder to address, given that
it can be subjective or even become a self-­fulfilling prophecy.
114 Chapter 3

Certainly, a teacher’s attitudes about testing, coupled with

the past history of any given student, could color how exams
and quizzes make a person feel.
However, there’s good reason not to automatically assume
that retrieval practice’s benefits come only at the price of
emotional distress. One thought-­provoking study of mid-
dle-­and high-­school students found that spreading frequent
low-­stakes assessments throughout a course — in this case,
questions that students answered using “clicker” devices in
class — actually reduced self-­reported anxiety associated with
higher-­stakes exams.42 According to the researchers, there
were probably several ways that these everyday, no-­big-­deal
clicker quizzes helped anxiety. First, they got students used
to being in testing situations, building up a level of famil-
iarity that helped reduce fear. Second, the clicker quizzes
were simply a better way to study, leading students to feel
justifiably more confident when heading into a big-­ticket
testing situation. These are all possibilities that do need to
be researched more deeply. But this is a good initial sugges-
tion that when it comes to students’ feelings about tests and
studying, quizzing does no harm and may do substantial
good.
Spacing. This principle tends to be more intuitive, and
an easier sell in some ways, compared to retrieval practice.
Spacing, which sometimes goes by the name “distributed
practice” in the scientific literature, has to do not with the
way you study but in the way that you manage your study
time.
Simply put, you get more out of the time when you split it
up into shorter sessions: two ninety-­minute sessions instead
of a single three-­hour session, for example. And, the more
finely sliced and spaced-­out the sessions, the better. The
limits on spacing are mostly practical ones, guided mostly
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 115

by how short a session can be and still allow you to settle in

and focus, as well as the lead time you need to set up these
multiple short sessions.
Telling students to follow a study plan, start early, and
not cram have all long been standard study skills advice, but
few such advice guides explain why the principle works and
where its impacts come from. Like retrieval practice, spacing
probably works because of several different mechanisms.
One thing it does is break down the association between
specific environmental cues and what’s being learned, which
in turn makes it easier to remember information when we’re
in a very different environment than where we first stud-
ied it. One side effect of a marathon cram session is that
background cues — the place, time of day, even our mood
and how we feel — will tend to get tied to the information
that we are learning. We’re probably more focused during
shorter sessions as well.43 There’s even some suggestion that
spaced learning helps stimulate the growth and survival of
cells in areas of the brain that are critical for new learning
and memory.44
That is the theory of why spacing works, and a large
number of studies show that the theory plays out just as
predicted across a robust variety of learning situations.45 In
one classic study, increasing the spacing of study sessions
over time produced gains in retention that were evident eight
years later.46 Similar to the case of retrieval practice, it’s not
just simple associations or easy facts that stick better with
spacing. Complex motor skills, nuanced definitions, difficult
grammatical concepts, mathematical reasoning: All of these
have been shown to benefit from this one relatively easy,
straightforward memory strategy.47
Recently, researchers have also uncovered a new fact about
spacing: It may enhance the effect of retrieval practice.48
116 Chapter 3

Psychologists Regan Gurung and Kathleen Burns examined

performance in Introduction to Psychology courses across
nine different higher education institutions, focusing on
what happens when the course design encourages more or
less retrieval practice, and more or less spacing (e.g., through
spreading out quiz deadlines versus having quizzes due all
at once just a few times during the semester). Gurung and
Burns found that these two course features interact, so that
retrieval practice is most beneficial when also coupled with
spacing.

High-­Tech and Low-­Tech Ways to Take Advantage

of Retrieval Practice and Spacing

Retrieval practice and spacing are features that we teachers

can — and probably should — build into our classes. Once
again, that doesn’t mean teaching to high-­stakes, high-­stress
tests all of the time. It can take the form of “brain dump”
exercises where students put down on paper everything they
remember from a previous class or topic, as quickly as they
can in any order. It can look like playing a Jeopardy!-­style
game before the big test. It can mean refocusing assignments
around mastery, so that students get the chance to go back
and restudy, retest, or otherwise reattempt work throughout
the course.
Both principles also really take off when coupled with
technology. Things like smartphone apps and learning-­
management systems go together with memory improve-
ment strategies like peanut butter and jelly, which is a
point I’ve argued for a while within ed-­tech and learning
circles.49 However, this lovely synergy gets rolling only when
the design of the tech is tightly aligned with the ways in
which memory and learning work. Fortunately, there are
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 117

some great examples out there of what this can look like in
practice, and probably more in development as I type these
words. The best ones to date, both in terms of overall useful-
ness and solid implementation of memory principles, tend
to be grouped in a few major areas: quizzing applications,
language learning programs, and adaptive learning systems.
Quizzing applications. One of the best developments in
mobile ed-­tech has been the proliferation of apps specifi-
cally for asking and answering questions. Whether styled
like traditional test questions, survey items, flashcards, or
competitive games, they’re obviously in line with what we
know about retrieval practice. When they’re designed to use
in short sessions, somewhat like the casual games we might
use to kill a few minutes on our phones, they also take ad-
vantage of spacing.
My favorite among these is currently Kahoot!,50 a program
that lets teachers create fast-­paced competitive quizzes with
a variety of different question types (multiple-­choice, true-­
false, and more). These can then be played quiz-­game style in
a group using any internet-­enabled device. What I like about
this approach is that first, students need not purchase or
even download a freestanding app, but can instead partici-
pate just by going to Kahoot!’s web site and typing in a code
that’s issued once the teacher launches the quiz. I also like
how it manages game play. Participants can quickly type in
a name (I prefer pseudonyms over real names), and winners
are declared after each question and after the whole quiz,
based on a points system that takes into account speed as
well as accuracy. Teachers can quickly scan a report after
the quiz that flags the most-­missed questions as well as
the proportion of students who picked different question
options. This is great for something like an exam review,
where you’d want to hone in on the concepts that students
118 Chapter 3

are currently having the most trouble with. And lastly, the
thing just works. So far, I’ve experienced mostly smooth and
error-­free performance from the system, which seems to be
built on the philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.
Kahoot! isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; in what the company
describes as a deliberate design choice, there’s a strict limit
on the length of questions and answers. It also has peppy
background music and a primary-­color-­heavy aesthetic that
might not be adult or academic enough for some tastes.
This is okay, though, because it is definitely not the only
game in town if you want to ask questions for learning.
Poll Everywhere is a well-­established system that’s mainly
designed to stimulate audience participation during pre-
sentations; similar to Kahoot!, it lets you write questions
that people then weigh in on using their own devices, but
with less emphasis on competition and more on showing
the distribution of answers. Quizlet is another one that has
been around for a while; it has different options for mobile-­
friendly quizzes, with an emphasis on saving and sharing
question sets. If you want to take a different approach
altogether, you can use student response system (SRS)
technology, which collects responses through specialized
hardware resembling remote controls instead of through
personal mobile devices. And by the time this book makes
it to you, there may be even more newly invented options
to choose from.
People tend to focus on the gamification aspects of quiz-
zing systems, or similarly, on how the systems work as a mo-
tivational tool. This facet of the tech is important, especially
when you’re looking to reduce student anxiety or hoping to
keep them engaged through tougher material, such as an
exam review.51 But it’s not all about the fun factor, because
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 119

something like Kahoot! can function as a near-­perfect plat-

form for retrieval practice.
Indeed, the research to date suggests that the effective-
ness of such systems derives from their ability to tap into
this memory principle. One controlled experiment revealed
that introducing Kahoot! quizzes for exam review into an
introductory psychology course significantly raised exam
scores.52 Other studies found similar positive effects for
Kahoot!, but noted that these advantages weren’t any greater
than frequent, low-­stakes quizzing done through other
means, such as questions presented via SRS or quizzes taken
privately on one’s own device.53 There’s clearly a lot left to
learn about the educational uses of quizzing systems, but for
now, it looks like the gameplay aspects of Kahoot! aren’t the
most critical features that lead to learning. Teachers might
choose it or another system depending on the particular
look, feel, and pacing that they’re after in any given learning
situation. Ultimately, though, these systems are best seen as
a means to an end — that desired end being active retrieval
of the facts students need to know.
Programs for language learning. Here as well, there’s one
standout in the current marketplace: Duolingo. This system
offers access to dozens of the worlds’ languages, via a plat-
form that is geared to short practice sessions. It is endowed
with even more game-­like features than Kahoot!, although
these are less oriented toward head-­to-­head competition and
more toward accruing points, earning badges, and leveling
up. You alternate between pronunciation, writing, com-
prehension and vocabulary tasks, with a focus on practice,
although there are also short stop-­outs that do more explicit
teaching
This is all a fresh take on traditional language instruction,
120 Chapter 3

and if you’ve ever tried it, you probably have found yourself
carried along with its engaging little touches, like the jingle
that goes with each correct answer, as well as by the rush
of accomplishing each new level. Its fast-­paced drills clearly
leverage retrieval practice, with minimal passive exposure
and maximal active recall. Spacing, too, is built into the
design, both by breaking the learning into tiny micro-­lessons
you access on the go, and by features like built-­in (and fairly
aggressive) reminders to practice every day. This is a par-
ticularly good thing given that learning a new language as
an adult is one of the most memory-­intensive, cognitively
demanding projects you can attempt.
One big caveat about Duolingo, though, is that it con-
centrates mostly on basic translation skills and vocabulary,
not on the cultural and conversational aspects of language
learning. As any professional language instructor will tell
you, this social-­cultural fluency is critical to actually being
able to function in a foreign language. Thus, Duolingo and
similar apps are perhaps best viewed as a way to build a
foundation for becoming fluent, not as the road to fluency
per se. But that head start isn’t anything to sneeze at given
the extraordinary demands of becoming fluent, and so, it’s
worth crediting Duolingo as adding something potentially
quite valuable in this space.
So how does the research on Duolingo stack up?
Surprisingly, there’s relatively little research on it, consid-
ering its runaway popularity around the globe.54 Studies of
classes where Duolingo is coupled with traditional instruc-
tion suggests that students tend to like using the system,
expressing that it does indeed have a fun factor that can be
missing from other more traditional forms of study.55 What
about effectiveness? One study directly compared lessons
teaching the same exact content (basic Italian vocabulary)
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 121

using either a slideshow-­style, direct-­instruction presenta-

tion or the gamified Duolingo approach. It turned out that
students did like the Duolingo approach more and said that
they’d be more likely to pursue further lessons with it com-
pared to the more traditional alternative. They didn’t learn
more, though — researchers found that performance was
about the same for both groups. We have to keep in mind
that this study wasn’t focused on typical use, where users
decide when and how often to do the lessons, but instead
scheduling use over a series of days. This made for a clean
study design, but suggests that in realistic use, learning
might be better for the system that users would be likely to
actually use more frequently. That possibility, coupled with
the emphasis on retrieval practice, offers some reason to be-
lieve that mobile apps for language learning can be powerful.
Duolingo may be the current rising star, but there have
been a number of others on the tech-­assisted language
learning scene. Rosetta Stone and Babel are two well-­known
examples. They tend to offer more complex features (think
live-­coaching and sophisticated speech-­recognition tech
for honing one’s accent), and bigger price tags to match,
compared to Duolingo. But what the systems all tap into
are the unique capabilities of technology to offer practice,
and more practice, coupled with multimedia to support the
many different facets of learning and using language. These
features combine with personalization (e.g., rerunning con-
cepts and materials that a given learner scores poorly on)
and once again, lots of active retrieval. Taken together, it
offers learners a real shot at learning a language more or
less on their own, something we could have only fantasized
about in the era before computers.
Adaptive learning systems. The personalization angle is
front and center with our final category of technology for
122 Chapter 3

making the most of memory. Adaptive learning systems

aren’t as much the product of entrepreneurs cooking up apps,
the way that programs like Duolingo came on the scene.
Rather, they’ve emerged from within academic circles, where
researchers in education and computer science have worked
for decades to come up with programs that present concepts
at the exact right time for a given learner.56 They do this by
attempting to detect the learner’s current level of mastery
of those concepts, and then using this information to target
the information that learners are having the most trouble
with while letting learners skip what they already know.
Besides this strategy of steering students through mate-
rial in the most effective way possible, adaptive learning sys-
tems tend to emphasize scaffolding, meaning that they start
with what a learner knows already and then add just enough,
a bit at a time, to encourage the learner to keep stretching to
extend that knowledge. In this way, the systems are solidly in
line with another one of our bedrock memory principles: The
mind takes in information best when it hooks in to some-
thing that’s already there. Exploiting preexisting knowledge
structures is something adaptive learning systems do by
quizzing learners upfront, before presenting anything new;
it’s also why the programs sometimes offer hints rather than
just telling learners that an answer is wrong before moving
on. By calibrating the difficulty of questions, a system can
encourage learners to tap into what they already know, and
push them to persist in trying to answer harder and harder
questions.
So what do these systems look like in practice? Examples
of commercially developed adaptive learning systems in-
clude Cogbooks and Smart Sparrow, but there are many
more.57 Both essentially consist of the same kind of content
you might see in a traditional textbook, presented digitally
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 123

and coupled with interactive features such as quizzes, short

exercises, and invitations to the user to rate or reflect on how
well they understand what’s being presented. The systems
might also question users about their preferences, style, and
background. Those self-­ratings and answers are then used to
determine the user’s “path” through the material — meaning,
what material they will see more of or less of, and in what
order. It’s a bit like the personalized ways that Netflix and
Amazon serve up content — just substitute course material
instead of items to watch or buy next.
Another system that has been around longer is the Open
Learning Initiative (OLI).58 Developed as a not-­for-­profit
resource by scientists at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford,
OLI pioneered the question-­and-­adjust methodology that’s
at the core of adaptive learning, offering replacements for
traditional textbooks and even whole courses that meld
content with this unique method of presenting the content.
A distinguishing feature of OLI’s approach is an emphasis
on feedback, with the goal of encouraging students to con-
tinually check and refine their knowledge as they go along.
Lastly, there is an emphasis on providing data and analytics
to instructors, echoing the just-­in-­time-­teaching philosophy
and enabling instructors to quickly flag and address any
trouble spots.
Surprisingly, there isn’t a vast research literature on
the impacts of these kinds of programs, considering how
long they’ve been in existence. On the one hand, there is at
least one big meta-­analytic study showing that “intelligent
tutors” — a form of adaptive learning systems — do tend to
improve student performance, although the amount of im-
provement tends to vary a lot across different implementa-
tions.59 Meta-­analysis is essentially a study of other studies,
in which specialized statistical techniques are used to draw
124 Chapter 3

conclusions about significant trends across different data

sets. In this case, the types of intelligent tutoring that were
studied spanned everything from brief laboratory-­based in-
terventions, comparable to a single homework assignment
or problem set, to a full 8-­week computer-­based course
taken instead of a traditional in-­person course. 46 of the
50 individual research studies that were incorporated in the
analysis did in fact show significantly better performance
overall.
Other researchers have focused more on how students use
adaptive learning systems and on whether they like them.60
Here, too, the findings are generally positive but not univer-
sally so. In sum, adaptive learning systems are not magical
means for turbocharging learning, but they are one tool in
the toolkit for helping students build knowledge in an effi-
cient and individualized way, by leveraging the receptivity
we have to taking in something new when it builds on what
we already know.
Quiz apps, language learning programs, adaptive learn-
ing systems: These are all technologies that can fast-­track
memory for the kind of knowledge we need to acquire in
schools, from the simplest definitions to some of the tough-
est academic material out there (which foreign languages,
in particular, definitely are). We’re likely to see even more of
these options come into play as teachers look to use tech in
creative ways in their own disciplines. I saw a great example
of this a few years ago in a faculty member’s idea to use
just the simple texting capabilities that most students have
on their phones to leverage spacing and retrieval practice
in a graduate pharmacology program.61 Students could opt
to have multiple-­choice questions sent to them at random
intervals during the day, to reinforce material they were
learning in class. It was an effective, low-­tech way to get
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 125

students studying throughout the day and throughout the

week, and to do so via the most effective study technique
ever discovered, namely, retrieval practice. For enterprising
teachers and self-­teachers, imagination is the only limit on
what you can do.

Big-­Picture Impacts of Technology on Memory

These uses of technology to fast-­track memory really do call

into question the idea that technology damages and dimin-
ishes human memory. Used correctly and in line with the
research, it can do the exact opposite. There are some major
strings attached, though. And I will admit that the research has
mostly focused on situations where a person is trying to com-
mit to memory some highly specific pieces of information—
French verbs, classes of drugs, facts for an upcoming exam,
and the like. These are not trivial. But it all raises the ques-
tion of whether there are more global impacts on memory,
reflecting perhaps the ways in which we use our technology
to manage knowledge as we go through our days?
Research suggests that such impacts may exist, and in
this case, the instincts of technology skeptics may just be
correct. One of the central claims about how tech supposedly
undermines us is the idea that we get lazy with memory
when we think we can always just Google whatever we need.
In one series of studies published in the top-­flight journal
Science, researchers attempted to pin down what exactly
does happen when you think you can come back to some-
thing saved for you online, versus when you believe that
you can’t.62
In one piece of the study, research volunteers were pre-
sented with trivia facts that were new to them. They also
took notes during this study phase, typing the facts into what
126 Chapter 3

they were led to believe were files on the computer they were
using. The twist was that sometimes the volunteers were told
that these files would be erased, meaning they wouldn’t be
able to look them up later. Other times, they were told that
they would be able to reference the files, but would need to
remember how to navigate back to the folders where the files
were saved. The idea here was to simulate what goes on in our
day-­to-­day technology usage, as we encounter information
that we either think we’ll be able to find again by searching,
or not.
Everybody in the study then took a test over the trivia
facts by writing down as many as they could remember. As it
turned out, memory was indeed worse when people thought
they would be able to look the information back up again.
Just as the tech-­skeptic view would predict, when we offload
knowledge to the computer, we do seem to let ourselves off
the hook for memorizing it ourselves. Conversely, when
volunteers thought their notes files would be erased, perfor-
mance improved. It wasn’t all bad for the saved-­information
folks though. When they were told to organize their notes
into specific folders, volunteers performed quite well at re-
membering where to find the various saved facts. In this
way, researchers also reinforced the comeback from tech’s
defenders: I might not remember everything, but I remember
how to find it when I need it.
The researchers also explored a more subtle aspect of
the interrelationship between human memory and digital
memory. They confronted a different set of volunteers with
a challenging trivia quiz, asking true-­false questions that
participants frequently didn’t know the answers to. When
people are primed in this way to be thinking of knowledge
and what they do and don’t know, it turns out that they start
thinking about computers and computer-­related concepts.
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 127

This thought process might be unconscious, but is revealed

through things like how quickly people process computer-­
related words.63 Put another way, search engines and the idea
of the Internet itself all float to the top of our minds when
we’re thinking about what we do and don’t know.
These findings imply that search engines and saved files
aren’t just a tool we use, but rather, have become tied up with
our whole concept of remembering and perhaps even knowl-
edge itself. The authors frame their interpretation in context
of a larger concept called “transactional memory.” The idea is
that even in the absence of any kind of technology, we don’t
draw strict boundaries around our own memories. Rather,
we share the load with whoever is around us — friends,
family, even our social group at large. In this way, depending
on Google is nothing new, but rather, a natural extension of
our human tendency to tap into whatever sources we can to
extend what our memories can do.

We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing

into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing
information than by knowing where the information can be
found. This gives us the advantage of access to a vast range of
information, although the disadvantages of being constantly
“wired” are still being debated. It may be no more than nostal-
gia at this point, however, to wish we were less dependent on
our gadgets. We have become dependent on them to the same
degree we are dependent on all the knowledge we gain from
our friends and co-­workers — and lose if they are out of touch.64

These are some profound thoughts that both reinforce

and challenge the idea that Google is undercutting us on a
fundamental cognitive level. Yes, we do depend on it, the
authors are saying, but the answer isn’t to pretend that we
128 Chapter 3

can go back to a prewired era. Instead, the effects of tech-

nology are additive, providing a new, powerful avenue to do
what we’ve always done — find and exploit the best ways to
tap into the memory of everyone we know.
As teachers, we need to remember this idea of symbiosis
as yet another reason not to fall back on the outmoded bank-
ing model of learning. It’s natural, and probably advanta-
geous, for students to find the information they need by any
means necessary. But at the same time, we teachers should
heed the risks of assuming that knowledge can always be
reaccessed online. When it comes to the bedrock knowledge
of a discipline or professional skill, students shouldn’t fall
back on looking things up. But they shouldn’t just set all
devices aside, because that would rob them of some of the
best ways to put memory theory into practice. And that,
in turn, is what being a discerning user of technology is
all about — knowing what features of technology will help
leverage the quirks of human memory, and which will not.
The story of how we offload memory onto technology,
and what happens when we do, is rapidly changing as new
research continues to emerge. There is currently some con-
troversy, for example, over how reliable the “Google effect”
on memory really is, with some laboratories failing to rep-
licate the key finding that when people expect to be able to
search for information later, they are less likely to remember
it on their own.65 Other researchers counter that some of the
variability in findings can be explained by whether research
participants actually trust that they will in fact be able to
reaccess saved information through search — something that
people would normally believe to be true in everyday life
but might not believe in a contrived laboratory situation.66
The current overall picture, though, is that relying on search
engines for finding information does make a difference,
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 129

one that may result in remembering less than we intend or

expect to on our own.
It’s important to keep the positive applications of tech
for learning and memory in mind as well, especially where
there have been some towering claims about how it affects
our ability to learn.67 But there’s one area where technol­
ogy’s critics are probably right, one that has to do with the
ways that technology can undercut us before we even get to
the point of trying to commit something to memory. The
next chapter focuses on attention, and what that means for
focused, productive living when technology — and its atten-
dant distractions — are usually right there within reach.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Memorization has been characterized by a number

of education experts as outdated, harmful to student
learning, and a diversion from acquiring higher-­order
thinking skills. Hierarchical schemes such as Bloom’s
Taxonomy reinforce the idea that building factual knowl-
edge is a low priority in teaching.
• However, there are both practical and cognitive benefits
to acquiring factual knowledge in a discipline. These in-
clude the ability to quickly and fluently apply what we’ve
learned in a work or academic context, and the ability to
extend and apply knowledge to new domains.
• Experts agree on several factors that makes material
easier for students to remember. These include meaning,
narrative structure, curiosity and surprise, visualization,
emotions associated with the material, attention devoted
to the material, and connection to the students’ own goals.
130 Chapter 3

• There are teaching strategies that align particularly

well with factors that accelerate memory. Pre-­quizzing
on what students already know, just-­in-­time teaching,
problem-­based and applied learning projects, and well-­
designed multimedia all intersect with memory princi-
ples in powerful ways.
• Mnemonics offer limited use for most of what students
need to remember in a typical course. However, there
are more versatile techniques such as retrieval practice
and spacing, both of which have strong track records of
effectiveness and are well-­grounded in memory research.
• There are some overarching, global effects that technol-
ogy might be having on human memory. Availability of
technology may lead to “offloading” information onto
technology, especially when we believe we’ll be able to
look it up again online.

TEACHING TAKE-­AWAYS

• Reflect on your own philosophy regarding the role of

memory in teaching and learning. Question any resis-
tance you might feel, asking where that resistance comes
from and whether it might actually benefit students in
your particular discipline to build a strong base of factual
knowledge.
• Retrieval practice is a powerful strategy, but it also
arouses concern among some teachers. Fortunately,
it does not have to take the form of stressful, time-­
consuming exams, nor does it solely produce superficial
learning that disappears after the test.
 Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters 131

• Consider memory and alignment to memory principles

when selecting technologies. Especially in the case of
quizzing applications, language learning programs, and
adaptive courseware systems, there are options that are
both engaging to use and effective for strengthening
knowledge.
• There are currently a rich set of outstanding technology
options for running memory-­boosting quizzes. Kahoot!,
Poll Everywhere, and Quizlet are examples that you can
experiment with.
• Be aware of the offloading phenomenon that takes place
when we think we will be able to look material up online
if we need it in the future. Consider discussing this phe-
nomenon with students, along with the downsides of
relying on searches for information they’ll need to use
frequently in their future classwork and careers.
 CHAPTER 4

MEMORY REQUIRES
ATTENTION

In the darkened lecture theater, all eyes (including mine)

were on the legendary cognitive scientist George Sperling as
he expounded on his latest project, a series of studies that
built up a comprehensive mathematical model of the con-
trol of visual attention. It was the mid-­1990s, and Sperling
had turned his considerable intellectual firepower on the
question of how we take attention from one location in
space and redirect it to another location in space. He wasn’t
talking about how we moved our eyes from place to place,
but rather, how we change the location that we’re consciously
focusing on. In order to get a grasp on this slippery theoret-
ical concept, Sperling employed a physical metaphor: stage
spotlights.1
As he explained to the audience of professors and grad
students, what Sperling wanted to know was whether this
spotlight worked like a sweeping mechanism, moving
smoothly from point A to point B, or whether it worked
more like separate, fixed pairs of lights that switched on to
illuminate a new spot just as the previous one switched off.
134 Chapter 4

Equation after equation filled the overhead projector as

he walked us through the different ways he had modeled
his theory to fit data from human volunteers completing
meticulously designed research procedures. Then, as we sat
trying to digest it all at the close of the talk, Sperling stood
back, put down his marker and said, “Well, at the end of all
this, I’m still not sure I understand attention. But I sure do
understand spotlights.”
Sperling was kidding, of course, and there was nothing
frivolous at all about this work. Far from it; for years after-
ward, he and his research collaborators continued to turn
out precise, quantitative theoretical investigations of how
we move our attention around a scene. And as far as the
sweeping-­versus-­switching question goes, his research came
down solidly on the side of switching, where visual attention
works like a stage hand turning fixed lights on and off in
synchrony.2
But the reason why Sperling’s statement has stuck with
me all these years doesn’t have to do with the intricacies of
visual attention per se. Instead, I think it illustrates just how
hard it is for even the most accomplished cognitive scientists
to pin down this thing we call attention. Most textbooks
at the time talked about attention in terms of physical
metaphors, and many still do today. Popular metaphors for
attention include likening it to gateway of fixed width that
only a few things can fit through at a time, or similarly, a
filter or screen that lets through only those items that have
certain features or characteristics.
Additional metaphors include a camera lens, one capable
of bringing just one thing at a time into sharp focus while
blurring the surrounding background. Still others involve
limited resources of various kinds — an engine’s fuel, a com-
puter’s RAM, or money in a checking account. The popular
 Memory Requires Attention 135

psychology site verywellmind.com offers another mixed

physical metaphor: “Think of attention as a highlighter. As
you read through a section of text in a book, the highlighted
section stands out, causing you to focus your interest on that
area. Attention allows you to ‘tune out’ information, sensa-
tions and perceptions that are not relevant at the moment
and instead focus your energy on the information that is
important.”3 All of these metaphors highlight important
characteristics of attention, but they bypass direct descrip-
tion of the mechanism itself.
In sum, everyone from the most brilliant researchers in
psychology history to the most down-­to-­earth popularizers
has trouble explaining exactly what attention is. Formal
definitions drawn from psychology textbook glossaries
aren’t much better; they tend to be circular, never really ex-
plaining what happens in the mind to create the experience
we all universally recognize as “paying attention.”

How Attention Works

We may not know what attention is, but in one of the most
delicious paradoxes that my field has to offer, we know a
massive amount about how attention works. We also under-
stand a remarkable amount from a neuroscience perspec-
tive. This goes well beyond the notion of just one or two
“attention centers” in the brain; researchers at this point
have been able to define multiple networks of structures
and pathways that coordinate with one another. Some of
these mechanisms are highly tied into vision, which makes
sense given that we tend to look at things we’re paying at-
tention to, and vice versa. Others are more geared toward
selective attention, which is what gives us the ability to focus
on the most immediately relevant thoughts, sensations, and
136 Chapter 4

memories without spending precious cognitive resources on

everything else.
So theorists do know the basics of how attention works,
and they also have a good idea of what it is for — namely, to
let the brain prioritize the most important tasks and inputs
at any given moment. This might seem like a straightforward
enough job. However, consider the fact that under this con-
ception, attention really has two jobs to do, and these jobs
are in some sense contradictory. On the one hand, there’s the
job of directing cognitive resources toward stimuli and pro-
cesses that are relevant at the current moment — elevating
or emphasizing those stimuli so that they take center stage.
But on the other hand, attention also has the job of suppress-
ing anything that’s not relevant at a given moment. And so,
these dual functions mean that your attentional systems
have to constantly scan the environment for stimuli that
might be important, select what’s going to make it through
to conscious awareness, and maintain focus on what’s cur-
rently relevant, all while simultaneously deemphasizing or
actively blocking everything else.
This means that even the most mundane everyday pro-
cessing tasks involve a constant, finely calibrated give-­and-­
take dynamic. Consider the so-­called cocktail party effect,
where you instantly notice your name even when it’s mixed
in with background noise. How is it possible to pick that one
snippet of sound out of a stream of auditory input that you’re
actively ignoring? It happens because your attentional sys-
tems are continually monitoring the environment at a level
below conscious awareness, processing stimuli at a basic level
in order to sort out what’s relevant from what isn’t. Only
after that sorting process can important information, such
as your own name, emerge into your conscious awareness.
In short, human attentional systems have a wildly
 Memory Requires Attention 137

complicated set of tasks to accomplish, and to accomplish

those successfully requires discernment and a precise bal-
ance between letting too much in and keeping too much out.
This is why my preferred metaphor for attention isn’t actu-
ally a spotlight, gate, or highlighter. It’s a bouncer — someone
whose job it is to stand outside the entrance to conscious
awareness, scanning for VIPs whom they want to usher
inside, while keeping everyone else safely on the other side
of that velvet rope. Doing the job well isn’t just a matter
of guarding the door — it’s letting the right items through,
without letting things get too crowded inside, and all while
monitoring for potential trouble that could be brewing out
on the periphery.
Achieving this delicate balance between what to let in and
what to keep out, while scanning for possible threats, is what
all of our brain’s many attentional mechanisms are work-
ing together to do. And this process goes on moment after
moment, throughout our whole waking lives. No wonder
attention is so complicated to define and understand.
But in order to be better teachers, we do have to try to
understand attention, because it is almost impossible to
separate from memory.

How Attention Drives Memory and Learning

For decades now, cognitive psychologists have agreed that

for all practical purposes, new learning requires focused at-
tention. It follows that anything that diverts attention will
produce a proportionate decrease in recall.4
The initial stage called encoding, when you’re forming a
new memory, is particularly subject to disruption. If you
are distracted by trying to do something else at the same
time or are monitoring more than one stream of input at a
138 Chapter 4

time, you’ll encode less. One classic research project asked

participants to learn word pairs while simultaneously mon-
itoring another display. This kind of multitasking sharply
reduced what participants were able to remember, especially
when the distraction happened during the initial learning
stage; multitasking during the recall stage, by contrast,
produced smaller decrements.5 Similarly, other researchers
have found that in a cocktail-­party situation, where you’re
deliberately screening out some kind of background chatter,
you remember practically none of the content of what you
screened out.6 There’s no backup tape, no way to rewind and
retrieve something you weren’t attending to — because once
it’s screened out, it’s trashed by your cognitive systems and
gone forever.
Technically, you can absorb information without con-
sciously trying to do so, through a process that psycholo-
gists call “implicit learning” and what everyone else calls
“learning by osmosis.” This exception tends to apply most
to the kind of learning where you are picking up patterns,
rather than acquiring the kind of factual knowledge that
we’d associate with academic learning. Implicit learning
also surfaces the most when it’s tested through means that
are themselves indirect or unconscious. For example, you
might be quicker to press a button saying that you recognize
a photo that you saw but didn’t pay much attention to. But if
you’re tested more directly — being asked to choose specifi-
cally which pictures you studied in a particular situation, for
example — those implicit learning effects tend to evaporate.
In sum, although experts might quibble about the extent of
implicit learning under different circumstances, learning by
osmosis is by far the exception, not the rule.
This principle effectively debunks the folk idea that we
can pick up information without putting in the cognitive
 Memory Requires Attention 139

effort to pay attention to it — a notion that hopeful students

might rely on as they while away a lecture as they are si-
multaneously engrossed in a text conversation, or as they
attempt to study while consuming a steady stream of other,
off-­task media. Because distractions aren’t necessarily just
external inputs, but can also arise from our own internal cog-
nitions, it also means that off-­topic thoughts can diminish
memory and learning.

Common Misconceptions about Attention

Given that memory depends on attention, and learning de-

pends in many important ways on memory, it’s clearly im-
portant for those of us who teach to have a decent grounding
in core facts about attention. And yet, as I’ve noted, even sci-
entists who study attention for a living struggle to articulate
what we do know about it. Furthermore, there’s the compli-
cation that attentional processes operate at least partially
outside of our own conscious awareness, at the same time as
they determine what we are consciously aware of in the first
place. This means that our intuitions about attention tend
to be way off base,7 usually in ways that make us look more
capable than we really are. The opacity of our own attention
mechanisms then tends to combine with people’s misgivings
about technology to produce a few pretty big misconcep-
tions, all of which can set our teaching on the wrong track.
Here are the major ones to watch out for.
Scientists know a lot about what is happening to our attention
spans. If it’s meant literally, this claim is easy to dispense
with. Here’s why: As a cognitive psychologist I’m here to tell
you that there’s no such thing as “attention span.”
I say this because the professional researchers working on
attention almost never talk about it in terms of a time-­based
140 Chapter 4

span. They may refer to its capacity, and perhaps even some-
thing akin to bandwidth — but they rarely mention set time
periods where we’re attentive and then cease to be so. Thus,
attention span is more a folk conception than anything
based in contemporary cognitive science. Our ability to
remain attentive and engaged in a task varies tremendously
not just from person to person, but situation to situation,
and thus, treating attention like some kind of an egg timer in
the brain is neither helpful nor useful. The span idea persists,
though, and echoes of it crop up in sincerely well-­intentioned
teaching advice.
Students are attentive in class for ten minutes at a time. The
most enduring example of this kind of misguided advice is
the “ten-­minute rule,” roughly summarized as the idea that
students can only pay attention for ten minutes at a time
during a face-­to-­face class. It follows that instructors ought
to switch up the rhythm of what they are doing every ten
minutes or so, with the assumption being that bringing in a
new topic or activity resets that ten-­minute attention span
clock. Or to take the idea further, instructors should perhaps
forgo lectures altogether, given that students will only take
in ten minutes, tops, out of any lecture they’re at, no matter
how compelling that lecture might be.
Incorporating lots of changes of pace and variety into
a class period isn’t necessarily bad advice, especially if
the alternative is a classic extended and unbroken lecture
mostly consisting of a lot of involved content. Incorporating
frequent changes of pace probably does help students stay
attentive, especially if the instructor makes a point of asking
students to respond in some way by offering opinions, an-
swering questions, or other active engagement in the topic
at hand.8
 Memory Requires Attention 141

However, it’s a mistake to paint this practice as being

grounded in an immutable rule of the brain.9
The ten-­minute rule looks even more questionable when
we trace back to the original research that it is based on. One
red flag is that it is actually rather difficult to pin down those
original studies, despite the fact that the rule itself is widely
known and accepted among teachers even today. A number
of the studies cited as support for it are quite old — think
1978 or earlier. Some are also way out of step with contem-
porary research standards, for example, using data gathered
via casual observation by observers who are sometimes
present in class, and sometimes not.10 Furthermore, many
use measures whose relationship to actual attentiveness are
tenuous at best. Some, for example, rely on the volume of
student note-­taking as a proxy for attentiveness, despite
multiple alternative explanations for why students might
write more or less throughout a given class period. With
all this in mind, we can confidently set the ten-­minute rule
aside as an idea borne more out of intuition than rigorous,
up-­to-­date science.
Technology is to blame for shrinking attentional capacity.
Even if we don’t take literally the idea that attention works
on a set time basis, and if we take the ten-­minute rule with
a liberal amount of salt, isn’t it still the case that our overall
ability to pay attention is decreasing in contemporary times?
This claim is another idea that’s repeated so much that it’s
commonly taken as fact, especially when it’s linked to the
unrelenting inroads of technology into our lives. But even
more so than we saw with the ten-­minute rule, the research
basis for this claim is gossamer-­thin.
Take one research finding that was shared all over the
globe, a study purporting to show that that human attention
142 Chapter 4

spans had shrunk to below that of the average goldfish, pre-

sumably because we all now spend so much time online.
Setting aside the fact that attention span is not a thing, why
should we be skeptical of this claim? First of all, don’t assume
that just because this study was cited all over the world, it
must have come from a high-­profile peer-­reviewed journal.
It was actually just an internal project commissioned by the
software company Microsoft and pushed out with no real
scientific vetting at all.11 As for the goldfish “control group,”
what the researchers were actually looking at among these
little creatures was working memory, not attention. It’s
certainly an interesting line of neuropsychological research
on nonhuman animals, but not one that provides any kind
of meaningful comparison to students focusing (or not) on
schoolwork.12
Even if the human-­versus-­goldfish study had been an
actual peer-­reviewed project, it still wouldn’t have offered
good information on attention span, because the mea-
sure they focused on among the human participants was
subjective impressions of one’s own attention span. This
is problematic for multiple reasons. For one, there’s no
reason to think that anyone could accurately pinpoint this
for themselves, given the limited insight we have into our
own attentional processes and the fact that many of them
operate out of conscious awareness. Asking people directly
if they think their attention spans have declined is also a
picture-­perfect example of what researchers call “demand
characteristics,” whereby experimenters subtly telegraph
the expected responses to participants, setting up a self-­
fulfilling prophecy.
Clearly, then, we can dispense with the goldfish study as a
reason to think that technology has caused wholesale decline
in the ability to pay sustained attention. That’s not to say
 Memory Requires Attention 143

that engaging in particular cognitive activities linked to tech

couldn’t cause that kind of global change, because in theory it
could. One intriguing line of cross-­cultural research, for ex-
ample, contrasted cognitive characteristics of kids growing
up in rural Maya Mexico versus the urban United States.13
In both cases, the children were engaged with technology,
but of vastly different sorts. In the United States, it was with
video games of various kinds, but in Mexico, it was with tra-
ditional backstrap loom weaving. The authors concluded that
observing loom weaving for hours at a time — as children
commonly did, as a way to learn — led to the rural Mexican
children’s being able to comfortably focus for longer periods
of time than their urban U.S. counterparts.
It’s a stretch to conclude from this line of research that
constant technology use automatically degrades attention,
but it sheds some light on the possibility of some level of
change by directly connecting the nature of the technology
engagement (long periods of watching versus frequent fast-­
paced switching among stimuli) with the way that attention
might be changed. Still, it’s not enough to completely sup-
port the claim that people these days just can’t handle life
without a constant stream of high stimulation.
However, an eroding ability to focus is something that
many people swear up and down that they subjectively feel.
Is there a ready explanation for this disconnect between
perception and scientific reality? Not at the moment, but I
look at it this way: Our ability to stay attentive even when
we’re bored or disengaged may not have decreased, but per-
haps our willingness has. In other words, we may have expe-
rienced a global decrease in our tolerance for the discomfort
of empty time or activities that aren’t that enticing. Perhaps
it fits with the many other ways in which affluent modern
people chafe at discomforts that our ancestors tolerated
144 Chapter 4

with minimal complaint. There was the heat, the cold, even
constant bouts with hunger and thirst — not pleasant, to be
sure, but something that people were used to because it was
simply a part of life. Maybe today, boredom is a little bit like
those states.
In sum: Do people need breaks from sustained mental
effort? Yes. Is it a good idea for teachers to alternate lec-
turing with other activities? Yes. Does technology alter our
preferences and typical patterns associated with paying
attention? Possibly. But none of these conclusions have all
that much to do with attention span.
Consuming a steady stream of content from our digital devices
burns us out mentally and neurologically. One of the most-­
discussed complaints regarding technology and attention
is the tired, edgy, unsatisfied mental state we find ourselves
in after a bout of scrolling, tab-­switching, and headline
scanning. Especially if we’ve engaged in this kind of tech-­
skimming as an (ineffective) way to take a break from work
that also happened to take place online, it can feel like the
screen itself is what has drained our mental energy.
But tempting as it may be to conclude that a techno-­binge
has fried our brains right down to our very neurons, it’s
worth noting that this is another concept stemming from
pop culture and marketing, not neuroscience. It’s related to
the idea of “continuous partial attention,” a term invented
by the software and technology consultant Linda Stone.14
The phrase refers to the habit of spreading attention across
multiple inputs without focusing intently on any single one,
as we might do if we’re trying to work on a project while
responding to incoming email notifications, toggling over
to Twitter, and fielding the occasional Slack15 message.
We engage in continuous partial attention because we’re
afraid of missing out on anything that might potentially
 Memory Requires Attention 145

be important, even though it’s ultimately self-­defeating.

According to Stone, it causes a host of ills ranging from
feeling overwhelmed and powerless to decreasing creativity.
Similarly, Gary Small, who led the “Your Brain on Google”
project discussed in chapter 1, talks about “techno-­brain
burnout” as a description of what happens when we spend
too much time on devices.
As subjective descriptions of how tech binges make us
feel, these ideas are spot-­on. But we have to keep in mind
they are just that: subjective descriptions. There’s little evi-
dence to suggest that they correspond to any kind of tangible
process going on in the brain’s attention mechanisms. Nor
are they necessarily any more pernicious than, say, the dis-
satisfaction we might feel after aimlessly channel-­surfing on
television or skimming through a trashy magazine. That bad
feeling we might have in the moment does not necessarily
mean that we’ve somehow tweaked the inner workings of
the brain.
That said, it’s worth acknowledging that burnout in the
traditional sense probably is accelerated by technology.
Chronic overwork, coupled with the onset of work-­related
cynicism and never feeling like your efforts are adequate to
meet demand, does indeed create a toxic brew when phones
and messaging apps are there to create the illusion of being
on duty 24 – 7.16 There are also very real concerns about tech-
nology’s effects on sleep. It may not have the same novelty
value as a cool new brain syndrome, but sleep deprivation
really does torpedo the brain’s ability to function.
Teenagers in particular are susceptible to ending up
chronically overtired when they take phones to bed,17 as
they are incredibly tempted to do by a culture of intense,
always-­on social media presence and the primacy of text
messaging as a way of socializing with peers. One study
146 Chapter 4

found that among teens who are particularly plagued with

FOMO (fear of missing out), sleep can be disturbed even
when the phone is off and out of reach.18 This happens be-
cause, amazingly enough, anxiety about social disconnection
stalks these teenagers even when they are offline, producing
bouts of late-­night wakefulness.
So for all of these old-­school, unglamorous reasons — im-
proving sleep, setting appropriate work boundaries, resisting
FOMO — having a conscious plan to moderate how we use
our devices is a great idea. However, just as the ten-­minute
rule is good advice grounded in bad reasoning, the caution
against techno-­brain burnout is good advice wrapped up
in an unnecessary layer of pseudoscience. If you feel that
technology is making you unhappy, tired, and stressed,
well, it probably is. There’s also not much of a downside to
scrutinizing how and how frequently you use your personal
technology. But don’t worry — your neurons aren’t paying a
price if you choose to spend a lot of time in front of a screen.
The brain can’t multitask. This is one that I’ve frequently
heard and read over the last several years.19 Generally it
comes wrapped in caution about the illusion of productivity
created by juggling several tasks at once, much like with the
continuous partial attention concept. And, it is grounded to
an extent in the research literature on attention, particu-
larly research having to do with task switching, which we
will get to in a moment. But it’s important to note that this
statement isn’t literally true. Accepting it as such leads us to
an overly rigid conception of what happens during divided
attention, and muddies the issue of how multitasking gets
in the way of memory and learning.
When we look at the big picture of how our neural systems
work, it’s clear that not only can the brain multitask, it lives
to multitask. Fundamentally, the brain is organized as a
 Memory Requires Attention 147

massive parallel processing system, with multiple different

systems all working side by side to accomplish different
jobs: processing sensory input, running the body’s life sup-
port systems, creating emotions, decoding language, and on
and on.
Cognitive systems, too, are organized and coordinated in
a way that allows different distinct mechanisms to handle
different tasks at the same time. Our systems for processing
language are a particularly good example of this. At any
given moment, various subsystems are independently form-
ing and maintaining memories for the way words sound,
what they mean, and even our plans for what we want to
say next. All of this work gets seamlessly integrated at the
point where we’re speaking and understanding, but before
then, the brain is feverishly divvying up and delegating dis-
tinct tasks for distinct systems to manage, all at the same
time.
When multitasking is framed in terms of cognitive pro-
cesses that operate in parallel, it reveals other exceptions
to the multitasking rule. Cognitive processes actually run
pretty well in parallel as long as they (a) don’t require much
in the form of decision-­making or other “executive” func-
tions, and (b) tap into separate cognitive mechanisms. Think
about listening to a podcast while driving, watching a movie
while knitting, or reading a book while riding a stationary
bike (which you might in fact be doing right now). Yes, if
the cognitive demands on either task suddenly spike — you
encounter a road hazard, the mind-­bending plot twist is
revealed, you lose your place in the book and have to find it
again — you’ll probably put one of the tasks on pause. But
as cognitive psychologists have observed time and again,20
some processes run fairly well concurrently, while others
clash with each other. It really has to do with the degree of
148 Chapter 4

separation between the parts of the mind that are doing

most of the work.
However, even though literal claims about the multitask-
ing brain may not be true, we should give credit to the anti-­
multitasking critics for picking up on something that is true
about certain kinds of processing. As I talked about earlier in
this chapter, demanding cognitive tasks like acquiring new
learning do require focused attention. The bandwidth we
have for doing this truly is quite limited, perhaps to as little
as one thing at a time. It’s absolutely the case that we can’t
effectively multitask as far as conscious, intensive processing
of the sort that’s most relevant to academic learning.
What the critics may also be tapping into is research not
on brain multitasking per se, but rather, on task switching. A
number of studies21 have focused on what are called “switch
costs,” meaning the time cost (and sometimes, loss of accu-
racy) that happens when we shift focus from one task to
another. The switch cost concept is particularly relevant to
what happens during real-­world technology use. Think of a
person who’s responding to email messages, checking social
media, and answering phone calls from home at the same
time as they are plowing through a demanding work project.
This typical modern employee is paying a price for each one
of these diversions, which makes the main project take more
time overall (and probably decreases the quality of the work
they are doing on each of those side tasks as well).22
Estimates vary as to exactly how many seconds or min-
utes it takes to get back into the swing of one activity once
we’ve switched to another activity. But even if we can’t pin-
point the exact amount, it’s safe to say that task switching
probably does drain off time. It also falls right in line with
the claim that when we think we’re capably doing lots of
 Memory Requires Attention 149

things at once, we’re probably just toggling, and inefficiently

at that.
Overall, technology probably doesn’t have long-­term,
global impacts on attention through shortening span or
triggering brain burnout. And multitasking is something
our brains do handily, just not when we are talking about the
kind of focused processing that is needed for more demand-
ing cognitive tasks. But the core affordances of technology —
immediacy, the ability to generate almost infinite numbers
of reminders, notifications, and pings, engaging us with
seemingly endless relevant content — do have impacts, at
least in the short term. We’ll get into those specifically asso-
ciated with portable technology in the next chapter. But in
general, we should have a cautious optimism about our own
ability to pay attention — and therefore, to remember — in a
distracting world.

Technology, Attention, and Prospective Memory

Attention is particularly critical for prospective memory,

the form of memory that allows us to follow through on
intentions at the right time and place. Examples include re-
membering to bring a reusable bag into the supermarket,
to switch off the kitchen lights before we go to bed, or to
take the just-­purchased groceries off the roof of the car be-
fore driving away. This form of memory has some unique
characteristics compared to other forms (e.g., semantic or
episodic memory). Thus, we can expect that it will interact
in different ways with technology, compared to other forms.
Some of these impacts are positive, such that technology will
be helpful in bolstering prospective memory, but others are
clearly negative, as we’ll get into in the section below.
150 Chapter 4

First, though, what are these unique characteristics?

Prospective memory is a kind of hybrid between our long-­term
memory, working memory, and attention. In order to hang onto
an intention long enough to execute it, it has to be kept fresh
in awareness, which draws heavily on attention. Anything that
takes focus off of an intention increases the risk of forgetting
to follow through on the intention. This could be something
else we’re doing at the same time, an interruption, a switch to
a new activity. Once the intention has left awareness, it can
still be revived by a cue in the environment—some trigger or
sensation that leads one back to the original intent—given
that the intention is still stored in long-­term memory. But,
when both these angles—cues and maintaining awareness—
fall through, the chances of failure skyrocket.
It really does not take much to induce this kind of memory
failure. One of my graduate students, Oz Rico, invented a pro-
cedure to cause our traditional college-­aged research volun-
teers to forget instructions in a simple computer task, one that
asked them to identify photos of celebrities and say whether
the celebrities were wearing glasses in the photos. In between
giving the instructions and launching the task, Oz diverted
our volunteers’ attention by handing them an intentionally
nonfunctioning pen to fill out some required preexperiment
paperwork and then leaving the room. After spending a little
while ineffectively scratching around with the sabotaged
writing instrument, the volunteers had to go down the hall
to track down Oz and ask for a new one. He engaged them in
a little bit of small talk and sent them back, where a signif-
icant number of them then forgot to follow through on the
trivial task they were supposed to be doing. Other laboratory
procedures for inducing prospective memory failures have
people do things like monitor word lists for particular target
letters (“press the space bar any time you see the letter D”)
 Memory Requires Attention 151

while doing other tasks. Generally, such procedures show that

under these kinds of challenging conditions, intentions can
be forgotten in mere minutes.
You can also see this phenomenon in the annoying case
of the doorway effect, where we walk into different rooms
and forget why we’re there, only to immediately remember
when we give up and go back to wherever we were before.
When we head out on our little journey off to the kitchen
for, say, the scissors, we’re paying attention to the reason we
need the scissors, but that attentiveness doesn’t last long.
Frequently, attention is diverted by all the things we see
and think about along the way. Thus, when we arrive at our
destination, there’s nothing around us to cue up the original
intention; instead, we’re surrounded by misleading or irrel-
evant cues, things that don’t have anything to do with the
task we were engaged in.
In a sense, the trip around the house is an interruption to
our attention and the natural flow of the task, and this in-
terruption is key to setting us up for failure. Unfortunately,
in many real-­life situations, the consequences of this kind
of failure can be a lot worse than having to make an extra
trip down the hall. Prospective memory lapses have been
blamed for an array of catastrophic mistakes, including a
1987 plane crash attributed to a momentary distraction that
caused the crew to forget to set the flaps before takeoff.23
Distractions are also the culprit for medical mishaps ranging
from nurses’ neglecting to dispense the right medication to
surgical teams’ leaving instruments inside their patients
before closing up.24 Saddest of all are the multiple cases of
tired, preoccupied parents who forget to remove children
from the back seat when they exit their cars.25
Besides emphasizing how important prospective memory
is in the real world, these tragic examples bring to the
152 Chapter 4

forefront another unsettling fact about memory: Just want-

ing to remember an intention isn’t enough to ensure that you
do. In this way, our priorities and even our emotions take
a back seat to circumstances. Because prospective memory
is so heavily driven by where we’re focusing at any given
moment, and by cues in the environment, those factors tend
to dominate over what we want to remember, even when
those desires are powerful.
Finally, some individuals simply have a tougher time with
prospective memory than others. Over time, the resulting
failures can contribute to anxiety and even obsessive-­
compulsive type symptoms where people excessively check
back on things they’ve already done.26 Anxiety, worry, and
feeling driven to triple and quintuple check oneself is a
pretty miserable combination, one that no doubt drains
off cognitive resources that could go to better things than
wondering if you turned off the coffee pot this morning.
There’s no question about it: Your unaided brain is scarily
unreliable when it comes to hanging onto intentions and
cuing them back up at the right time. And since we don’t
have anything like an alarm clock in our heads, time-­based
intentions — those we’d like to trigger on a given date or
time — are especially prone to vanishing. This applies not
just to long-­term recurring events like birthdays, but also
to tasks that unfold over the scale of minutes.
This is a perfect case of technology excelling at something
that our brains do not. The lowliest smartphone is brilliant
at filing away that reminder to pick up a birthday bouquet for
your significant other on the way home from work, and you
can count on it to make that reminder pop up at precisely the
planned moment. For the smartphone-­opposed, there are
also email reminders, which may not be as good at grabbing
your attention and pestering you until you respond, but will
 Memory Requires Attention 153

jog your memory on the right day when you need to take
action. Tech is also a great place to keep checklists, which
happen to be another highly effective weapon in the fight
against distraction-­induced forgetting.27
Technology’s power to supplement our fallible memory
for intentions is something that tech advocates have touted
since before the iPhone was a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eye.28
And yet, even heavy smartphone users don’t always use all
of its capabilities in this realm. As with so many memory-­
supplementing systems as well, the key may be not just to
use them, but to use them consistently. I’ve set up a recur-
ring reminder, for example, that serves as a sort of preflight
checklist of what I need to do before my larger classes. It not
only saves me from forgetting to do things like load videos
or pass out worksheets, but also helps me redirect my mental
capacity toward more important, cognitively demanding
activities like talking to students or refreshing myself on
the day’s material.
Our students can benefit from these kinds of strategies
as well. It’s an area where instead of just forbidding phones
and complaining about tech-­dependence, we can open a
conversation about the up sides. Try asking your students
for their own tips for using tech-­based memory aids like
reminders and calendar alerts. And if your students prefer
paper planners, ask them why, and listen carefully to what
they have to say. The point isn’t to criticize or convert, but
rather to spark reflection on the systems we use to manage
our lives and how to tailor those for maximum impact.
Those organizing systems, after all, are only getting
more important as college inexorably moves away from a
full-­time model anchored to a consistent schedule of weekly
face-­to-­face class meetings. With more students combining
higher learning with work, raising children, and other major
154 Chapter 4

undertakings, the juggling act becomes more complicated.

The design of the courses they are taking is also becoming
less predictable and more complicated to manage. This isn’t
a bad thing necessarily, especially when the reasons for the
complexity have to do with bringing in good practices like
options to take multiple pathways through the material,
flexible deadlines, and lots of small-­stakes formative assign-
ments in place of big-­ticket, infrequent tests and papers. But
such a slate of requirements creates a bigger load of tasks to
stay on top of than even the best prospective memory could
handle. We owe it to our students to let them know that
human memory for this kind of thing is fallible, but that
technology — when used in the right way — can help.

Talking to Students About Technology:

Distraction, Learning, and the Attention Matters! Project

Clearly, there are some upsides to the complicated relation-

ship between technology, attention, and memory. However,
the downsides are also substantial. They include something
that has generated more press than almost any other issue
in classroom teaching over the last ten years or so: students
diverted by their technology when they’re supposed to be
learning.
The debate may be a timely one, but inattentive students
are nothing new. This is one of many astute points raised
in a recent book titled Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus
and What You Can Do About It.29 In it, teaching expert James
Lang (who is also the series editor for this book) draws on his
decades of classroom experience combined with a historical
take on the issue. He points out that scholars through the
ages have lamented the inability of today’s students — in
whatever century “today” might happen to be — to resist the
 Memory Requires Attention 155

temptation to pay attention to anything besides what they

are supposed to be studying.
Indeed, it’s worth remembering that ever since the
invention of the window, students have had an enticing
alternative to focusing on whatever is going on inside the
classroom. Lang, in Distracted, quotes the 17th century poet
John Donne lamenting how sidetracked he became simply
by watching spiders spinning webs and lizards stalking flies
as he was trying to write.30 There’s always some appealing
diversion to serious intellectual work, it seems. But I think
that we can all appreciate that windows and spider webs,
entertaining though they are, pale in comparison to the 47
notifications that have accumulated on your social media
platform of choice, news of the world pouring in from every
portal, and the dozen emoji-­laden texts that just came in
from your mom. These intrusions — relentless, frequent,
and bursting with engineered urgency — kick the distraction
game up to a whole new level.
Lang cites some stunning findings on just how frequently
today’s students succumb to the pull of their devices. In
one survey, fewer than 5% of college students reported that
they rarely or never strayed off-­task with their phones in a
normal day of classes; typically, students said they engaged
in this kind of off-­task activity around eleven times a day.
Texting in class was a particularly common one, something
my research partners and I have also found in our own sur-
veys of undergraduates.31 All of these findings fit with the
perceptions of many teachers who say they feel that every
minute in class is a competition for the attention of their
perpetually wired students, and that this is a competition
they are not set up to win.
Today we also have data showing exactly what happens to
learning when students are digitally distracted. The news is
156 Chapter 4

not good. Education researcher Reynol Junco has published

what I think is the most definitive data-­driven takedown
of technology’s impacts on academic achievement, a line of
research that backs up what many anti-­tech educators have
suspected all along. In a series of studies conducted before
young people abandoned the now-­frumpy Facebook platform
in favor of Instagram, TikTok, and the like, Junco found
that heavier Facebook users had significantly lower college
grades,32 and were less engaged in school overall.33
There is no shortage of explanations for these effects. If
students are texting while they’re studying or even while
they are physically sitting in class, they are probably experi-
encing the kind of attentional diversion that disrupts learn-
ing, dozens or perhaps hundreds of times per day. Students
who are heavily into social media are probably adding even
more of these costly task-­switching breaks throughout the
day. Even when they’re not actually checking their feeds, for
social media addicts, just thinking about that feed might be
taking up cognitive resources. This seems especially plausible
when we think back to those studies showing that even when
teens don’t take phones to bed, their social media driven pre-
occupations can still disrupt sleep. And on top of everything
else, it may be that students who allow these distractions
to dominate study are less committed to or excited about
their own educations to begin with. Even if the cause-­and-­
effect runs in that reverse direction, it demonstrates that
technology is part of a dynamic of disengagement.
As with many social science findings, this trend might
seem completely obvious in hindsight: Of course texting all
the way through your classes is going to shave points off of
your grades. Of course students who live life on Facebook are
going to care less about connecting to their school commu-
nities. But before we file this under “duh, what else would
 Memory Requires Attention 157

you expect?,” let’s remember that for quite a while there was
a school of thought, enthusiastically embraced by many in
higher education as well as the younger demographic them-
selves, that attributed special cognitive powers to people
who grew up in the era of ubiquitous technology. This “dig-
ital natives” theory made the rounds for a few years, with
the notion being that the technology-­saturated formative
experiences of this generation altered their cognitive ca-
pacities in fundamental ways, allowing them to deal with
multiple streaming inputs all at once.34
Digital nativism seemed intuitive to a lot of people during
its heyday. If true, it would have predicted that young people
are immune from the worst consequences of multi­tasking and
distraction. Or, it could even be that being able to interact
with lots of technologies all at once would increase learning,
since it would surround youngsters with a comforting buffer
of the technology that they supposedly adored interacting
with. But that heyday didn’t last long. Many experts (me
included)35 piled on to this idea, shooting it down with one
well-­placed criticism after another.36 Among other things,
the human brain simply isn’t reshaped dramatically on such
a short time frame, and rewiring the brain for effortless task
switching and expanding its bandwidth for conscious pro-
cessing would be a major overhaul indeed.37 While younger
people might do marginally better in situations where
they’re juggling multiple inputs, that has a lot more to do
with their more agile working memory systems than with a
generational difference per se.38
Even young people’s supposed love for all things digi-
tal tends to fall apart when you look at patterns such as
preferences for paper textbooks versus e-­books — where,
surprisingly, paper wins even among solidly digital-­native
students.39 The pandemic of 2020 – 2021 revealed even more
158 Chapter 4

glaring disparities between perceived and actual preferences.

As class formats pivoted nearly overnight to remote (think
Zoom classes) or traditional online (think discussion boards,
videos, and web-­based activities), there was hardly a col-
lective sigh of relief from young college students. On the
contrary, many expressed grief over the loss of the low-­tech,
face-­to-­face experience they’d expected to have, as well as
simmering frustration with the technology itself. Far from
being happy to be fully immersed in their “native” environ-
ment, many were as overwhelmed, if not more so, than the
middle-­aged remote workers who found themselves tossed
into the digital deep end.
What this all points to is that young people aren’t neces-
sarily hooked on technology, but neither are they immune
to its negative impacts on attention and learning. And these
impacts are more than theoretical, judging from research
linking heavier use to worse grades. So given all of this, what
can teachers do to help students protect their attention —
and thereby memory — from the relentless pull of distracting
devices?
One strategy that’s gotten a lot of press is the in-­class tech
ban — a rule by which classrooms become a sort of tech-­free
sterile zone where the devices are simply not allowed. While
this might be appealing to some, it’s probably not the best
solution, and here’s why. First of all is the effect on classroom
mood and morale, and on the instructor’s capacities as they
now have to split their own attention between surveillance
and teaching. Students themselves tend to rate these bans
as ineffective, unappealing, and difficult to enforce.40 If the
ban encompasses laptops too, you are guaranteed to run
into problems given that some students prefer or need to
use them for note taking, and may in fact have legal accom-
modations entitling them to do so.41
 Memory Requires Attention 159

The laptop note-­taking issue is one we’ll return to in the

next chapter, given just how much this debate has dominated
discussions of teaching with technology. There are other
reasons not to rely on bans, though. Restrictive policies cut
instructors off from productive and positive uses of personal
devices, such as in-­class quizzing and polling or collaborative
work on shared documents. They don’t work when students
aren’t in a traditional physical classroom but are instead
participating in some form of online learning — which the
majority of students will do for at least some, if not all, of
their college educations, and where students are even more
likely to engage in multitasking.42 And most important to
me, instructor-­driven bans deprive students of an oppor-
tunity to learn to moderate their own device usage in the
face of significant temptation — which is, after all, a vitally
important contemporary life skill.
That idea of developing technology and attention man-
agement skills has been with me for a long time, as I’ve tried
to develop solutions of my own. Early on in these efforts, I
even developed a traveling road show of sorts that I’d pres-
ent in courses where I was invited in as a guest speaker.
The presentation featured demonstrations of some famous,
striking attentional phenomena and follow-­up discussions of
what those tell us about the limited awareness we have about
our own attentional processes. I’d close with tips on how to
maximize learning by using focused, active strategies such
as self-­quizzing and retrieval practice, and invite students to
describe how they would approach distraction and learning
in more productive ways in the future.
My little show was a popular but not a particularly scal-
able way to spread these ideas to our student population.
So on the suggestion of a brilliant instructional designer
I know,43 I set about turning it into an online, open-­access
160 Chapter 4

module — something that anyone at our institution could

sign up for. We christened the project Attention Matters!
Here is how the module works. Students at my institution
usually find out about it through their professors; many of
them offer extra credit for doing it. Module users begin by
filling out a couple of short surveys, which do double duty
as first, a way to research beliefs and practices involving at-
tention, and second, as a way to help focus our participants
on these issues before they begin. They then step through
a sequence of three short units. The first two highlight the
limits of attention, and just how much gets by us when we
aren’t focused. One of the main ways we do this is by show-
ing short, memorable videos that are available online, then
asking students to comment on them in an open discussion
board.
One of our mainstays is called “The Amazing Color
Changing Card Trick”44—a particularly well-­done demon-
stration of a phenomenon called change blindness, whereby
we miss changes to a scene (even drastic ones) if our atten-
tion is momentarily interrupted.45 Another is a video made
in Belgium, called “The Impossible Texting and Driving
Test.”46 Essentially a prank with a purpose, this film shows
student drivers as they’re told that a (fictional) new law
requires them demonstrate that they can drive and text
at the same time. The hapless students then weave around
the closed course, mowing down traffic cones as they shriek
to the examiner that what they’re being told to do is dan-
gerous and totally impossible. Now, the Attention Matters!
team and I never set out to address highway safety with
this particular project. However, texting and driving turns
out to be a universally relatable example of distraction, one
that makes a great conversation starter with undergraduate
students. (And, if it does discourage this incredibly risky
 Memory Requires Attention 161

form of multitasking among even a few of our students — we

count that as another win.)
Throughout these discussions, we keep coming back to
the links between attention, memory, and learning. Many
of the students will spontaneously observe that they have
no intention of wasting the considerable time and money
they are investing in their educations, affirming that staying
undistracted in class is a part of that plan.
This brings us to the last of the three units, which fo-
cuses on persuading students to adopt changes based on
what they’ve seen in Attention Matters! Here, we try to leave
students with some research-­based tools to help make that
happen. This is because just knowing the facts about a less-­
than-­desirable habit isn’t enough to create lasting changes
to behavior (just ask any smoker, binge drinker, or yo-­yo
dieter). Neither is a just-­do-­it one-­shot attempt born from
a sudden flash of insight. Research on behavior change has
made it quite clear that most people need a specific plan for
how they’ll resist temptation when things get tough. There
also needs to be an authentic commitment to following
through on the plan, something that can motivate you to
stick to it even when temptation is high.
There might even be a social component to the kind of
changes we hoped students would make. I say this because
a classroom isn’t only filled with students all doing their
own things; students interact with and affect each other in
complex and sometimes fraught ways. In the case of distrac-
tion, one student’s good intentions can be easily undercut by
another students not-­so-­good choices. This could range from
seeing (and perhaps hearing) someone else who is tapping
out text after text, to being trapped behind a neighbor who
is watching, say, an entire season of The Bachelorette over the
course of a semester (sadly, this is not actually a theoretical
162 Chapter 4

example, but rather something I learned was happening

months in to one of my Introduction to Psychology classes).
To get students more fully engaged in the ideas presented
in the module, we employed one of the sneakiest weapons in
the psychology arsenal — the hypocrisy effect.47 This effect
persuades people to change behavior by asking them to
either take a hypothetical stance on an issue or to articu-
late a desired point of view. Once they give a hypothetical
opinion on a subject, people tend to stick to that opinion,
despite the fact that it was only something they said because
they were asked to do so. It’s not particularly rational, but
it works, as suggested by a long line of studies focusing on
a variety of health-­related behaviors.48 We tapped into the
hypocrisy effect by asking students to write down their plan
for how they would manage distractions going forward. We
also asked them, in one of the discussion boards, to talk
with each other about their preferred strategies for dealing
with a classmate who was being distracting. It didn’t matter
whether they went with a more confrontational approach
(which a surprisingly large proportion did) or mellower tac-
tics such as moving to a different seat. The point was that by
having students publicly state their intentions, they would
be more likely to follow through in the future.
These are all the best persuasive and informative tech-
niques we know of — show, don’t tell; get people to state an
intention; let peers do as much of the persuading as pos-
sible. So has the project actually worked? In the sense of
just engaging students in the discussion — the answer is a
resounding yes. At the time of this writing, several thousand
students have gone through the program at my university
alone. Potentially thousands more have completed it around
the country, as we’ve shared our materials with upward of
 Memory Requires Attention 163

25 other universities. At this scale, even a tiny shift toward

better practices adds up to big impact.
We’ve also learned a lot about the psychology of memory
and attention just by paying attention to what our partici-
pants say on our surveys and in the discussions. For example,
we’ve generated proof that people’s beliefs and knowledge
about these processes do bear some relationship to behav-
iors in the real world. The “counterproductive beliefs survey”
(CBS), it turns out, is correlated to how much people say that
they multitask in different real-­world situations — texting
in class, reading and answering email during meetings,
watching videos or playing games on a smartphone at work.
There’s also a significant link between CBS scores and GPA,
such that students who believe in more myths about memory
and attention tend to have worse grades. Multitasking, too,
turns out to be related to GPA. Echoing Junco’s findings, stu-
dents who reported texting in class more frequently tended
to earn lower GPAs. Clearly, there is a complicated web of
correlations between beliefs about attention and memory,
the predilection for multitasking with our technology in
real-­world settings, and academic achievement.
And most importantly for our purposes, in a before-­
and-­after comparison, we found that CBS scores were sig-
nificantly better after completing the module. This means
that students were less likely to say that they could learn by
osmosis, less likely to endorse rereading as a good strategy
for remembering what they’re studying, and more likely to
say that their own attentional abilities were not particu-
larly exceptional, compared to other people’s. These are all
bedrock metacognitive and study-­skills messages that are
unwieldy to work into a typical college course, let alone get
students to reliably adopt on their own.49
164 Chapter 4

We learned a few other unexpected things about attention

from those surveys. Surprisingly, there is a strong relation-
ship between gender and counterproductive beliefs.50 As it
turns out, male students hold significantly more of these
beliefs, especially in the realm of memory. In other words,
men were substantially more likely to think that they could
remember things through passive exposure, or that memory
works like a video recording, and less likely to say that
quizzing was a good way to study. Incorrect beliefs about
attention and one’s own exceptionalism were also more
common among men. We are still figuring out the source
of this gender difference. But it’s important for instructors
to know about as they think about which students might
particularly benefit from something like Attention Matters!
or other ways of addressing misconceptions about learning
that might lead to self-­defeating patterns of distraction
and multitasking in class. We were heartened to see, too,
that this module was about as effective in men as in other
genders, suggesting that even among a group that is prone
to these misconceptions, intervention can help.
There was another unexpected benefit from the project,
and that is that it became a source of fresh new ideas about
managing distracting technology. We started out thinking
that the learning would largely be a one-­way street, with
us passing advice to students, but that assumption turned
out to be gloriously wrong. In the discussion forums and
reflection assignments, students talked about site-­blocking
apps — that software that lets you lock off distractions for
a preset time — as well as an ingenious program we’d never
heard of before, called Pocket Points. 51 It’s not available
everywhere, but where it is, it lets students amass points
for time spent off their phones in class, points which are
redeemable for tangible real-­world items like rideshare and
 Memory Requires Attention 165

restaurant discounts. (Even my local outdoor outfitter ac-

cepts Pocket Points, and I’m waiting for the day when I walk
in and see a particularly dedicated young student redeem
theirs for, say, a kayak.)
Other student-­generated ideas include using one browser
program for work and one browser program for fun, as a
subtle cue to stay on track during work time (and, I suppose,
to stay out of one’s work email during downtime). One par-
ticipant even said that when he really needs to study, he puts
his phone in a dropbox located outside in the yard, so that if
he wants to scroll and text and whatnot, he’s got to endure
the bitterly cold Flagstaff night in order to do it. Besides all
being solid strategies, these student-­generated ideas make
it very clear that young adults are in no way the uncritical,
unquestioning technology addicts that they are made out to
be. Digital natives or no, they’ve spent a lot of thought figur-
ing out what they do and don’t like about their devices, and
on devising ways to own their technology rather than the
other way around. Anyone who is interested in these issues
would do well to listen to them, rather than lecture them.
Of course, for an educational psychologist the big ques-
tion about Attention Matters! would be this: What’s the long-­
term impact on students’ learning? If students go through an
experience like this, do they earn measurably better grades
as a result? Do our Attention Matters! graduates actually put
their phones away in class? I have to admit, we don’t know.
Our research team gathered data through the module itself
but we haven’t followed up with students to observe them
as they are actually in their classes, or tried anything like
a controlled experiment where we assign students in one
class to complete the module and compare them to a control
group. Long-­term tracking of grades might reveal longer-­
term impacts as well, but I know from doing this kind of
166 Chapter 4

research for a long time that GPA is affected by so many

other factors at the same time that it becomes difficult to
see the relatively tiny influence of a single educational inter-
vention — a type of signal-­to-­noise problem that crops up in
this kind of applied research.
Even though we haven’t made the case that this short
intervention changes GPAs, I think there are still important
takeaways for teachers, and really, for anyone who cares
about distraction in a technological age. First, as in pretty
much any endeavor where persuasion is the goal, it’s impor-
tant to make it a two-­way dialogue rather than simply rat-
tling off the risks of being on devices all the time. Students
also have plenty of room to learn the basics of how attention
and memory work, as evidenced by the big gains that our
participants showed in our knowledge measures — and this
knowledge is probably important to address in college, given
the relationship between it and GPA. Male students in par-
ticular would likely benefit from this direct approach given
that they are more prone to counterproductive beliefs.
All of these pieces of advice should also reinforce that
one big take-­away for teachers: Attention and memory can’t
be separated. These days, technology and attention can’t be
separated either, given how perfectly suited our devices are
for interrupting, diverting, and engrossing us. It’s what
they’re made to do. But this doesn’t mean we, as champions
of undistracted learning, should make those devices our
sworn enemies. We need to stay on the right side of the issue
with claims that we can support with good science, while
steering away from myths and rumors fueled by clickbait
culture. We also need to give our devices credit where credit
is due, especially for their amazing ability to remind and
cue us to follow through on actions at the right time — an
underrated, but vital thing our memories are responsible for
 Memory Requires Attention 167

doing. And finally, we shouldn’t complain about the younger

generations’ misconceptions about distraction and learning,
unless we’re also prepared to address those with good science
and workable strategies.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Attention is a complex phenomenon that arises out of the

brain’s mechanisms for prioritizing the allocation of
cognitive resources. It is what allows us to filter out or
suppress anything that’s not currently relevant, while si-
multaneously monitoring our surroundings for anything
that could potentially be important.
• There are a number of myths and misconceptions about
attention, some fueled by popular ideas about tech-
nology. These include the idea that attention spans are
shrinking due to technology, that students only pay at-
tention for ten minutes at a time in class, and that digital
devices cause a specific form of burnout or fatigue within
the brain.
• Attention is needed for almost all instances of new mem-
ory formation. It is particularly interrelated with pro-
spective memory, which tends to be disrupted very easily
when a person is distracted.
• In some ways, technology can help benefit highly fal-
lible forms of memory including prospective memory.
Reminders, alerts, and to-­do lists all complement human
cognitive capabilities particularly well.
• Digital technologies clearly have extraordinary potential
to distract us, and thereby disrupt the formation of new
memories.
168 Chapter 4

• Research conducted as part of the Attention Matters! proj-

ect at Northern Arizona University demonstrates that a
brief, nontechnical educational module can significantly
reduce counterproductive beliefs about attention and
memory. Student comments gathered as part of the proj-
ect also revealed a surprisingly large number of original
insights about technology and distraction, counter to the
popular idea that young adults are uncritically accepting
of technology in their lives.

TEACHING TAKE-­AWAYS

• For practical purposes, there is no such thing as pas-

sively absorbing information “by osmosis.” Attention is
necessary for memory, so students need to be not only
physically present but also attentive in order to create
new connections and acquire new knowledge.
• Consider how you’ll attract and maintain students’ at-
tention at the same time as you are designing other as-
pects of courses and learning activities. At the same time,
be aware that attempting to ban all technology during
classes may not be an effective or practical strategy.
• Confronting the problem of distracted students can be
difficult and demoralizing. It may help to take the long
view, remembering that scholars have written about dis-
traction and learning for centuries, and that not all of the
problems are new ones.
• Be cautious about repeating or reinforcing myths about
attention that students may have heard before, such as
the ten-­minute myth, the idea that digital natives are
 Memory Requires Attention 169

different, or the idea that mobile devices are irreparably

damaging human attention.
• Talking to students about the shared challenges most
of us face with managing distracting technologies can
reveal some surprising insights. Your students have prob-
ably already grappled with ways to stay focused both in
and out of class, and can share those with you and with
each other if they’re invited to in the right way.
• The Attention Matters! project suggests that believing in
myths about attention is related to dysfunctional multi­
tasking behaviors, which in turn predict lower GPA.
Targeting these mistaken beliefs can be part of helping
develop your students’ metacognitive skills.
• To effectively teach students to manage distracting tech-
nologies, don’t stop at giving them the facts. Try also
challenging them to consider how they’ll stick to tech-
nology management plans, especially when they’re bored,
frustrated, or dealing with in-­c lass neighbors who are
distracting them.
 CHAPTER 5

THE DEVICES WE CAN’T

PUT DOWN

Smartphones, Laptops, Memory,

and Learning

Computers started making serious inroads into our daily

lives when they became portable. They seemed to meld with
our very essence when they assumed the form of pocket-­
sized portals to the open internet. Gaming, news, urgent
work communications, running to-­do lists, even our entire
social networks — all of those things are perpetually just
one “unlock screen” away, thanks to the tiniest and most
addictive technology ever invented.
Education, as a field, was relatively slow to catch on to
the massive trend toward mobile and smartphone-­based
computing. Well into the years that saw the meteoric
global rise of the iPhone, the makers of education-­targeted
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technologies — textbook publishing firms, learning man-

agement system companies, and so on — lagged behind in
making products that would even work on a phone, let alone
take advantage of the unique affordances of these ultra-
portable computers. So it’s not surprising that in education
circles, we’re still thrashing around a bit to define a coherent
philosophy of what these devices mean for learning.
Furthermore, within these education circles, the dis-
cussion has overwhelmingly concentrated on the power of
mobile devices to distract students, especially during face-­
to-­face, in-­person classes. Smartphones, after all, are small
enough to conceal under a desk, enabling students to text
their way through an entire lecture if they choose. The lap-
tops that start out as a wonderful tool for taking notes and
accessing reference materials soon morph into means to do
anything except focus on class — a temptation that requires
an iron will to resist once your hands are on the keyboard
and your eyes are on the screen. These problems are all rem-
iniscent of the issues addressed in the Attention Matters!
module I talked about in the previous chapter, in that we
are grappling with a very real threat to attention, and thus
to learning, that students and teachers simply can’t escape
in the contemporary world. Taking an in-­depth look at what
exactly happens in our cognitive systems when we are using
mobile devices, or when we’re even in the mere presence of
those devices, is therefore a key piece of understanding the
big picture of how technology relates to learning.
Once we get into the bigger picture, it becomes clear that
the implications of carrying computers around with us go
beyond obvious instances of distraction. There are other
kinds of subtle effects, ones that we might not notice in the
moment but that over time begin to alter what we remember
and how capable we are of effectively using the knowledge
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 173

we acquire. These effects include our episodic memories of

things we’ve experienced, our ability to navigate around an
environment based on spatial information we’ve stored in
memory, and even what we learn along the way as we take
notes in a classroom. Today, all of these outcomes reflect
the influence of the devices most of us choose to rely on to
process and record information, a choice we might make
with the intention of enhancing our day-­to-­day functioning
but which sometimes creates unintended consequences.
The moral-­panic strain of antitechnology rhetoric has
flourished around portable devices, especially the smart-
phone. This constant visual, auditory, even tactile reminder
of the prominence of computing in our lives naturally makes
us wonder what might be happening in our minds as a result.
Like tiny, annoying lightning rods, smartphones seem to
attract and concentrate people’s negative perceptions about
technology — that it has become intrusive, is inescapable,
and is changing us for the worse.
The panic crowd is clearly right about one thing — smart-
phones are a new ballgame in terms of potential influences
on our cognitive processes. As the psychologist Henry
Wilmer and colleagues put it in a meaty review of research
on the subject, “smartphones are an especially impactful
technological development, due to their flexibility of func-
tion, portability, and increasing proliferation.”1 According to
these authors, the thoroughness with which smartphones
have permeated our contemporary lives actually makes them
somewhat difficult to study in controlled fashion, because
it’s now essentially impossible to study control groups of
individuals who don’t use these devices at all.
This difficulty is compounded by the fact that so many
studies use self-­report questionnaires as their main form
of measurement. At this point in history, most adults have
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been exposed to the idea that smartphones are hazardous

to one’s cognitive health. This exposure could create subtle
expectations that people unconsciously hew to in their
answers — a self-­fulfilling prophecy of sorts. There’s also the
fact that, as with many behaviors involving time, people are
just not that accurate at estimating how frequently they use
their phones.2 More objective measures, such as examining
people’s cognitive performance in different domains and
correlating those with actual observed patterns of phone
use, would skirt around these problems. But these kinds of
direct measurements are complicated and time-­consuming
to gather, and thus, we’re often stuck with a person’s own,
potentially distorted, perceptions of how their phones might
be affecting them.
Even given these limitations, though, there are a few
things researchers can confidently conclude about what
phones do and don’t do to our minds. Much as we saw with
the questions having to do with attention and computing in
general, the relationship between phones and mental func-
tioning isn’t a clear-­cut case of degradation and impairment.

Neural and Cognitive Consequences

of Using Smartphones

One study, conducted by the psychologist P. Andrew Leynes

and colleagues, used a technique called event-­related po-
tentials to pinpoint what happens to mental processes, at a
neural level, as a function of regular smartphone use.3
Event-­related potentials, or “ERPs”, are tiny fluctua-
tions in electrical activity that can be picked up through
electrodes placed on the outside of the scalp. These fluc-
tuations reflect the activity of groups of cells within the
brain. Researchers are usually interested in tracking what
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happens to this activity as a function of some stimulus they

present — namely, something research subjects are seeing,
hearing, or doing. This is the “event-­related” part of the
terminology. Over the years, ERP researchers have built
up enough data about these event-­related responses that
they can reliably identify patterns that are associated with
different cognitive processes, such as processing visual ma-
terial or picking up on anomalous words within sentences.
ERP methodology can even detect certain kinds of interior
mental reactions, such as surprise or boredom.
Leynes’ research team was interested in comparing these
telltale ERP signatures across experienced and naive smart-
phone users as they completed a task involving divided at-
tention across a phone and a reading task. So how did they
get around the problem that there are so few phone-­naive
individuals left to study? Ingeniously, the team took advan-
tage of a previously existing data set that had collected the
same kind of measurements, from the same type of research
subjects, back in 2007 — before smartphones had achieved
the total domination of the planet that they have now.
When the researchers compared these older data with
data from present-­day heavy phone users, they found that
ERP responses associated with visual-­spatial processing
were reduced in the experienced group, relative to the naive
group. Cognitively speaking, this reduced neural response
is actually a good thing, because it means that the brain
isn’t working as hard to process visual data. Granted, this
is a single study, and as the researchers acknowledge, there
could be other differences across the two cohorts that
could possibly account for the differences. However, it’s one
thought-­provoking example of how smartphones might be
creating across-­the-­board changes within the brain — and as
it happens in this case, the changes were positive.
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Visual-­spatial processing is certainly important, but it’s

not what most of us mean when we think about the mental
processes that power learning. In an effort to target this
kind of higher-­order cognitive processing, another study
targeted thinking style. This is an important choice given
that so many of the concerns commonly voiced among
technology skeptics involve thinking abilities, broadly de-
fined. Specifically, the researchers set out to test the claim
that smartphones encourage poor thinking habits and
practices. These included superficial skimming, jumping to
conclusions, and avoiding deep engagement with challenging
topics. In other words, the researchers wanted to know: As
phones get smarter, do their users get dumber?
Researchers tried to approach this question directly by
looking at the correlation between degree of smartphone
use — heavy or light — and the ability to reason.4 After asking
study volunteers about their typical phone use, researchers
presented them with a set of notoriously challenging logic
problems. What makes these logic problems so hard isn’t
the complexity (many contain just a few key pieces of infor-
mation), or the need for some kind of special expertise. It’s
that the problems dangle a tempting-­but-­wrong answer that
seems obvious unless you go through some difficult, precise
mental calculations.
Take this famous example, one that gets under my skin
every time I see it: “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The
bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball
cost?” (Hint: Not ten cents.5) Questions like this one reveal
how carefully and deliberately you tend to think.
The prediction was that heavy smartphone users would
be more prone to zipping straight to obvious answers, and
that conversely, lighter users would be willing and able to
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 177

engage in deeper, more difficult forms of thought. This is

exactly what the analyses revealed: a correlation between
level of smartphone use and cognitive style, in favor of the
lighter users. Notably, the overall amount of time spent
online didn’t have this same predictive relationship — rather,
it was specific to smartphones. The particular kinds of ac-
tivities that volunteers used their smartphones for also
mattered. Those who more frequently used their phones to
conduct searches were especially predisposed toward the
less-­deliberative, shortcutting cognitive style. Heavier use
of phones for entertainment and social media, by contrast,
mattered less.
This last finding is what the researchers zeroed in on to
argue that they had found another case of the offloading
dynamic, the one commonly implicated as one mechanism
by which technology affects information processing. Like the
study about online searching described in chapter 3, where
people tended not to encode information in memory if they
believed they could look it up later, these results suggest that
constantly going to your phone for answers makes you less
willing and able to work out the answers on your own. The
finding also highlights yet another link between thinking
and memory. Searching out information, rather than rely-
ing on one’s stored knowledge, might be part of an overall
pattern of thinking in which speed and ease are prioritized
over accuracy.
That is the story that the study’s authors would like to tell,
and they do make a good case for it. But there are multiple ca-
veats we need to consider before concluding that researchers
have found the smoking gun implicating smartphones in the
untimely death of human cognitive capabilities. This study,
like most, used self-­report for the heavy-­use measurement,
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so we can’t be sure that the relationship involved actual use

versus any of the factors that might influence our perception
of use — among which is simply the shoddy memory we have
of such everyday minutiae.
Furthermore, given that the study was set up to look at
correlations between preexisting variables instead of assign-
ing people to control groups and so forth, we simply can’t be
sure about the direction of cause and effect. It could easily
be the case that people who already lean toward a superfi-
cial cognitive style are attracted to the ease of searching on
their phones. Or, there could be an unknown third factor — a
personality quirk, some demographic characteristic — that
influences both of these outcomes, in parallel.
Both of these are plausible alternatives to the possibility
that habitually using your phone to look up information
causes alterations to your thinking style. I’ll grant, though,
that this study presents a red flag about the possibility that
it does. Perhaps it provides one more reason not to rely ex-
clusively on Google instead of our own memories, even when
we can.
So, phone use might alter our minds with respect to a few
fundamental aspects of cognitive processing. Still, there’s
still scant evidence that they’re wreaking havoc across the
board. Given that, we can look more closely at some impacts
that are specifically true for memory. To do that, we should
begin by going back to memory’s most important precursor:
attention.

Smartphones and Attention

The key affordance of smartphones — the thing that sets

them apart from other computing devices that came before
them — is that they stay with you, on your person or within
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 179

reach. Tied up with this barnacle-­like ability to stick with us

is their constant communicative function. Notifications pull
us away from what we’re doing with fiendish efficiency. And
even when we’ve suppressed the pings, badges, and other
obvious interruptions, phones provide constant visual re-
minders of all the engrossing things we can do with them.
It’s an attention disaster waiting to happen.
This brings us to one of the most unsettling studies on
phones and attention that’s come along in some time. It’s not
one that looks at how distracting it is to receive notifications,
or how ill-­advised it is to try to multitask while our eyes
and brain are glued to the device. None of those impacts
are that surprising, and by now they are well documented
in the research literature. Instead, this experiment looked
at how distracting a phone can be even when we aren’t using
it, listening to it, or even holding it in our hands.
A team led by psychologist Bill Thornton presented re-
search volunteers with a set of timed pencil-­and-­paper tests
designed to take intense concentration to complete. These
included tasks like searching and crossing out specific num-
bers from a row of numbers, doing the same for sequences
of numbers that added up to a specific number (e.g., if your
target number is 3, cross out 2 1), and drawing lines between
an array of numbered circles in correct order. The researchers
subtly manipulated one aspect of the testing situation, like
this: For one randomly assigned group of volunteers, the
research assistant administering the test casually placed her
cell phone on the edge of the table before the tests began.
For the control group, the research assistant placed a cell-­
phone-­sized spiral notebook in the same spot.
That one tweak to the situation did in fact affect how
well participants did on the attention-­demanding tasks.
At the easier levels of the tests — for example, just finding
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and crossing off single numbers — there wasn’t a difference.

But as the tests got harder — crossing off numbers that add
to a target number, dealing with circles that were labeled
with either numbers or letters, in order — performance got
worse in the presence of the phone. Researchers interpreted
this pattern as evidence that just that one environmental
cue— someone else’s phone sitting off in the periphery — can
grab our attention, enough to matter when we’re engaged in
a particularly demanding activity.
That’s enough to give one pause, and perhaps cause one
to reconsider the habit of leaving phones around in any old
place when we’re trying to get work done. It’s sobering to
think that phones have acquired enough power over us, at
a deep enough level of our consciousness, that we can’t help
but divert our focus toward them.
That said, there are a few caveats we have to apply to this
study as well. On the one hand, the design was experimen-
tal, not correlational, meaning that we don’t have to worry
that we’re comparing across two groups of volunteers who
might differ in some fundamental way (e.g., that there’s a
certain kind of person who chooses to be around phones,
since volunteers weren’t given the choice but rather were ran-
domly assigned to the groups). On the other hand, like most
well-­controlled experiments, Thornton’s procedure was a bit
contrived. For example, the phone in question was someone
else’s, not one’s own phone as we would most commonly be
dealing with in a real-­life situation involving distraction.
There have been some questions as well about how con-
sistently this effect shows up; not all studies attempting to
replicate the effect have been able to do so.6 Strangely, one
of these replication studies found that when you substitute a
person’s own phone into the procedure, and have them either
keep their phones in view or set them in another room, they
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 181

tend to rate the tasks they are doing in the experiment as

easier and less boring.7 This turns out to be especially true
for people who describe themselves as more attached to their
phones. This suggests (but doesn’t confirm definitively) that
the phone-­dependent among us are in a bit of a catch-­22.
Having our phones in view while we try to work is distract-
ing, but so is being separated from them altogether.
The notion that smartphones are uniquely distracting,
even when we aren’t actively poking away at them, also
fits with the findings of another line of research. A team of
researchers led by psychologist Cary Stothart investigated
how distracting it was to receive notifications on your phone
even when you don’t have any intention of answering them.
Researchers engaged participants in a computer-­based vigi-
lance task that allowed them to pinpoint any lapse in atten-
tion that happened. Then, in an ingenious twist, researchers
arranged to send notifications (unbeknown to the research
volunteers) that were audible during the procedure. The vol-
unteers, believing that they were hearing real notifications,
saw their performance crash, compared to how they had
done in an undistracted state — even though none actually
responded. The team speculated — plausibly, I think — that
this performance drop-­off happened because of the volley
of off-­topic thoughts triggered with each new ring and ping.
One last reason to credit smartphones with a unique abil-
ity to distract us comes from that same study by Leynes and
colleagues on the event-­related potentials associated with
receiving notifications. Even though these researchers found
that smartphone use was associated with improvements to
the efficiency of visual processing, in a different study, they
found some powerful physical evidence of how distracting
it can be to interact with phones. It turns out there’s also an
electrical signature associated with noticing information
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that’s relevant to an ongoing task, a signal that’s easily

picked up with the ERP technique. This telltale brainwave
pattern was reduced by around fifty percent in participants
who were using a smartphone to do the experimental task.
This is one sobering way to quantify the size of the impact,
and it drives home the idea that these kinds of effects aren’t
just subjective impressions, but instead are rooted deeply in
our brains’ attentional mechanisms.
Let’s acknowledge again that none of these studies
demonstrated long-­term, lasting erosion of anybody’s at-
tentional capabilities. The negative effects they revealed
were primarily short-­term decrements, impacts that go away
when the phone does. But they all give a new perspective
on what many of us have long suspected: Smartphones are
wildly distracting.
One of the reasons we care so much about the distraction
wrought by smartphones is because being distracted under-
cuts memory. What are some other ways that smartphones
can directly affect what and how well we remember?
One possibility is that smartphones magnify the “I can
Google it later” effect we encountered in a previous chapter—
the one where believing that you’ll be able to search for
information leads you not to encode it as well in your own
memory.8 That finding was a general one having to do with
any kind of access to information stored digitally, but it
seems likely that smartphones could increase this tendency
even further. Because people tend to keep their phones with
them constantly, and use them so frequently, phones accen-
tuate that sense that we can just rely on search engines for
everything we need to know. Right now, this link is only
hypothetical — but it’s highly plausible given what we already
know.
Other research has attempted to pinpoint impacts of
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 183

specific uses for smartphones, especially those that affect

our memory for experiences as we move through different
physical environments. In this case, the relevant kind of
memory is episodic memory, meaning impressions connected
to firsthand experiences we had in particular places. It’s an
apt choice, given the contemporary trend toward using our
phones throughout all kinds of excursions, both to take
photos and to share what we’re experiencing with others
via social media and messaging. These memories are also the
kind that we tend to be particularly interested in creating
and preserving, whether it’s because they’re so enjoyable, or
because (for example, in the case of a field trip or work event)
the purpose is to gather information we will need later on.
So does using your phone during a real-­world experience
affect what you remember about that experience? Here,
we probably want to count as a given the fact that if you’re
simply distracted with off-­topic tasks and notifications the
whole time, you’ll encode less. More interesting are ques-
tions about how attempting to record the experience itself
changes recall. This was the subject of an experiment by
Diana Tamir and colleagues, who set out to discover what
happens when we use a phone to record something we’re
experiencing, and also, what happens when we’re intent on
sharing the experience on social media.
Tamir’s research team asked volunteers to tour a local
landmark,9 and later tested what they remembered about
the place they visited. This memory test was a surprise, so
that just like with real-­world memories, participants weren’t
deliberately trying to memorize details along the way. It
also took place after a solid delay — at least one week after
the tour — which also helped make the test as realistic as
possible. To simulate the effect of using a cellphone camera,
researchers assigned some volunteers to use devices to take
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photos along the way. Volunteers were further subdivided

into two groups, one that was asked to take pictures for
their own use and one that was asked to share the photos
on social media immediately after the tour. Those assigned
to the control condition left their cellphones behind before
embarking on the tour.
The results of the camera – no camera comparison were
quite clear: People who took pictures remembered less. This
applied regardless of whether the photos were for personal
use or for online sharing. What wasn’t as clear were the rea-
sons for this difference. Other measurements taken after
the visit showed no differences in engagement, enjoyment,
or feelings of being present during the experience itself.
But even if they didn’t nail down the precise reasons for
the effect, the researchers did find solid evidence that, iron-
ically enough, the devices we use to hang onto cherished
experiences actually degrade the memories we have of those
experiences.
Is there a way out of this catch-­22? Older research on the
psychology of photographing scenes suggests that there may
be. Psychologist Linda Henkel assigned research volunteers
to do something similar to the procedure in the landmark-­
tour experiment.10 Participants toured a museum exhibit
with instructions to photograph certain objects, and not to
photograph other objects. On a surprise memory test later
on, objects that people had taken pictures of weren’t remem-
bered as well as objects that volunteers had simply examined
without taking any photos. This pattern seems like another
argument for the memory-­destroying effects of snapping
pictures, except for a twist discovered in a follow-­up study:
When people are told to take pictures of specific parts of
objects — for example, just the hands of a statue — memory
is almost as good as when they are taking no pictures at all.
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 185

On the one hand, this could seem like a minuscule excep-

tion to an overall trend — and who, after all, would really
spend their time during a memorable experience worrying
about the finer points of photographing whole things or just
parts? But that would miss the real point of the part-­versus-­
whole finding, which is this: Being attentive counteracts the
photo-­offloading effect. In other words, when we’re focused
more intently on the experience — as we would be when
selecting specific things to photograph — that focus kick-­
starts the process of forming new memories of what we’re
doing. That offsets the costs associated with being distracted
by taking the picture, as well as the decrements caused by
offloading the memory from our brains to our photographs.
All in all, the impacts of picture-­taking on memory should
remind us of the multistage, multidimensional nature of
memory, and how different stages of creating and accessing
memories can be affected differently by the presence of tech-
nology. Successfully remembering an experience requires
multiple things to go exactly right. We have to encode the
information in the first place, which in turn requires that
we are not only attentive, but also that we take some level
of responsibility for remembering it ourselves rather than
assuming we can rely on an external mechanism. Then, we
need to be able to get that encoded information back out
of storage, usually with the aid of some kind of a cue. And
with that, we need to give credit to external recordings for
providing excellent cues. As Henkel points out in her article,
there’s plenty of research showing that examining a photo-
graph can trigger and effectively reactivate details from our
own memories, which makes them a wonderful complement
to our own memories.
In the end, what should we believe about our memo-
ries and smartphone cameras — and as importantly, what
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should we do differently in light of the research? There’s good

reason, on the front end, to be careful about spending too
much time during an important experience taking pictures.
We can shoot just the most important or irresistible details,
and when we do, we can stop and focus on what specific
details we’re attempting to capture. More subtly, we can alter
our mindset about what cellphone photos are for, from a
memory standpoint. Ideally, we create these pictures not as
an easy substitute for our own recollections, but as a way to
trigger those recollections later on.
It’s reminiscent of a compromise approach that I heard
about from one group of my own young-­adult students.
On a big trip they’d planned to celebrate their senior year,
these young women made a pact not to use their phones to
take pictures, instead choosing to use disposable cameras to
record just a few choice shots along the way. This arrange-
ment both forced the group members to be more selective
about what they chose to photograph, while heading off the
inevitable distractions that suck you in when you pull your
phone out to capture that gorgeous sunset or perfect selfie.
These students’ deliberate approach offers some encour-
aging points for teachers as well. It’s another reminder that
our students themselves are a source of ideas for managing
memory when technology is involved, and that not all young
people feel the need to be yoked to their phones at all times.
All of the research, taken together, offers other insights for
teachers who take on the labor-­intensive, important work
of setting up experiences like field trips and site visits. It
likely makes sense to raise the issue with students ahead of
time, setting expectations and norms for phone cameras, or
perhaps for when phones should be out at all. The research
also provides relatable examples of the important principles
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 187

linking memory and attention, as well as how seemingly

small changes — like taking pictures of partial objects — can
have a big impact when they tap into those principles.
Similarly, there’s another line of research based on real-­
world activities that we can tie in to principles that matter
for learning. This research grows out of an established body
of work on the effects of GPS-­style navigation on memory
for spatial environments, something that used to be done by
dedicated navigation devices but that’s now typically han-
dled by a phone. The question here is: Does using a phone to
get detailed directions as we move through a region in space
hinder the process of learning how to get around that region
on our own? And if so, is that negative impact any worse
than it would be for low-­tech alternatives like paper maps?
According to one early study of this issue, the answers are
yes and yes.11 Using a driving simulator, researchers asked
volunteers to make their way through a virtual town, aided
either by paper maps or GPS-­style turn-­by-­turn directions.
When they were later presented with a surprise recall test,
volunteers in the turn-­by-­turn group showed poorer recall,
with sparser mental maps and a decreased ability to sketch
important landmarks.
Research since then has offered more evidence that over
time, using navigation aids slows down the formation of our
own knowledge, resulting in longer and less efficient trips
(especially when the aids are taken away).12 There may even
be a rich-­get-­richer effect here too, because people who per-
ceive themselves to be less adept at navigation are especially
likely to rely on computer-­generated directions, which then
causes them to store even less information that might help
them navigate in the future.13 This phenomenon both offers
caution about relying on phones to get around environments
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that we’d like to develop a better understanding of, and puts

another checkmark in the column of mental processes that
can deteriorate as a function of offloading.
In sum, phones probably do affect what we remember
as we use them in typical ways — taking pictures, getting
directions, and searching for information. They almost cer-
tainly affect memory when they do what they do best — send
attention-­grabbing alerts that cause us to disengage from
what we’re supposed to be doing. This power in particular
may be something phones exert over us even when we’re
separated from them, or even reminded in some way of their
existence. The jury is still out on whether heavy phone use
degrades our ability to use knowledge in more profound
ways, but if it does, that would constitute another part of
the same familiar dynamic, one in which phones encourage
us to over-­rely on them, perhaps combined with their ability
to train us to like and expect instant results.

Should We Try to Give Up Mobile Devices —

or At Least Curtail Them?

Given the risks to memory and perhaps thought itself,

should teachers make it their mission to separate students
from their ever-­present phones? Should we all be separating
ourselves from mobile devices, just to be on the safe side?
The answer, I think, is “only partly,” and here is why.
First, I think that phones have a lot to offer in terms of
reinforcing weaker areas of cognition. In the previous
chapter, I talked about the problem of prospective memory,
something that brains are awful at but where phones excel,
and in the next chapter, we’ll look at how technology can
serve an assistive function to those of us facing specific in-
dividual challenges. Second, teachers would be missing out
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 189

on good educational applications I described in an earlier

chapter — the Duolingos, the Kahoots, and (hopefully) even
better incarnations of technology to come. Used strategically
and well, these smartphone-­friendly apps are a boon to stu-
dents, and so passing up on all of them is a heavy tradeoff.
Third, and finally, as we weigh those tradeoffs, there is
the encouraging fact that we can mitigate some of the issues
once we really understand why they are happening, from the
inside out. One thing that jumps out after a close look at the
research is that the problems with smartphones aren’t an
inevitability, or something inherent to the machines them-
selves. Instead, all of them trace back to particular ways we
use the devices (or allow ourselves to be used by them, as
the case may be). Once we see and understand the ways in
which our cognitive processes are being pulled off track, we
can effectively resist.
This blind spot, where we pin problems on the devices
without considering why the problems happen, is nowhere
more evident than in a long-­r unning debate over another
type of device that has made enormous inroads into daily
life: the laptop. Specifically, the debate focuses on the note-­
taking students do in class and what the cognitive implica-
tions are for using laptops, and not paper, for this purpose.

Should Teachers Let Students Take Notes on Laptops?

The question about using laptops for taking notes has fired
up more heated opinions than nearly any other topic in
technology and teaching in the last ten years. Rarely do the
finer points of higher education pedagogy make it into the
popular consciousness, but this one did, in spectacular fash-
ion. Over a period spanning several years, multiple op-­eds
in major magazines and newspapers14 argued that laptops
190 Chapter 5

are hazardous to learning, usually concluding that teachers

ought to simply forbid these devices during class.
This explosion of interest then touched off a counter­
reaction, in the form of a flurry of articles and blog posts15
from nationally known teaching experts, most of whom took
the opposite stance on the wisdom of forbidding laptops in
class. Writers in this camp argued that blanket bans have
some serious downsides and warned against over-­extension
of the fairly limited research evidence against laptop-­based
notetaking.
Regarding that research evidence, virtually everybody
cites one particular series of experiments that was reported
in a 2014 article by the cognitive psychologists Pam Mueller
and Daniel Oppenheimer. This article carried the catchy (for
an academic journal, anyway) title “The Pen Is Mightier Than
the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note
Taking,” and to this day it remains the weapon of choice for
anyone who wants to argue the case for handwriting over
keyboarding in education. As one research team observed
about the study, “It has also captured the academic imagi-
nation; as of January 15, 2021, Mueller and Oppenheimer
(2014) have been cited more than 1,100 times (Google
Scholar), and the article’s Attention score places it in ‘the
top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.’”16
In this study, Mueller and Oppenheimer set out to ex-
amine the impact, on memory specifically, of taking hand-
written notes versus keyboarding in situations that are
similar to a college classroom. Their research volunteers were
asked to watch a 15-­minute recorded TED talk, a format
that the researchers believed to be roughly similar to that
of an in-­class lecture. Volunteers were told to take notes
using their usual techniques, and here’s where the critical
variable came into play. Some were randomly assigned to use
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 191

paper notebooks, and others were assigned to use laptops

(not their own, but ones provided by researchers, on which
internet access was disabled to prevent off-­topic activities
during the experiment).
After watching the talks, volunteers were led off to an-
other room where they engaged in some demanding working-­
memory tasks for about a half hour. This way, researchers
could be sure that they’d wiped out any short-­term recol-
lection of the talks before testing volunteers over what they
remembered. The test questions paralleled what many faculty
do in real exams, in that there were different levels and kinds
of questions. Some questions focused on factual recall and
others focused on conceptual relationships—items requiring
prediction, comparison, application, and the like.
Researchers didn’t just look at test performance. They
also analyzed the notes themselves, to get a sense of how
the two forms of note taking differ, focusing on important
variables such as the overall amount of verbiage written
and the degree to which there was verbatim transcription
of what the TED speakers had said. This way, they could test
the common assertion that note-­takers don’t work as hard
to condense and synthesize what they’re hearing when they
can quickly copy down exactly what’s being said. If this is the
case, there should be a less-­is-­more phenomenon, whereby
the slower process of handwriting induces more complex
thought, and thus better memorability, according to the
well-­documented depth of processing effect.
The results of this comparison told a powerful story about
the link between note-­taking modality, memory, and what
people tend to write when they’re using different mecha-
nisms for doing so. There was a clear and significant advan-
tage for longhand note taking in the case of conceptual recall
questions. Factual questions, by contrast, were little affected
192 Chapter 5

by how people took notes. When taking handwritten notes,

the research volunteers wrote less, but what they wrote also
overlapped less with the text of the TED talks, such that
there did appear to be a lower level of verbatim transcription
and a greater amount of concise, originally worded summary
of the content in handwritten notes. And, it turned out that
the less verbatim overlap there was in a given set of notes,
the better the performance was on the memory test.
The bottom line: Results were consistent with the intu-
itions of many laptop skeptics, confirming that people write
more and remember less when keyboarding.
The work certainly sounds like the last word in favor of
low-­tech note taking. And as a researcher, I’d agree that
the design and execution of the study are, if not flawless,
very strong. In particular, the authors did a tremendous job
drawing precise comparisons among different kinds of exam
questions and digging deeply into the finer points of how
different methods of note taking affect what we capture. But
as with any single study that’s expected to support major
changes to our teaching practices — or even changes to our
overall acceptance of laptops in daily life — we have to look
in depth at what that study did well, what it didn’t do as well,
and what it ultimately can and can’t tell us.
It’s also important to determine whether the same re-
sults are likely to happen under different circumstances. To
do this, the gold standard is replication — in other words,
having other researchers try the same procedure to see if
they get the same outcomes. We social science researchers
don’t do nearly as much replication as we should, but in the
case of the laptop study, several complete replications have
now been carried out, and the results are eye-­opening.17
For one replication, researchers Kayla Morehead, John
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 193

Dunlosky, and Katherine A. Rawson first did exactly what

Mueller and Oppenheimer did, randomly assigning differ-
ent groups of volunteers to use different methods of note
taking while watching the same exact set of TED talks, then
testing what they remembered afterward.18 This time, the
team did not find a significant advantage of handwriting for
the conceptual questions, although strangely they did find
such an advantage in the case of purely factual questions.
The original pattern of a greater volume of notes being taken
via laptop held up in the replication, with volunteers writing
more and including more verbatim transcription when using
laptops.
In other words, some patterns found in the original study
replicated, but some — most notably the conceptual recall
question advantage — did not. When findings like this can’t
be reproduced consistently, naturally it raises questions
about why that is, and unfortunately, we can’t tell for sure
based on the Morehead team’s study alone. It may be that
the effect is simply more fragile, more subject to change with
any tiny alteration to context, than it originally appeared to
be. As social scientists have pointed out about all kinds of
replications, when you’re looking at differences that are fairly
subtle to begin with, you may not be able to observe them
in every single sample, even when all the correct procedures
are in place and there’s nothing questionable about the orig-
inal study. Random variations in the characteristics of your
sample, your testing conditions and so on can obscure the
view of smaller, less dramatic effects. This is consistent with
the fact that the larger, more dramatic of the effects found in
the original study — the differences in the number of words
written and the level of verbatim transcription — held up
just fine in the replication.
194 Chapter 5

All this back and forth is good social science, but from a
practical standpoint it leads to one fairly glaring conclusion:
If the supposed advantage of handwriting is subtle enough,
or simply small enough, not to reliably show up across
studies, we probably shouldn’t be remaking our classroom
policies because of it. We should also set a much higher bar
for any future op-­ed pieces singing the praises of handwrit-
ing, with the expectation that the authors will need to offer
either some major caveats based on the replication ques-
tion, or a good explanation for why these newer findings
don’t matter. That alone would be a huge contribution of
the Morehead replication study: reintroducing nuance and
reminding us that one study does not a definitive scientific
conclusion make.
This wasn’t the only contribution of the replication study,
though, and it’s important that some of the researchers’
additional insights not get lost in the back-­and-­forth over
the laptop question. As a carefully planned extension to the
original Mueller and Oppenheimer procedure, the team also
looked at another technology for taking notes: eWriters.
These note-­taking tools are digital, but don’t involve key-
boarding. Instead, they are designed to mimic the experience
of writing on paper, but with a tablet-­t ype interface. eWrit-
ers offer a paper-­saving alternative to physical notebooks,
and although at the time of this writing they haven’t taken
off in terms of popularity, Morehead and colleagues make a
good case that if we care about the impact of different tech-
nologies on memories for what we write, we should expand
the range of technologies that we’re looking at. eWriters also
offer a way to tease apart the impact of using a technologi-
cal aid per se from any effects that are due to keyboarding.
Overall, their findings showed that eWriters produced sim-
ilar patterns as writing on paper, both with respect to the
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 195

word count and verbatim overlap, as well as the impact (or

lack thereof) on memory for the content of the notes.
The replication study team also brought up a major issue
in the interpretation of the findings, one that ought to make
us step back and take a new perspective on the overall ques-
tion of how notes help students learn. This interpretation
issue goes back to the idea of students’ learning as a function
of creating the notes — in other words, acquiring knowledge
right then and there while they are writing. This is termed
the encoding function of notes. But as the researchers pointed
out in the write-­up of the replication study, this isn’t the only
way that notes promote learning. Typically, class notes have
their bigger impact later on, while students are going back
and reviewing what they wrote. This is the storage function
of notes, and here, it’s not the modality or even the amount
of notes that matter, but the relevance of what was written
down to the eventual exam, quiz, or other assessment of
learning.
The storage function of notes always strikes me as less
exciting than the encoding function, and that might be why
it is rarely mentioned in antilaptop editorials. It’s just some-
thing you’d assume is part of studying — deliberately sitting
down and putting in the effort to review and refresh on what
you heard. The encoding function, on the other hand, offers
the promise of learning without even reviewing. And while
this function is important — and indeed, although memo-
ries are formed all the time without deliberate review and
rehearsal — learning while taking notes still seems like a
side benefit, something that is a nice bonus but not what
most students are depending on to get prepared for a test.
Morehead and colleagues don’t write about it specifically,
but there is the additional possibility that good notes can be
the basis for even more powerful study techniques, such as
196 Chapter 5

retrieval practice or relating the material to your own life.

These techniques, too, would work best when a students’
notes are comprehensive, accurate, and relevant.
Put another way, the real bread and butter function of
notes might not be the cool side effect of creating memories
while writing, but rather, in supporting effective studying
later on. So how does the quality of notes fit into the laptop
versus handwriting question? Morehead and colleagues
looked at characteristics of notes taken by their research
volunteers, defining quality along two dimensions: first, how
many test answers happened to be included in the notes (i.e.,
relevance), and how many concepts were incorporated as a
function of how many words were written (i.e., efficiency).
The idea here is that notes that have a dense concentration of
conceptual material, and are well-­aligned with the content
of the eventual test, will be particularly useful for studying.
The team compared these quality measures across modes
of note taking and found no differences in the relevance
and efficiency of notes taken by the three methods. Nor did
they find significant differences in test performance when
volunteers were allowed to study their notes before the test
(a variation that would enhance any effect associated with
the storage function), although there was a nonsignificant
trend toward better performance for the laptop group.
Morehead and colleagues ended their article by stating
that based on the research, there simply isn’t enough evi-
dence to justify prescribing one method of note taking over
another, and I quite agree. Also, if you go back to the original
“pen is mightier than the keyboard” study, those authors
themselves include numerous qualifications to their con-
clusion that teachers ought to prescribe handwritten notes.
Most notably, they point out that laptops are going to be a
problem mainly if note-­takers use them to “indiscriminately”
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 197

transcribe reams of undigested lecture content. In other

words, we shouldn’t look on laptops in general with suspi-
cion, but rather, focus on note-­taking techniques.
These observations jibe with an even more recent repli-
cation attempt, this one conducted by Tufts University pro-
fessor Heather Urry and a student research team.19 Urry’s
group reran the original Mueller and Oppenheimer study
with scrupulous attention to keeping almost every detail
the same, right down to showing the identical set of TED
talks to their research volunteers. Once again, this study
did replicate the core finding that people do in fact write
more when taking notes by laptop, and that they score
lower on retention tests when their notes contain a high
degree of verbatim overlap with the talk they’re watching.
However, handwritten notes failed to produce any apprecia-
ble improvement in performance, either for conceptual or
factual-­style exam questions.
Across multiple studies, then, a similar pattern is emerg-
ing: When studied under controlled experimental condi-
tions, the advantages of longhand writing are inconsistent at
best, and nonexistent at worst. Verbatim transcription does
seem to lower exam performance, but as Urry’s team points
out, there is another important caveat to interpreting this
connection as straight cause and effect. It may be the case
that students who are more likely to engage in transcription-­
style note taking are less conscientious, less motivated or
simply less interested in the talk topics, and thus likely to
score lower on exam questions anyway.20
This nuanced interpretation introduced by conscientious,
replication-­minded scientists stands as a stark contrast to
how popular culture has latched onto the idea that laptops
hurt learning. It’s especially notable how so many people
ascribe inherent power to the act of writing by hand.
198 Chapter 5

Handwriting is dramatically different than keyboarding in

many ways, I will grant you that. However, as a cognitive sci-
entist with a deep background in the psychology of language,
I can also assure you that writing with a handheld instru-
ment has no special power as far as memory is concerned.
There’s no superhighway to long-­term storage opened up by
slowly scratching out words on paper, although you might
think there was based on the breathless pronouncements
in popular press about its power to sear information into
your brain.21
This leads us back to a pretty inescapable conclusion about
note-­taking methodologies and machinery: It’s the thought
processes, not the medium itself, that matters most. Good
note taking is a skill, one that can be consciously applied
even when you have the option to do the kinds of mindless
copying that is admittedly easier when on a laptop.
Imagine if even a tiny fraction of the energy directed
against in-­class laptops were directed toward promoting
better ways to make the most of class time. Instructors could
work on developing powerful methods for note taking, ones
grounded in science and designed to maximize both the en-
coding and storage functions of notes. We could spend class
time actually teaching those methods to students, and we
could work to ensure that students get practice and feedback
while they’re developing this bedrock academic skill. That,
to me, would be a crusade worth getting behind, and I have
a hunch that it’s something the Mueller, Morehead, Urry,
and other research teams would all agree on.
They agree on something else as well, a limitation of their
research that rarely makes it into any of the public discus-
sions but which is spelled out quite clearly in several of the
key articles on the subject. This is the issue of using laptops
for off-­topic, distracting activities in the middle of a learning
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 199

task. In the actual studies, this wasn’t possible, given that in

the Mueller and Oppenheimer study as well as in the major
replications, research participants were prevented from web
surfing during the procedure.
Off-­task activities made possible by laptops may not have
been a major concern for these particular research teams,
but they are for those of us teaching in real classrooms. Any
faculty member who’s ever watched a student gazing intently
at a screen, nary a keystroke in sight, for an entire class
period knows that note-­taking technique isn’t the issue,
but instead whether the student is mentally present at all.
At that point, the finer distinctions of encoding, storage,
word count and verbatim overlap go out the window, and
we’re back to the fact that without attention, nothing much
is going to happen as far as memory for class material is
concerned.
This frustrating fact could be what really forms the reac-
tor core powering the nuclear-­level outrage about laptop-­
toting college students: that the devices enable them to tune
in intermittently at best, ignoring their instructor the rest
of the time. These instructors, being only human and having
human egos, end up feeling personally slighted, or outright
insulted. This is natural, but we should acknowledge that if
this is the real motivation, the concern doesn’t actually have
much to do with the cognitive benefits of handwritten notes,
or even with learning per se.
That said, it is a problem to have something as distract-
ing as a computer in front of you when you’re being asked
to engage in the difficult and sometimes draining work of
learning. Or even worse, if you are a student who is putting
in the effort to stay focused in class, you may find yourself
sucked in to the digital mayhem unfolding on your less con-
scientious neighbors’ laptops.
200 Chapter 5

This possibility was the subject of another high-­profile

study on distractions and laptops, carried out by the psychol-
ogists Faria Sana, Tina Weston, and Nicholas Cepeda.22 They
used a straightforward procedure to look at what other peo-
ple’s visible laptops do to performance, assigning volunteers
to take handwritten notes during a lecture. One randomly
assigned group was seated in view of research confederates
who were flipping back and forth among different non – class-­
related websites, such as Facebook; others were only in view
of other students taking handwritten notes. Those who could
see others doing distracting things on laptops performed
worse on a test of lecture content, validating the concern
that it’s not just one’s own learning that suffers when laptops
are misused in class.
Another problem that’s rarely discussed, but which is
equally important, is the distancing effect that laptops can
have in a face-­to-­face class setting. Especially in seminar-­
style courses where students are supposed to be fully en-
gaged with each other in deep discussion, those ever-­present
screens form a psychological and physical barrier. And al-
though it’s clear that good note-­taking skills should offset
the “mindless transcription” that laptop note-­taking studies
talk about, not all students have those skills, and not all
instructors are willing and able to teach them.
This is a real problem. So what should instructors do?
The often-­prescribed advice to forbid all laptops from all
classrooms isn’t a good option; here is why: access, inclusion,
and simple consideration of individual needs. Some students
need to be able to boost their writing speed, and to capture
more of what’s being said. Some need the additional struc-
ture provided by having an outline or a copy of the lecture
slides that they can use as a guide as they go.
Some students are physically less capable of producing
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 201

legible, reasonably complete notes when handwriting. This

point is personal. I have struggled tremendously with hand-
writing since I was in elementary school, partly because of
a childhood injury that affected fine motor control in my
dominant hand. Writing, for me, is slow, uncomfortable,
and — given how illegible even my better attempts are —
singularly unrewarding. These problems have only gotten
worse with age (and, admittedly, with the lack of practice
wrought by my own preference not to handwrite except
when I absolutely have to). Given all of this, I’m the last
person who would tell a student that in my class that it’s
paper notes or the highway.
Clearly, across-­t he-­board, no-­tech-­a llowed policies
aren’t the answer, especially if they are punitive or create
a situation where individual accommodations are obvious
to others. As an alternative, some instructors — myself in-
cluded, at least in some classes — explicitly tell students that
they can use any technology in any way they want during
class, as long as it helps them learn and doesn’t get in the way
of others’ learning. Knowing that it’s easy to kid ourselves
about what actually is helping our learning, I also like to
encourage students to educate themselves about attention
and learning, and to be really honest with themselves about
how they are using technology. Once again, I borrow the les-
sons from Attention Matters!, and attempt to raise awareness
about the fact that even if you’re young and tech-­savvy, your
attention is more fallible than you realize and learning can’t
happen if you don’t have your head in the game.
Other advocates go further, telling us to turn the spot-
light onto our own teaching rather than on our students’
failure to pay rapt attention to our every word. As teaching
expert Robert Talbert put it in an insightful blog post about
fighting in-­class distraction:
202 Chapter 5

“I think all lecturers, even the 1%-­ers who are consistently out-
standing lecturers, struggle to win the battle for attention. But,
when you reach this point—which you will, if you teach for any
length of time—you cannot just question the technology. You
also need to question your teaching. By simply banning laptops
when you get to this point, you’re saying: Everything I am doing is
OK. It’s that darn technology that’s messing it up. . . . So maybe the
answer here isn’t to ban laptops but to back away from instruc-
tional methods that are obviously going to invite distraction,
and instead do class differently with the above questions in
mind. We can even conceive of such classes where technology is
part of the engagement process if we just try a little.”23

These days, lecturing excessively — or lecturing at all,

according to some experts — is generally seen as poor peda-
gogy. I come down in the middle on the issue of how much
lecture is acceptable in a college class. On the one hand, a
well-­structured lecture can pack in lots of information in a
compact form, and if the lecture content is well-­connected
to other learning activities that are going on in the class,
that immediacy can trigger great retention of that material.
I also think the enduring popularity of spoken-­word media
such as TED talks also demonstrates that good lectures can
be engrossing, enjoyable, and have the power to truly move
people.
On the other hand, I don’t believe lecturing should be
seen as synonymous with “teaching,” nor should it be the
default choice when we’re planning what to do with class
time. Even those carefully crafted, built-­to-­entertain TED
talks are less than about 20 minutes long, much less than
the typical class period. And as we saw back in the chapter
on attention, it’s natural for our engagement to wane — and
distractions to beckon — if we’re merely watching and taking
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 203

in information for long stretches of time. There’s also the

practical reality that in college, our face-­to-­face meeting
time is precious and limited, and in an era when there are
so many ways to present and consume content, it doesn’t
make sense to spend that limited time simply restating in-
formation that students can get elsewhere.
Lecture may still be prevalent, but many faculty have
incorporated this message about active learning into their
teaching. And so, students are frequently encountering
plenty of in-­class activities that don’t have anything to do
with lecture, and where capturing material transmitted from
the instructor isn’t even relevant. Note taking during activ-
ities like pair discussion, laboratory exercises, role playing,
quiz games and the like would be entirely beside the point.
Students would be retaining memories of these exercises,
all right, but more as an organic outcome of having had
a compelling experience, not as something that happens
through deliberately recording, condensing, and rehearsing
information.
Talbert’s point also implies that if we teachers are conceiv-
ing of class as an exercise in teacher-­to-­student information
transfer (there’s that banking metaphor again!), then no
wonder students will treat it as such. Namely, they’ll treat
it as something to be mindlessly transcribed, and quite pos-
sibly, to be escaped from as often as possible. When we flip
the script so that class is seen as something that students do
instead of something that they witness and watch, suddenly
the laptop question is less relevant.
Let’s take the example of a class that kicks off with a fast-­
paced quiz game on the assigned background reading. The
quiz then leads into an unscripted, lively discussion of what
students got right and wrong. From there, the instructor
introduces a structured discussion exercise in which groups
204 Chapter 5

of students each discuss one claim that was made in the

reading they did, answering specific challenging questions
without obvious right or wrong answers. At the end, each
group presents their ideas to the rest of the class. The in-
structor summarizes the main points and adds a few ad-
ditional questions for students to think about before the
next meeting.
This, by the way, is a fair description of many of my own
class meetings, complete with quizzes and structured exer-
cises. Many students are in fact on various devices during
class, to review the reading that’s being discussed, search
the Internet for additional evidence, definitions and the like,
and perhaps even to take notes. Are they fooling around
on them? Possibly, but given the fast pacing and the expec-
tation that everyone will contribute to the tasks at hand,
there’s not too much opportunity for students to be pulled
off course. And given that most of the time, the focus is
supposed to be on them and not on me, occasional misuses
of technology don’t feel quite as much like an ego-­bruising
affront to me and my lecturing prowess.
Granted, this is an idealistic view of what class can be like,
and it’s one that is harder to pull off under less-­privileged
circumstances. Factors like large class sizes, lack of in-­class
teaching assistants, or less-­prepared students do matter,
enough where we shouldn’t underestimate the challenge of
creating active, engaged classrooms. But enough experts
have weighed in on these kinds of teaching techniques
by now to make it clear that active learning is both nec-
essary and possible, even in the kind of courses that have
traditionally fallen into the passive-­learning, lecture-­heavy
model.24 In other words, lecture does its job best when it’s
interspersed with other activities, and in my experience,
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 205

pretty much any lecture-­based course is improved by the

introduction of these alternatives.
I also don’t believe you need to have just one idealized
kind of class — small, advanced, seminar-­style, with per-
fectly motivated students — in order to buffer yourself from
the problems of mobile devices. What you do need is an ap-
proach to teaching that makes every moment count, and at
its best, entices students to set aside distractions voluntarily.
This brings us to one last perspective on in-­class tech-
nology that I think is both practical, mindful of the science
around distraction, and compassionate toward the needs
of diverse learners. It’s a philosophy that teaching expert
and college professor James Lang articulates in the book
Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do
About It,25 which I also talked about in the previous chapter.
As you’d assume from the title, the book takes an in-­
depth look at the classroom problems wrought by mobile
tech. As for the question of whether instructors ought to
allow laptops, Lang offers a nuanced “it depends.”
Instructors should make policies about technology, Lang
says, but these should be responsive, situational, and part
of a larger emphasis on purposeful use of every moment of
class time. They should also be designed with an eye to the
fact that devices don’t just distract the person using them, as
we’ve discussed in this chapter as well. Lang also reminds us
that today’s applications have been extraordinarily well en-
gineered to seize our attention. In that sense, it’s asking too
much to expect students to resist through willpower alone.
This context-­specific approach means that if there is a
lecture, laptops are okay. If students are taking notes, it
really doesn’t matter how they choose to do it. But if there
is a discussion, devices should be put away most or all of the
206 Chapter 5

time. The same goes for exercises, problem solving, and the
like. In other words, if there’s no clear and compelling reason
why students should be writing, devices go away.
These are all specific directives without much in the way
of loopholes, hedging or exceptions. However, it is possible
to present the rules to students respectfully and with trans-
parency about the reasoning behind them. I also like the
fact that they don’t flow out of the idea that technology is
bad because all eyes and brains should be on the instructor
at every moment. Instead, the policies seem to me to offer
respect to the fact that attention is effortful. Staying focused
when we are trying to learn is plain hard. This applies not
just to the technology-­dependent students of today, but for
everyone, probably going back to the dawn of education
itself.
It follows from this that, as Lang puts it, “if we wish to
achieve attention in the classroom, we must cultivate it de-
liberately. The achievement of student attention requires
deliberate and conscious effort from the teacher. We won’t
get students’ attention by scolding them, at least in the long
term. We won’t get it from simply hoping for the best. We
won’t get it from going about our business in the front of
the room and letting them fend for themselves out there
in the seats. We’ll get attention when we establish it as an
important value in our courses and consider how we will
help students cultivate and sustain the forms of attention
that help them learn.”26
Lang’s formula isn’t easy, nor is it simple. But it respects
the common struggle at the heart of all focused learning,
and offers a positive pathway forward, through leadership
that is strong but also compassionate.
I want to end this chapter with a confession: I am still
working on my own policies about mobile technology in
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 207

classes, and I’m not totally happy with any of the ones I’ve
tried. Lately I’ve leaned toward the laissez-­faire side of the
spectrum, out of a mix of concern about access, an aversion
to constantly playing the role of enforcer, and an infusion
of my own personal baggage surrounding the whole topic
of writing by hand. But then again, when I’ve taught larger
classes in the past, with assistants who could help with
surveillance and so on, I’ve also had a stricter policy about
when and how laptops could be used. I’d like to try Lang’s
method next time I’ve got this sort of class, where there are
definite boundaries around different activities and a risk
that students could be disrupting one another’s focus.
In a way, my struggles reflect the larger state of affairs in
the field of education, where — as I mentioned at the top of
this chapter — we’re still not quite sure where mobile devices
fit into our mission and agenda. Many of us see the potential
contained in the world-­changing invention of computers
that can and do go everywhere. But we in education also
see the problems — literally, in the rows of laptop lids and
smartphone screens that get between us and our students.
And so, as polarizing as the mobile-­technology debates
have been, I hope we keep having them. They are what
will help us in education move beyond quiz games and the
occasional in-­c lass research assignment to turn the ex-
traordinary power of mobile devices to our own purposes:
accelerating learning and creating avenues to learning for
more people throughout the world.
Can we have it both ways, using mobile technology to
do great things while avoiding the side effects, risks, and
aggravations that come with it? Maybe not entirely. Until
such time as the devices are fundamentally redesigned — to
neutralize notifications, to encourage judicious use rather
than dispensing constant quick hits of information and
208 Chapter 5

entertainment — they’re going to tilt toward eroding, not

supporting, deep learning.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Concerns about technology have been heightened and con-

centrated by advances in mobile computing. Smartphones
in particular represent a new level of influence on cogni-
tive processes, given that they are designed to go every-
where and be a part of nearly every aspect of life.
• Research has offered a mixed set of findings on deeper
cognitive and neural impacts of smartphones. It is un-
likely that these devices have changed cognition in major
ways, but relying on phone-­based searches, in particular,
may have subtle effects on memory and on the ability to
engage in focused, demanding problem solving.
• The research on attention and smartphones is more
clear-­c ut. Notifications disrupt attention even when
they’re not responded to right away, and merely having
a cell phone in view might be distracting, even when it’s
not in use.
• Smartphones are frequently used to supplement memory
through photos and also by GPS-­aided navigation. Both
of these uses can block the formation of new memories,
making it so that we remember less about experiences
and are less likely to develop good mental maps of loca-
tions we’ve visited.
• Mobile devices can also make positive contributions to
learning, such as when they’re used to engage students in
retrieval practice. Examples include mobile-­based quiz-
zing and language learning applications.
 The Devices We Can’t Put Down 209

• The debate over laptop-­based versus handwritten note

taking has generated intense attention, but the research
support in favor of handwriting is frequently overstated.
Multiple replication studies have demonstrated that the
kind of verbatim transcription people tend to do on lap-
tops is associated with lower exam performance; how-
ever, there is no consistent overall advantage for hand-
written notes.

TEACHING TAKE-­AWAYS

• Encourage students to get out of the habit of always

searching for information using their smartphones.
Although the evidence isn’t definitive, there’s some
suggestion that over-­reliance on search weakens their
own memory for what they’re looking up, and may also
weaken some aspects of their thinking skills.
• If you take students on field trips or other similar in-­the-­
field experiences, address how you expect phones to be
used, or not used, during that time. Especially if students
might be using their phones to take photos, advise them
on how to do so in ways that are less likely to detract from
memory—or alternatively, forbid picture taking altogether.
• Consider discussing with students the uniquely distract-
ing nature of smartphones. Putting these devices out of
sight during any demanding activity, including class and
homework sessions, makes sense.
• At the same time, stay abreast of mobile apps that can
advance students’ learning. For example, quizzing apps
such as Kahoot! or Quizlet do a great job at support-
ing retrieval practice, polling applications such as Poll
210 Chapter 5

Everywhere are good for gathering anonymous input,

and there are other specialized apps such as language
learning programs that might fit with your own disci-
pline and goals.
• Set structured policies for in-­c lass mobile devices, but
don’t do so on the basis of research purportedly showing
that writing by hand is superior. Instead, focus on what
you think students should be doing (listening, participat-
ing in discussion, completing assigned work) at different
points in the flow of your class, and then consider how
devices might add to or take away from those activities.
• If you do want students to remember more of what they
write down in class, consider offering a short module or
other guidance on note-­taking techniques. Regardless of
the specific technique you choose, ensure that it encour-
ages students to synthesize and paraphrase, rather than
transcribe, what they’re hearing in class.
 CONCLUSION

HOW MEMORY CAN

THRIVE IN A TECHNOLOGY-­
SATURATED FUTURE

For those of us who are passionate about our own learning

as well as other people’s learning: What should we conclude
about the ways in which memory is changing in the contem-
porary world?
Based on what is known right now about human memory—
which is a lot — we can identify some clear paths forward.
There are points that are relevant specifically to teachers,
and other more general points that are relevant to everyone.
There are also some predictions for how practices and expe-
riences involving memory could continue to evolve along
with our technologies. These forward-­looking possibilities
are what I want to share with you in this final chapter.
The first few take-­home ideas are ones of reassurance and
a bit of moderation. Based on the best research to date, we
can rest assured that our memories are not being perma-
nently and seriously damaged. Don’t worry — your brain cells
aren’t shorting out each time you press the Unlock button
212 Conclusion

or succumb to a bout of scrolling. Relying on your laptop’s

memory isn’t wiping out your own.
However, we do need to keep tabs on the costs of technol-
ogy reliance in our everyday lives. More than ever before in
human history, we need to be fierce and vigilant protectors of
our cognitive capabilities, especially those involving attention.
We also need to be deliberate about constructing memory
so that we save what we actually need to remember, in the
course of our lives as 21st century human beings. This means
making a deliberate effort to smoothing the path to memory
for information that might not grab us in the moment, but
which contributes to our long-­term thriving. Memory can
and does happen automatically, all the time. But to be able to
make the most of it, to retain not just the attention-­grabbing
or shocking things but the substantive ones as well—that
requires deliberate strategy and deliberate effort. By stepping
outside the process, to reflect on how and why we remember,
we can be more in charge and leave less to chance.
The best research currently available in the field also
tells us that generational differences, while real (and still
developing), don’t really come down to technology per se.
Technology preferences are widely diverse within as well
as between generations, and young people are unlikely to
be clamoring for more technology for its own sake as part
of their educations. That said, the more subtle impacts of
having so many of one’s life experiences mediated by tech-
nology have already been set in motion. Today’s children,
adolescents, and young adults will be able to look back on
their life stories completely differently than people ever have
before, with those stories likely being both more accurate
and also less personal as a function of being anchored in
digital rather than human episodic memory.
Younger people entering college and professions will also
 How Memory Can Thrive 213

be doing so with a greater habitual reliance on technology

than ever before. In some ways, for young people, memory
is the technology used to reinforce it. Consider how a typical
20-­year-­old of today would react to the prospect of losing a
phone, or worse, losing a whole cloud-­based storage cache.
It’s a panic-­inducing thought, perhaps even more so than
how members of earlier generations would have felt about
losing a planner or address book. It is also a sentiment
echoed by over 80% of people in one survey, who agreed that
losing their external, technology-­based memories would be
devastating.1 This is because so much of the information con-
tained in digital accounts is highly personal, highly visual,
and intimately tied to identity and experience.
Growing up with technology might make younger people
dependent on their technology, but this doesn’t mean they
can’t be thoughtful and even critical consumers of it. My ex-
periences with college students all point toward their insights,
their concerns, and their creativity concerning ways to keep
technology under control. Perhaps growing up with devices
strewn everywhere has made them realize that trying to stuff
the tech genie back in the bottle is neither realistic nor desir-
able. Or perhaps they’ve learned through hard experience the
importance of owning your technology rather than letting
it own you. Whatever the reasons, I think we can heartily
endorse the idea that the next generation of technology users
are more than capable of leadership in this arena, and I look
forward to finding out what they, as a group, envision for the
future role of technology in all of our lives.

Advice for Teachers

For people who teach — formally or informally — there are

some clear takeaways as well.
214 Conclusion

Actively engage your students in the common challenges

we all face with distraction, technology, and memory.

Our research at Northern Arizona University illustrates just

how receptive students can be to talking about the chal-
lenges of living with technology, especially the challenges
that put learning at risk. Time and again, I’ve read students’
fiery, first-­person accounts of how frustrated they’ve been
with the risks and downsides — everything from the heart-­
stopping danger of texting in traffic to the annoyance of
sitting next to classmates who are misusing their devices in
class. I’ve read their clever and creative solutions, and seen
the insights gained after they’ve completed a few engaging,
nonjudgmental activities designed to kick off thoughtful
discussion.
Those points are key, though: nonjudgmental, and coming
from a place of common challenge — not an us-­versus-­them,
kids-­t hese-­d ays stance. It’s also important to consider
“what’s next” after the acknowledgment that distraction
impairs memory. Just knowing that the problem exists isn’t
enough, and neither is wanting to do better. Giving students
the basic tools of intentional behavior change, as we tried
to do with the Attention Matters! project, is the last step to
putting them in control of their technology for the long haul.
It’s also important to pair the negative (Don’t use your
phone in class! No laptops allowed!) with positive strate-
gies — in other words, emphasizing what you do want stu-
dents to do at least as much as what you don’t want them to
do. Much of applied memory research can be boiled down
into principles that, while sometimes counterintuitive, are
easy for anyone to put into action. Learning about the amaz-
ing power of retrieval practice, for example, or why spacing is
important, can vastly expand a student’s ability to remember
 How Memory Can Thrive 215

more information in less study time. It also reminds them

that they need to put in effort and also deliberately design
their study regimens. Passivity is out, and active involve-
ment is in — not because we teachers demand to have their
eyes on us at all times, but because students want and need
to get the most they can out of time invested. This is a mes-
sage I’ve seen resonate hundreds of times as students take
the lessons of memory and make them their own.

Don’t be afraid to ask students to commit material to memory.

It is now well past time for the pendulum to swing back, if

not all the way to 1940s-­style rote memorization, toward an
acceptance that memory is one foundational part of a stu-
dent’s education. Every discipline has its key, don’t-­stop-­to-­
Google-­it knowledge, and it’s up to instructors to select and
present that information to students in a way that makes
it clear that students really do need to have it down cold in
order to succeed.
Some smart marketing is also in order, and it’s good to
have a plan going in for how to sell students on the idea of
memorization. Here is where generational differences might
crop up again, especially among students who are more
technology dependent. Even something like how to spell key
terms might not be something they think is important to
remember, a fact which will show up in some unanticipated
ways as we open up the dialogue about memory.
It shouldn’t be that hard a sell though, when you explain to
students that (a) you have been selective and strategic about
what you are asking them to memorize, and (b) when you
also teach techniques that make doing so a whole lot easier.
Students are also quite open to new ideas about memory
when you illustrate for them, as transparently as possible,
216 Conclusion

why having a solid knowledge base is going to benefit them

in their future work lives.
As teachers, we also know that selective and strategic
memorization helps accomplish another high-­priority
agenda item, which is developing students’ ability to engage
in sophisticated, expert-­level thinking. The research liter-
ature is beginning to show a promising pattern by which
learning more, and learning more efficiently (through re-
trieval practice, for example) supports and accelerates the
ability to categorize, infer, and draw conclusions. This is
relatively new work and will no doubt be expanded and dis-
cussed more as the story unfolds. But I think there’s more
than enough evidence right now to make teachers feel confi-
dent in a decision to push memory further to the foreground.

Don’t be afraid to bring technology into the classroom —

but don’t feel like you have to, either.

Many of today’s standout technologies for learning are laser

focused on memory and helping students build knowledge
efficiently. Kahoot!, Duolingo, Quizlet — all of these now
have a solid track record for being both easy to use and well
aligned with the science of memory. They work well either
in the context of instructor-­designed, instructor-­led activi-
ties, or in the context of students’ using them when they’re
studying independently. There are also a few educational
technology applications out there that are geared to specific
topic areas 2; perhaps future years will see more of these pop
up as faculty experiment with ways to leverage the visual
and multimedia capabilities of mobile devices for teaching
tough concepts within their own disciplines.
These hot applications of today are surely going to be re-
placed, though, and so it’s important to remember what to
 How Memory Can Thrive 217

look for in future ed-­tech products intended to strengthen

and develop knowledge. The main one is the capability for
encouraging active recall of key information — features like
lots of questions that students can answer, or the ability for
instructors (or students themselves) to easily input lots of
questions that they make up. If applications are also fun to
use, if they support friendly competition, or open up other
ways to make learning social — so much the better.
Teachers should also keep in mind that not all students,
regardless of age, are going to want to use technology as
part of their education. Unless it’s critical that students do
so in order to reach the learning objectives of the course,
teachers should also be developing their own slate of low-­
tech alternatives. In-­class polling, where students answer
questions in real time, works brilliantly on phones and lap-
tops, but something similar can be accomplished through
asking students to hold up color-­coded pieces of paper or
turn in handwritten answers on index cards. Students who
don’t want to participate in something like a live Kahoot!
quiz can still benefit by watching the display and noting
down answers on paper as they go.

Forbid personal technology in class if you must,

but think carefully before you do.

No doubt there are times when personal technology is su-

perfluous to an in-­class learning activity, and plenty of times
when it can get in the way. But the across-­the-­board tech
ban should not be the default response. Students need and
deserve some latitude to take notes in the ways that work
best for them, and not to have those choices end up exposing
any limitations or special needs that they would prefer to
keep private. Bans don’t always work in the classroom, and
218 Conclusion

they definitely don’t work when students are on their own

learning at home, as in a fully online class.
And as we’ve seen throughout this book, the research
that’s frequently touted as offering reasons for limiting or
flat-­out rejecting technology is too often over-­interpreted.
Even good-­quality studies don’t always replicate, and
the cautions that the researchers themselves put on the
results — important limitations on concluding cause and
effect or how well the effects would generalize to realistic
situations — too frequently get lost in a rush to conclude that
technology is damaging, and that science proves it so.

Advice for Everyone

Broadening our perspective beyond classrooms, what else

should all of us as technology-­using humans take away that
will help us thrive?

Be protective about attention and vigilant

against anything that detracts from it.

Distraction is kryptonite for memory, and unfortunately,

distraction is what personal technology does best. Left un-
checked, the alerts generated by the myriad programs that
most of us use in the course of a day will inevitably erode
memory. This is not because the constant interruptions per-
manently alter us at a fundamental level, but because they
interfere with the process of making new memories when
they’re happening. This is a significant threat.
Guarding against such threats requires foresight and a
fair amount of willpower. And so, just as teachers should
include a dose of “how” along with the “what” of managing
distraction, everyone else should familiarize themselves
 How Memory Can Thrive 219

with some psychology-­based tools for following through on

intentions. Precommitment is one that’s particularly well
suited to the challenge. Site-­blocking technology is a great
way to help us ensure that our future selves behave the way
that our present selves want them to, by delineating in ad-
vance exactly what you are and are not allowed to do at a
given time. These limitations protect our limited stores of
willpower against the depletion wrought by watching alert
after alert pile up, and help insulate us from the constant
pull of email and news. The do-­not-­disturb and call blocking
functions now built into smartphone operating systems can
similarly excuse us from responding to every single bid for
our attention. They can also be configured to allow through
the most important and relevant alerts, such as phone calls
from family members or Slack messages from our current
top-­priority project group.
These are all concrete, attainable steps we can take to better
manage our technology, without throwing it out. Even so, I
sometimes get pushback from people who point out that,
for example, using an application called SelfControl to block
sites is the opposite of “self” control. We ought to be able to
manage without needing those guardrails in place, and if we
can’t—well, then we shouldn’t have the technology at all.
Here’s what I think about that line of criticism. It’s true
that we’ve always had temptations that pull us away from
our priorities — television, games, the water cooler at work,
you name it. But for the first time ever, highly engineered
versions of these activities are now accessible 24/7/365, and
importantly, are available right within the spaces where
many of us are now doing work — our phones, laptops, and
tablets. And so, I think we need to take a cue from what the
intentional behavior change experts have been saying for
years and find ways to make it easier on ourselves to follow
220 Conclusion

through on our plans, especially plans that help us stay the

course when we’re bored, overwhelmed, or otherwise pre-
disposed to give in to temptation.

Use technology to buffer against prospective memory failures.

Although we should definitely minimize extraneous alerts

that originate from other people, we should make liberal use
of alerts that we ourselves set up. Tracking time and place is
something that personal technology does incredibly well. In
that way, it can help us advance our own priorities and avert
disaster in the form of forgotten events and needed errands.
Given that the human brain is typically terrible at this, it is
a great thing to offload to technology.

Take and review digital photos strategically and with an eye

to strengthening important episodic memories.

Used in the right ways, photos can be an incredibly effective

way to spark recollection and strengthen memories of our
life experiences. But let’s also remember that used in the
wrong way, digital photography can keep these great per-
sonal memories from forming in the first place. Probably the
commonest of these wrong ways is in the attempt to capture
too much of an experience in the moment, to the point where
we’re not engaged in the experience itself. Taking only a few
pictures, or perhaps forgoing the camera altogether, is an-
other deliberate strategy we can use to manage the risks.
These risks are real; after all, no computer in the world can
maintain real first-­person episodic memories for you. Only
you can do that, and in order to hang onto these memories
you have to form them in the first place.
 How Memory Can Thrive 221

Don’t assume that information will always be a click away.

As we share more and more of our factual memories with

computers, the boundary between what we know and what
they know may become even more porous. Knowing how and
where to search out information is indeed an important con-
temporary skill, and does relieve us of the burden of having
to memorize a lot of day-­to-­day minutiae.
However, researchers now know that our memories can
subtly substitute the “where” for the “what” in memorized
knowledge. And so, when we catch ourselves in the act of
assuming that some important piece of information will
always be an online search away, we can try to head that
process off. For the more important things that we do want
to have as part of our own stored knowledge, we should try
to act as though we’ll never be able to find it online, even
when we probably could.

Be a skeptical, selective, and inquisitive consumer of research

on technology and the mind.

We’ve seen how advice aimed at teachers frequently over-

states and oversimplifies the impact of things like laptops
on learning, and the same distortions happen in the more
general sphere of reporting about technology’s impacts. If a
study you’re reading about sounds so dramatically alarming
that you want to drop your phone in the nearest recycling
bin and go shopping for a vintage typewriter — that’s a big
red flag. Studies like this are often overreported or stretched
to the breaking point. They’re almost always in need of rig-
orous replication, or at the very least, much more nuanced
summary. Every now and again, the wilder claims — like
222 Conclusion

those involving the infamous “goldfish” study — turn out

to be flat-­out pseudoscience.
On the flip side, technology-­as-­brain-­panacea messages
are just as suspect. Here too, we’ve seen this dynamic play
out in education, with the rise and fall of the idea that tech-
nology will fix every problem there is in learning, for all
learners, by its mere presence.
In sum: It takes a lot to significantly and permanently
alter the way the mind works, whether for good or bad.
Research that seems to state otherwise deserves heavy
scrutiny.

What the Future Holds

There’s little doubt that new technologies will keep arriving

on the scene, each with their own set of impacts on how we
take in and remember information. One clear example that’s
especially hot today is virtual reality (VR), along with its
cousin augmented reality (i.e., media that superimposes vir-
tual sights, sounds, or other information onto a real-­world
scene). Educators have taken the idea of VR and run with
it; at the time of this writing there are dozens of projects
going on around the country seeking to create educational
applications that get at learning in brand-­new ways.
Time is going to tell how well these projects work out. The
best information we have right now suggests that similar
to other educational technologies, the effectiveness of edu-
cational VR depends on how well its unique characteristics
match up with the material and the goals of the learning
exercise. For example, VR programs that teach anatomy
and physiology fit well with VR’s 3-­D visualization capabil-
ities.3 Similar to this idea, we’ve found in our own research
at Northern Arizona University that VR can help teach
 How Memory Can Thrive 223

organic chemistry, another subject where being able to in-

teract with and view shapes from multiple perspectives is
critically important.4 As more educational VR applications
become available, more instructors will be asking how — or
whether — such programs enhance retention for the con-
cepts students are supposed to be learning. And as more of
us experience virtual reality in its many forms, we’ll start to
see how we remember differently when we’re in one of these
simulated environments.
Increases in the amount of media and cloud storage avail-
able to us will increase the importance of visual media for
memory in the modern world. Just in the last ten years or
so, we’ve gone from being able to share the occasional image
on social media or shared database, to being able to store
and swap as many as we could possibly want. TikTok, and
before it the now-­defunct Vine, have turned video from a
specialized, capacity-­eating medium to one that anyone can
use just for fun. We’ll likely see more of these “recreational”
platforms come and go, but video as part of communication,
commemoration, and sharing is here to stay.
Current trends also point to more people asking how their
personal technology can best serve them, rather than just
how much more the technology can do. The ability of a tech-
nology to serve up push notifications has now thoroughly
lost any novelty value it once had with consumers, and more
consumers may be looking for technology that does less,
but does it better. Public discussion about technology and
the mind may not have always been faithful to the research
literature. But one great outcome is that it’s spurred more
people to question the role of personal tech in their lives,
and encouraged more people to set deliberate parameters
around when they use technology and how.
There’s an additional development that I’ll admit is more
224 Conclusion

a personal hope than an actual trend: I wonder whether we

will see more people approaching memory not with dread but
as a source of fun. Will we see a renaissance in the pleasure
of remembering for its own sake? Will spelling bees, trivia
contests, even memory competitions become more popular?
As with so many other pursuits in modern life, memory is
not a life-­or-­death necessity any more. And so, like cooking,
crafting, hiking, or gardening — maybe memory will become
something we do for fun, rather than solely something we
have to do to survive.
This brings me to one last thing I want to share with you,
a treasured memory of my own.

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye . . .

These are the opening lines of the Prologue to Chaucer’s

Canterbury Tales, and there was a point at which I could rattle
off each and every one by heart. This was thanks to my high
school English teacher, Lynne Murchison, who was famous
for her exacting standards and a level of innovative thinking
not much seen in teaching back then. “Dr. Murk” required
every student in her British Literature class to memorize
the Prologue, bestowing a passing grade only when you
 How Memory Can Thrive 225

could stand in front of her sans notes and say all the lines
perfectly, in the original Middle English.
We students each set our own time to step up and take the
challenge, one by one. If we messed up, we came back and we
did it again, until we got it right. Each of us experimented
with different ways to get the task done, with the ones who’d
succeeded passing tips to those who were still working on
it. Most commonly, what we hit upon in the course of this
project was that we couldn’t just take it word by unfamiliar
and strange word. We had to try to understand the whole
passage, to picture the scene that Chaucer was describing,
and we had to try to think about why he wanted to describe
it exactly as he did.
When Dr. Murchison died in 2020, her students shared
the sad news online, as we all do these days. And right away,
we started swapping stories about this one thing we did in
class. How maddening but also how fun it was, and how
exhilarating it was when we finally got the whole thing right.
Some of her alums even say that they still know the lines to
this day.
Her signature assignment may have seemed a bit eccentric
even decades ago, and today this kind of academic require-
ment is even less common than it was back then. I would like
to see this change. I’d like to see students — and everyone,
actually — engage in this kind of memory challenge, and
memory play, more often than we do.
I say this because the exercise, tough as it was, crushed
no one’s creativity, nor did it block us from going on to lives
enriched by intellectual curiosity. It became a point of pride.
And it taught all of us, without our realizing it at the time,
techniques that we could use later on as we went on to pro-
fessions and pursuits that required us to know our stuff.
226 Conclusion

Students want that sense of accomplishment. They want

to have a sense of mastery connected to things they care
about, even in an age that’s defined by infinite capacity for
digital memory.
Our human memories are quirky, limited, and no match
for what even the most basic technology can do. But our
memories will survive this technology, and paired with it
in the right way, I know that they can thrive like they never
have before.
 NOTES

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. G. Small & G. Vorgan (2008), Meet your iBrain, Scientific
American Mind, 19, 42 – 49.
2. D. Norman (1993), Things that make us smart: Defending human
attributes in the age of the machine (p. 43), Diversion Books.
3. G. Tracy (2019, May 5), How technology helps our memories,
The Week, https://theweek.com/articles/836109/how
-­technology-­helps-­memories.
4. Parent quoted in N. Bowles (2018, October 26), A dark
consensus about screens and kids begins to emerge in Silicon
Valley, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26
/style/phones-­children-­silicon-­valley.html.
5. J. Anderson & L. Rainie (2018, April 17), The future of well-­
being in a tech-­saturated world. Pew Research Center. https://
www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/04/17/the-­future-­of-­well
-­being-­in-­a-­tech-­saturated-­world/.
6. S. Pinker (2010, June 10), Mind over mass media, New York
Times.
7. J. Wilkins (1997), Protecting our children from Internet smut:
Moral duty or moral panic? The Humanist, 57, 4. See also:
R. J. Noonan (1998), The psychology of sex: A mirror from the
Internet. In J. Gackenbach (Ed.), Psychology and the Internet:
Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal implications (pp
143 – 168), Academic Press.
8. B. Auxier, M. Anderson, A. Perrin, & E. Turner (2020, July 28),
Parenting children in the age of screens, https://www.pewresearch
.org/internet/2020/07/28/parenting-­children-­in-­the-­age-­of
-­screens/.
9. A. K. Przybylski & N. Weinstein (2017), Digital screen time
228 Notes to Chapter 1

limits and young children’s psychological well-­being: Evidence

from a population-­based study, Child Development, 90(1), e56-­
e65. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13007.
10. See, for example, the Freewrite product: https://getfreewrite
.com/.
11. R. Contreras (2017, June 15), Digital burnout leads to a
resurgence of vintage typewriters, and it isn’t just a fad,
Christian Science Monitor. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA
/Society/2017/0615/Digital-­burnout-­leads-­to-­a-­resurgence-­of
-­vintage-­typewriters-­and-­it-­isn-­t-­just-­a-­fad.
12. I can offer a personal testimonial that the site blocking
capabilities of SelfControl are indeed impossible to evade
through any normal means. https://selfcontrolapp.com/.
13. A. L. Duckworth, K. L. Milkman, & D. Laibson (2018), Beyond
willpower: strategies for reducing failures of self-­control,
Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(3), 102 – 129,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100618821893.
14. M. D. Miller (2014), Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with
Technology, Harvard University Press.
15. E. Ellerman (1998), The internet in context. In Gackenbach, J.
(Ed.), Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, interpersonal,
and transpersonal implications (pp 11 – 33), Academic Press.
16. G. Salomon & D. Perkins (2013), Do technologies make us
smarter? Intellectual amplification with, of, and through
technology, in R. Sternberg & D. Preiss (Eds), Intelligence and
technology: Ihe impact of tools on the nature and development of
human abilities (pp.71 – 86), Routledge. https://doi.org/10
.4324/9780203824252.
17. See also D. Preiss & R. Sternberg (2013), Technologies for
working intelligence, in R. Sternberg & D. Preiss (Eds),
Intelligence and technology: The impact of tools on the nature and
development of human abilities (pp. 87 – 101), Routledge, https://
doi.org/10.4324/9780203824252.
18. D. Preiss & R. Sternberg (2013), Technologies for working
intelligence, in R. Sternberg & D. Preiss (Eds), Intelligence and
technology: The impact of tools on the nature and development of
human abilities (pp. 87 – 101), New York: Routledge, https://doi
.org/10.4324/9780203824252.
19. R. Nickerson (2013), Technology and cognitive amplification,
in R. Sternberg & D. Preiss (Eds), Intelligence and technology: The
impact of tools on the nature and development of human abilities
(pp. 3 – 27), New York: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324
/9780203824252.
20. R. Nickerson (2013), Technology and cognitive amplification, in
 Notes to Chapter 1 229

R. Sternberg & D. Preiss (Eds), Intelligence and Technology:

The impact of tools on the nature and development of human
abilities (pp. 3 – 27), New York: Routledge, https://doi.org/10
.4324/9780203824252.
21. D. Norman (2013), The design of everyday things (Revised and
expanded edition, p. 286), Basic Books.
22. See, for example, D. T. Willingham (2010, Summer), Have
technology and multitasking rewired how students learn?,
American Educator, 23 – 29; D. T. Willingham (2015, January 20),
Smartphones don’ t make us dumb, New York Times; S. Pinker
(2010, June 10), Mind over mass media, New York Times.
23. S. Pinker (2010, June 10), Mind over mass media, New York
Times.
24. G. W. Small, T. D. Moody, P. Siddarth, P., & S. Y. Bookheimer
(2009), Your brain on Google: Patterns of cerebral activation
during Internet searching, American Journal of Geriatric
Psychiatry, 17(2), 116 – 126, https://doi.org/10.1097/JGP
.0b013e3181953a02.
25. Keep in mind that fMRIs measure neural activity indirectly,
usually by comparing the amount of blood flow to regions of
the brain during a task of interest (in this case, searching)
versus a control task of some kind. The control is subtracted
from the task of interest, and the remaining activation is
depicted by superimposing it on a representation of the brain,
so that you end up with a picture that looks like “hot spots”
or certain regions lighting up during the task of interest. In
studies with more than one participant, data from multiple
people are also averaged or combined to make up these
composite images. Researchers also statistically analyze these
increases or decreases in regional blood flow in response to
the change in tasks, to assess whether they are statistically
significant.
26. This additional part about experience was reported in a
different publication by the lead author: G. Small & G. Vorgan
(2008), Meet your iBrain, Scientific American Mind, 19, 42 – 49.
27. The sample-­size issue is a generic criticism that’s almost
guaranteed to come up in coverage of the limitations of this
study, or really of any study of its kind. It’s frequently conflated
with the representativeness of the sample, which is a separate
issue and one that is not addressed by simply adding more
people to the study. Appropriate sample size is something
that can be determined using conventional guidelines and
calculation methods, but there isn’t one gold-­standard
minimum number that applies across the board. In sum:
230 Notes to Chapter 1

Sample size is a more complicated question than meets the eye,

and press coverage of sampling rarely gets it right.
28. G. Small & G. Vorgan (2008), Meet your iBrain, Scientific
American Mind, 19, 42 – 49.
29. See, for example, these classic articles on cognitive aging: D. G.
MacKay & D. M. Burke (1990), Cognition and aging: a theory
of new learning and the use of old connections, Aging and
Cognition: Knowledge Organization and Utilization, 213 – 263,
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0166- 4115(08)60159- 4; L. Hasher
& R. T. Zacks (1988), Working memory, comprehension, and
aging: A review and a new view, Psychology of Learning and
Motivation — Advances in Research and Theory, 22(C), 193 – 225,
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079- 7421(08)60041- 9.
30. G. W. Small, T. D. Moody, P. Siddarth, P., & S. Y. Bookheimer
(2009), Your brain on Google: patterns of cerebral activation
during internet searching. American Journal of Geriatric
Psychiatry, 17(2), 116 – 126. https://doi.org/10.1097/JGP
.0b013e3181953a02, p. 116.
31. Here’s one example: J. Harris (2010, August 20), How the
internet is altering your mind, The Guardian. Retrieved from
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/20
/internet-­altering-­your-­mind
32. UCLA Health (2008, October 14), UCLA study finds that
searching the Internet increases brain function, https://www
.uclahealth.org/ucla-­study-­finds-­that-­searching-­the-­internet
-­increases-­brain-­function.
33. J. Feifer (2014, October 13), The Internet is not harming you.
Here’s what’s harmful: Fearmongering about the Internet, Fast
Company, https://www.fastcompany.com/3036428/fear-­and
-­loathing-­of-­silicon-­valley?cid=search.
34. This book offers an excellent account of the deep changes
wrought by literacy: M. Wolf (2007), Proust and the squid: The
story and science of the reading brain, HarperCollins.
35. J. Feifer (2014, October 13), The Internet is not harming you.
Here’s what’s harmful: Fearmongering about the Internet, Fast
Company, https://www.fastcompany.com/3036428/fear
-­and-­loathing-­of-­silicon-­valley?cid=search.
36. S. Pinker (n.d.), How is the internet changing the way you think?
Edge, https://www.edge.org/responses/how-­is-­the-­internet
-­changing-­the-­way-­you-­think.
37. T. Tokuhama-­Espinosa (2018), Neuromyths: Debunking false
ideas about the brain, New W.W. Norton.
38. R. Nickerson (2013), Technology and cognitive amplification,
in R. Sternberg & D. Preiss (Eds), Intelligence and technology: The
 Notes to Chapter 2 231

impact of tools on the nature and development of human

abilities (pp. 3 – 27), Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324
/9780203824252, quote on p. 25.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1. Which I wouldn’t dream of repeating in a high-­toned book such
as this one.
2. Benedict Cumberbatch.
3. D. J. Simons & C. F. Chabris (2011), What people believe
about how memory works: A representative survey of the U.S.
population, PLoS ONE, 6(8), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal
.pone.0022757.
4. K. Betts, M. Miller, T. Tokuhama-­Espinosa, P. Shewokis,
A. Anderson, C. Borja, T. Galoyan, B. Delaney, J. Eigenauer,
& S. Dekker (2019), International report: Neuromyths and
evidence-­based practices in higher education, Online Learning
Consortium, Newburyport, MA.
5. A survey of the general population conducted through the
online Amazon Mechanical Turk platform found that a similar
percent — 26% — agreed with the same question. J.R. Finley,
F. Naaz, & F.W. Goh (2018), Memory and technology: How we
use information in the brain and in the world. Springer.
6. D. J. Simons & C. F. Chabris (2011), What people believe
about how memory works: A representative survey of the U.S.
population, PloS ONE, 6(8), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal
.pone.0022757, p. 7.
7. E. Loftus, & J. Palmer (1974), Reconstruction of automobile
destruction: An example of the interaction between language
and memory, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13
(5), 585 – 589.
8. J. F. Kihlstrom (1997), Hypnosis, memory and amnesia,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences, 352(1362), 1727 – 1732, https://doi.org/10.1098
/rstb.1997.0155.
9. D. J. Simons & C. F. Chabris (2011), What people believe
about how memory works: A representative survey of the U.S.
population, PloS ONE, 6(8), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal
.pone.0022757.
10. D. J. Simons & C. F. Chabris (1999), Gorillas in our midst:
Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events,
Perception, 28(9), 1059 – 1074, https://doi.org/10.1068/p2952.
11. See also: M. D. Miller (2011), What college teachers should
know about memory: A perspective from cognitive psychology,
232 Notes to Chapter 2

College Teaching, 59, 117 – 122; G. Plancher & P. Barrouillet

(2019), On some of the main criticisms of the modal model:
Reappraisal from a TBRS perspective, Memory and Cognition,
48(3), 455 – 468. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421 - 019
- 00982-­w.
12. R. Atkinson & R. M. Shiffrin (1971), The control of short-­term
memory, Scientific American, 22, 82 – 90.
13. R. C. Martin (1993), Short-­term memory and sentence
processing: Evidence from neuropsychology, Memory &
Cognition 21, 176 – 83; R. C. Martin & S. D. Breedin (1992),
Dissociations between speech perception and phonological
short-­term memory deficits, Cognitive Neuropsychology, 9.
509 – 534.
14. M. D. Miller (2011), What college teachers should know about
memory: A perspective from cognitive psychology, College
Teaching, 59(3), 117 – 122,https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555
.2011.580636.
15. M. C. Potter & L. Lombardi (1990), Regeneration in the short-­
term recall of sentences, Journal of Memory and Language, 29,
633 – 654.
16. P. Freire (2014), Pedagogy of the oppressed: 30th anniversary
edition, Bloomsbury.
17. K. Bain (2004), What the best college teachers do (p. 30), Harvard
University Press.
18. G. A. Miller (1956), The magical number seven, plus or minus
two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information,
Psychological Review, 63(2), 81 – 97, https://doi-­org.libproxy
.nau.edu/10.1037/h0043158; see also G. A. Miller (1994),
The magical number two, plus or minus one: Some limits on
our capacity for processing musical information, Psychological
Review, 101(2), 343 – 352, https://doi.org/10.1177
/102986490200600205; and A. Baddeley (1994), The magical
number seven: Still magic after all these years? Psychological
Review, 101(2), 353 – 356, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033 - 295X
.101.2.353.
19. N. Cowan (2010), The magical mystery four: How is working
memory capacity limited, and why? Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 19(1), 51 – 57, https://doi.org/10.1177
/0963721409359277.
20. G. A. Miller (1956), The magical number seven, plus or minus
two: some limits on our capacity for processing information,
Psychological Review, 63(2), 81 – 97, https://doi-­org.libproxy.nau
.edu/10.1037/h0043158.
21. M. D. Miller (2011), What college teachers should know about
 Notes to Chapter 2 233

memory: A perspective from cognitive psychology, College

Teaching, 59, 117 – 122.
22. J. L. Doumont (2002), Magical numbers: The seven-­plus-­
or-­minus-­two myth, IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication, 45(2), 123 – 127, https://doi.org/10.1109
/TPC.2002.1003695.
23. G. Plancher & P. Barrouillet (2019), On some of the main
criticisms of the modal model: Reappraisal from a TBRS
perspective, Memory and Cognition, 48(3), 455 – 468, https://
doi.org/10.3758/s13421 -019 - 00982-­w.
24. A. D. Baddeley (1986), Working memory, Oxford University
Press.
25. E. V. Chemerisova, & O. V. Martynova (2019), Effects of the
phonological loop of working memory on the productivity
of solving mathematical and verbal tasks in specialists in
mathematics and the humanities, Neuroscience and Behavioral
Physiology, 49(7), 857 – 862, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11055
- 019 - 00812- 1.
26. R. C. Martin & T. T. Schnur (2019), Independent contributions
of semantic and phonological working memory to spontaneous
speech in acute stroke, Cortex, 112, 58 – 68, https://doi.org
/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.11.017.
27. M. D. Miller (2011), What college teachers should know about
memory: A perspective from cognitive psychology, College
Teaching, 59, 117 – 122.
28. J. M. McQueen, F. Eisner, M. A. Burgering, & J. Vroomen
(2019), Specialized memory systems for learning spoken words,
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory
and Cognition, 46(1), 189 – 199, https://doi.org/10.1037
/xlm0000704; M. L. Freedman & R. C. Martin (2001),
Dissociable components of short-­term memory and their
relation to long-­term learning, Cognitive Neuropsychology,
https://doi.org/10.1080/02643290126002; A. Baddeley,
S. Gathercole, & C. Papagno (1998), The phonological loop as a
language learning device, Psychological Review, 105, 158 – 173.
29. This short article also has a description of how this process
plays out in realistic learning situations: M. D. Miller (2012,
September), Helping students memorize: Tips from cognitive
science, The Teaching Professor, 97, 1 – 6.
30. See, for example: E. Tulving (2002), Episodic memory, Annual
Review of Psychology, 53, 1 – 25. https://doi.org/10.1007/978
- 3-­642 -36172 -2_201013; E. Tulving (1985), How many
memory systems are there?, 385 – 398.
31. Sometimes this is also termed “declarative memory.”
234 Notes to Chapter 2

32. M. T. H. Chi & R. D. Koeske (1983), Network representation of

a child’s dinosaur knowledge, Developmental Psychology, 19(1),
29 – 39, https://doi.org/10.1037/0012 -1649.19.1.29.
33. Technically speaking, tip-­of-­the-­tongue states involve partial
retrieval of a word; the abstract meaning is coming to mind, but
the actual sounds are not. For a more fine-­grained explanation
of these errors, see this classic research article: D. M. Burke,
D. MacKay, J. S. Worthley, & E. Wade (1991), On the tip of the
tongue: What causes word finding failures in young and older
adults?, Journal of Memory and Language, 30(5), 542 – 579,
https://doi.org/10.1016/0749 -596X(91)90026-­G.
34. J. Ost, A. Vrij, A. Costall, & R. Bull (2002), Crashing memories
and reality monitoring: Distinguishing between perceptions,
imaginations and “false memories,” Applied Cognitive Psychology,
16, 125 – 134.
35. K. Pezdek (2003), Event memory and autobiographical memory
for the events of September 11, 2001, Applied Cognitive
Psychology, 17(9), 1033 – 1045, https://doi.org/10.1002/acp
.984.
36. W. Hirst, E. A. Phelps, R. L. Buckner, M. K. Johnson, K. B.
Lyle, M. Mather, & K. J. Mitchell (2010), Long-­term memory
for the terrorist attack of September 11: Flashbulb memories,
event memories, and the factors that influence their retention,
Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 138(2), 161 – 176,
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015527; K. Pezdek (2003), Event
memory and autobiographical memory for the events of
September 11, 2001, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17(9),
1033 – 1045, https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.984.
37. D. R. Godden & A. D. Baddeley (1975), Context-­dependent
memory in two natural environments: On land and underwater,
British Journal of Psychology, 66(3), 325 – 331, https://doi.org/10
.1016/0195 -6671(82)90042- 8.
38. D. L. Schacter (1999), The seven sins of memory: Insights from
psychology and cognitive neuroscience, American Psychologist,
https://doi.org/10.1037/0003 - 066X.54.3.182; M. K. Johnson,
S. Hashtroudi, & D. S. Lindsay (1993), Source monitoring,
Psychological Bulletin, 114(1), 3 – 28, https://doi
.org/10.1037/0033 -2909.114.1.3.
39. D. T. Willingham (2008), Critical thinking: Why is it so hard to
teach? Arts Education Policy Review, 109(4), 21 – 32, https://doi
.org/10.3200/AEPR.109.4.21-32.
40. For an example and illustration, see https://www.purlsoho.com
/create/long-­tail-­cast-­on/
41. The cerebellum is the wrinkled roundish mass that looks almost
 Notes to Chapter 2 235

like a second miniature brain tacked onto the rear underside of

the rest of the brain, just above the spinal cord.
42. S. Cavaco, S. W. Anderson, J. S. Allen, A. Castro-­Caldas, &
H. Damasio, H. (2004), The scope of preserved procedural
memory in amnesia, Brain, 127(8), 1853 – 1867, https://doi
.org/10.1093/brain/awh208.
43. F. I. Craik & R. S. Lockhart (1972), Levels of processing: A
framework for memory research, Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior, 11, 671 – 684.
44. Note that although depth of processing studies tend to
involve fairly short delays — under an hour — between study
and test phases, they’re technically not tapping short-­term
memory. Short-­term, immediate, or working memory, as
memory researchers think of it, typically extends less than a
minute — it’s really short term.
45. T. B. Rogers, N.A. Kuiper, & W. S. Kirker (1977), Self-­reference
and the encoding of personal information, Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 35(9), 677 – 688. https://doi.org/10.1037
/0022 -3514.35.9.677.
46. E. J. Fantino, K. Fischer, D. Krebs, G. S. Reynolds, & Z. Rubin
(1974), Understanding Psychology, CRM Books.
47. As an example, my total amnesia for the content of my
freshman Western Civilization course probably reflects both of
these factors. I never went on to use most of that information,
contributing to its decay over time. I also lacked the conceptual
understanding at the time that would allow me to interpret and
organize what I was supposed to be learning. I was able to get
by on the exams by memorizing a few facts, but I retained little
that I could use over time.
48. For a variation on this idea, see J. S. Nairne (1990), A feature
model of immediate memory, Memory & Cognition, 18(3),
251 – 269, https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213879.
49. However, it’s not impossible, as discussed in this story about
the controversy over repressed memory: L. Winerman (2005),
Can you force yourself to forget?, Monitor on Psychology, 36(8),
52, http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/forget.aspx.
50. S. Porter& K. A. Peace (2007), The scars of memory of
traumatic and positive emotional memories in adulthood,
Psychological Science, 18(5), 435 – 441, https://doi.org/10.1111
/j.1467- 9280.2007.01918.x.
51. See, e.g., H. P. Bahrick (1984), Semantic memory content in
permastore: Fifty years of memory for Spanish learned in
school, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 1 – 29
52. S. Porter & K. A. Peace (2007), The scars of memory of
236 Notes to Chapter 2

traumatic and positive emotional memories in adulthood,

Psychological Science, 18(5), 435 – 441, https://doi.org/10.1111
/j.1467 - 9280.2007.01918.x.
53. See for example the discussion in this article: L. Fornazzari,
M. Leggieri, T. A. Schweizer, R. L. Arizaga, R.F. Allegri, & C.
E. Fischer (2018), Luria and Borges revisited, Dementia &
Neuropsychologia, 12 (2), 101-­104, https://doi.org/10
.1590/1980-­57642018dn12-­020001.
54. An important caveat is that although S’s memory was clearly
extraordinary, it was not perfect nor complete in every way.
For a recent discussion of some of the questions that still exist
about the case of S, see R. Johnson (2017), The mystery of S.,
the man with an impossible memory, The New Yorker, 1 – 12.
55. The neuroscientist Luis Fornazzari and colleagues hypothesize
that both hypermnesia and problems with executive functions
could be the result of autism spectrum disorder: L. Fornazzari,
M. Leggieri, T. A. Schweizer, R. L. Arizaga, R.F. Allegri, & C. E.
Fischer (2018), Hyper memory, synaesthesia, savants: Luria and
Borges revisited, Dementia & Neuropsychologia, 12(2), 101 – 104,
https://doi.org/10.1590/1980 -57642018dn12- 020001.
56. W. James (1980: 689), The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1,
New York: Henry Holt & Company, as cited in L. Fornazzari,
M. Leggieri, T. A. Schweizer, R. L. Arizaga, R.F. Allegri, & C. E.
Fischer (2018), Hyper memory, synaesthesia, savants: Luria and
Borges revisited, Dementia & Neuropsychologia, 12(2), 101 – 104,
https://doi.org/10.1590/1980 - 57642018dn12-020001.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. K. Robinson (2006, February), Do schools kill creativity? [Video],
TED Conferences, https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken
_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity.
2. B. S. Bloom, M. Engelhart, E. J. Furst, W. Hill, & D. R.
Krathwohl (1956), Taxonomy of educational objectives, Handbook
I: Cognitive domain, Longman. For an updated version of
this familiar “learning pyramid,” see L. W. Anderson, & D. R.
Krathwohl (Eds.) (2001), A taxonomy for learning, teaching and
assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives:
Complete edition, Longman. For a recent illustration and
explanation of Bloom’s key concepts, see https://cft.vanderbilt
.edu/guides-­sub-­pages/blooms-­taxonomy/.
3. However, there are some alternative depictions that don’t use
the pyramid metaphor. For examples, see M. Knapp, (2016,
October 11), 5 gorgeous depictions of Bloom’s taxonomy,
 Notes to Chapter 3 237

https://news.nnlm.gov/nto/2016/10/11/5-­ gorgeous
-­depictions-­of-­blooms-­taxonomy/.
4. For a similar take on the hierarchical nature of Bloom’s
taxonomy, see J. Lang (2016), Small teaching: Everyday lessons
from the science of learning, Jossey-­Bass.
5. D. Pogue (2013), Smartphones mean you will no longer have
to memorize facts, Scientific American, 1 – 5, http://www
.scientificamerican.com/article/smartphones-­mean-­no
-­longer-­memorize-­facts/.
6. L. G. Eglington & S. H. K. Kang (2018), Retrieval practice
benefits deductive inference, Educational Psychology Review,
30(1), 215 – 228. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648 - 016
- 9386-­y.
7. J. D. Bransford & D. L. Schwartz (2001), Rethinking transfer: A
simple proposal with multiple implications, Review of Research
in Education, 2, 61 – 100, https://aaalab.stanford.edu/papers
/Rethinking_transfer_a_simple_proposal_with_multiple
_implications.pdf.
8. See, for example, L. B. Nilson (2013), Creating self-­regulated
learners: Strategies to strengthen students’ self-­awareness and
learning skills, Stylus; M. Saundra (2015), Teach students how
to learn: Strategies you can incorporate into any course to improve
student metacognition, study skills, and motivation, Stylus.
9. V. Sathy & K. A. Hogan (2019, July), Want to reach all of your
students? Here’s how to make your teaching more inclusive,
The Chronicle of Higher Education, https://www.chronicle.com
/interactives/20190719_inclusive_teaching.
10. I.e., “R can saw little rocks.”
11. J. M. Lang (2011), Teaching and human memory, Part 2, The
Chronicle of Higher Education.
12. D. T. Willingham (2017, May 19), You still need your brain, New
York Times.
13. P. K. Agarwal (2019), Retrieval practice & Bloom’s taxonomy:
Do students need fact knowledge before higher order learning?,
Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(2), 189 – 209, https://doi
.org/10.1037/edu0000282.
14. See, for example, C. Riener & D. Willingham (2010), The myth
of learning styles, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 42(5),
32 – 35, https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2010.503139.
15. For a deep dive into the impact of emotions on learning, see
S. R. Cavanagh (2016), The spark of learning: Energizing the
college classroom with the science of emotion, West Virginia
University Press.
16. P. W. Thorndyke (1977), Cognitive structures in comprehension
238 Notes to Chapter 3

and memory of narrative discourse, Cognitive Psychology, 9(1),

77 – 110, https://doi.org/10.1016/0010 - 0285(77)90005 -6.
17. J. M. Lang (2019, January 4), How to teach a good first day
of class. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-­to-­teach-­a
-­good-­first-­day-­of-­class/.
18. For an overview, see https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-­sub
-­pages/just-­in-­time-­teaching-­jitt/.
19. The definitive source for PBL resources geared to higher
education is this site maintained by the University of Delaware:
https://www.itue.udel.edu/resources/pbl-­resources.
20. E. Sung & R. E. Mayer (2012), When graphics improve liking
but not learning from online lessons, Computers in Human
Behavior, 28(5), 1618 – 1625, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb
.2012.03.026.
21. This is also known as the “method of loci,” and has been
around for thousands of years as a way of memorizing lengthy
sequences, such as the components of a speech.
22. For more on memorizing students’ names, see this post I
put up describing my own technique: https://www.academia
.edu/38180533/Research_based_Tips_and_Tricks_for
_Remembering_Names_pdf.
23. For some exceptions to this, see this short piece on mnemonics
for academic learning: M. D. Miller (2012), Helping students
memorize: Tips from cognitive science, The Teaching Professor,
97(September), 1 – 6.
24. This is why retrieval practice is sometimes also referred to in
the literature as the testing effect.
25. M. D. Miller (2009), What the science of cognition tells us
about instructional technology, Change: The Magazine of Higher
Learning, 41, 71 – 74.
26. Great places to start include the books Make it Stick: The Science
of Successful Learning, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the
Science of Learning, and Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of
Learning, and the website www.retrievalpractice.org.
27. Classic articles on retrieval practice include M. A. McDaniel,
H. L. Roediger, & K. B. McDermott (2007), Generalizing
test-­enhanced learning from the laboratory to the classroom,
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14(2), 200 – 206, https://doi
.org/10.3758/BF03194052; J. D. Karpicke & H. L. Roediger
(2008), The critical importance of retrieval for learning, Science,
319, 966 – 968, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1152408;
J. D. Karpicke (2012), Retrieval-­Based Learning: Active
Retrieval Promotes Meaningful Learning, Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 21(3), 157 – 163, https://doi.org
 Notes to Chapter 3 239

/10.1177/0963721412443552; H. L. Roediger & A. C. Butler

(2011), The critical role of retrieval practice in long-­term
retention, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 20 – 27, https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.09.003.
28. M. A. McDaniel, H. L. Roediger, & K. B. McDermott (2007),
Generalizing test-­enhanced learning from the laboratory to the
classroom, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14(2), 200 – 206,
https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194052; C. Wiklund-­Hörnquist,
B. Jonsson, & L. Nyberg (2014), Strengthening concept
learning by repeated testing, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology,
55(1), 10 – 16, https://doi.org/10.1111/sjop.12093.
29. For an in-­depth discussion of different evidence-­based study
techniques, rank-­ordered by effectiveness, see J. Dunlosky,
K. A. Rawson, E. J. Marsh, M. J. Nathan, & D. T. Willingham
(2013), Improving students’ learning with effective learning
techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and
educational psychology, Psychological Science in the Public
Interest, Supplement, 14(1), 4 – 58, https://doi.org/10.1177
/1529100612453266.
30. J. Siler & A. S. Benjamin (2019), Long-­term inference and
memory following retrieval practice, Memory and Cognition, 48,
645 – 654, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421- 019-00997- 3.
31. A. A. Callender & M. A. McDaniel (2009), The limited benefits
of rereading educational texts, Contemporary Educational
Psychology, 34(1), 30 – 41, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych
.2008.07.001.
32. J. D. Karpicke, A. C. Butler & H. L. Roediger (2009),
Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students
practise retrieval when they study on their own?, Memory,
17(4), 471–479, https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210802647009.
33. A. S. Benjamin & H. Pashler (2015), The value of standardized
testing: A perspective from cognitive psychology, Policy Insights
from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2(1), 13 – 23, https://doi
.org/10.1177/2372732215601116.
34. C. B. Kromann, M. L. Jensen, & C. Ringsted (2009), The effect
of testing on skills learning, Medical Education, 43(1), 21 – 27,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365 - 2923.2008.03245.x.
35. S. H. Kang, M. A. McDaniel, & H. Pashler (2011), Effects of
testing on learning of functions, Psychonomic Bulletin and
Review, 18(5), 998 – 1005, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423 - 011
-0113-­x.
36. S. C. Pan & T. C. Rickard (2018), Transfer of test-­enhanced
learning: Meta-­analytic review and synthesis, Psychological
Bulletin, https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000151; A. C. Butler
240 Notes to Chapter 3

(2010), Repeated testing produces superior transfer of

learning relative to repeated studying, Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(5), 1118 – 1133.
37. K. M. Arnold, & K. B. McDermott (2013), Test-­potentiated
learning: Distinguishing between direct and indirect effects of
tests, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, &
Cognition, 39(3), 940 – 945, doi:10.1037/a0029199.
38. A. S. Benjamin & H. Pashler (2015), The value of standardized
testing: A perspective from cognitive psychology, Policy insights
from the behavioral and brain sciences, 2(1), 13 – 23, https://doi
.org/10.1177/2372732215601116.
39. See, for example: The 47th PDK/Gallup Poll of the public’s
attitudes toward the public schools: Testing doesn’t measure up
for Americans (2015), Phi Delta Kappan, 97(1), 1.
40. A. C. Butler & H. L. Roediger (2007), Testing improves long-­
term retention in a simulated classroom setting, European
Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 19(4 – 5), 514 – 527, https://
doi.org/10.1080/09541440701326097; also see. A. McDaniel,
H. L. Roediger, & K. B. McDermott (2007), Generalizing
test-­enhanced learning from the laboratory to the classroom,
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14(2), 200 – 206, https://
doi.org/10.3758/BF03194052; H. L. Roediger & A. C. Butler
(2011). The critical role of retrieval practice in long-­term
retention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 20 – 27. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.09.003.
41. J. D. Karpicke & W. R. Aue (2015), The testing effect is alive
and well with complex materials, Educational Psychology Review,
27(2), 317 – 326, https://doi.org/10.1007/s.
42. P. K. Agarwal, D’Antonio, H. L. Roediger, K. B. McDermott, &
M. A. McDaniel (2014), Classroom-­based programs of retrieval
practice reduce middle school and high school students’ test
anxiety, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition,
3(3), 131 – 139, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.07.002.
43. J. Metcalfe & J. Xu (2016), Peoples’ minds wander more during
massed than spaced inductive learning, Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 978 – 984,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000216.
44. H. Sisti, A. Glass, & T. Shors (2007), Neurogenesis and the
spacing effect: Learning over time enhances memory and the
survival of new neurons, Learning & Memory, (732), 368 – 375,
https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.488707.368.
45. N. J. Cepeda, H. Pashler, E, Vul, J. T. Wixted, & D. Rohrer
(2006), Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and
quantitative synthesis, Psychological Bulletin, 132, 354 – 380;
 Notes to Chapter 3 241

S. K. Carpenter, N. J. Cepeda, D. Rohrer, D., S. H. K. Kang, &

H. Pashler (2012), Using spacing to enhance diverse forms
of learning: Review of recent research and implications for
instruction, Educational Psychology Review, 24(3), 369 – 378,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648 -012 - 9205-­z.
46. H. P. Bahrick & E. Phelps (1987), Retention of Spanish
vocabulary over 8 years, Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13(2), 344 – 349, https://doi
.org/10.1037/0278 -7393.13.2.344.
47. S. K. Carpenter, N. J. Cepeda, D. Rohrer, D., S. H. K. Kang, &
H. Pashler (2012), Using spacing to enhance diverse forms
of learning: Review of recent research and implications for
instruction, Educational Psychology Review, 24(3), 369 – 378,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648 - 012 -9205-­z.
48. R. A. R. Gurung, & K. Burns (2019), Putting evidence-­based
claims to the test: A multi-­site classroom study of retrieval
practice and spaced practice, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 33(5),
732 – 743, https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3507.
49. M. D. Miller (2009), What the science of cognition tells us
about instructional technology, Change: The Magazine of Higher
Learning, 41, 71 – 74.
50. www.kahoot.it
51. L. Zucker & A. Fisch (2019), Play and learning with KAHOOT!:
Enhancing collaboration and engagement in grades 9 – 16
through digital games, Journal of Language and Literacy
Education, 15(1).
52. D. H. Iwamoto, J. Hargis, E. J. Taitano, & K. Vuong (2017),
Analyzing the efficacy of the testing effect using Kahoot™
on student performance, Turkish Online Journal of Distance
Education, 18(2), 80 – 93.
53. N. R. Andzik, C. M. Gist, E. E. Smith, M. Xu, N. A. Neef, & T. O.
State (2015), The effects of gaming on university student quiz
performance, Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education,
2(1), 109 – 119; K. Yabuno, E. Luong, & J. Shaffer, (2019),
Comparison of traditional and gamified student response
systems in an undergraduate human anatomy course, HAPS
Educator, 23(1), 29 – 36, https://doi.org/10.21692/haps
.2019.001.
54. K. K. James & R. E. Mayer (2019), Learning a second language
by playing a game, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 33(4), 669 – 674,
https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3492.
55. R. Gafni, D. B. Achituv, & G. J. Rachmani (2017), Learning
foreign languages using mobile applications, Journal of
Information Technology Education: Research, 16(1), 301 – 317,
242 Notes to Chapter 3

https://doi.org/10.28945/3855; S. Loewen, D. Crowther,

D. Isbell, DK. M. Kim, Z. Miller, Z., & H. Rawal (2019), Mobile-­
assisted language learning: A Duolingo case study, ReCALL,
31(3), 293 – 311.
56. A. Grubišić, S. Stankov, & B. Žitko (2015), Adaptive courseware:
A literature review, Journal of Universal Computer Science, 21(9),
1168 – 1209, https://doi.org/10.3217/jucs-­021- 09 - 1168.
57. For more examples, see C. D. Dziuban, P. D. Moskal, J. Cassisi, &
A. Fawcett (2016), Adaptive learning in psychology: Wayfinding
in the digital age, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Network,
20(3), 74 – 96.
58. https://oli.cmu.edu/.
59. J. A. Kulik & J. D. Fletcher (2016), Effectiveness of intelligent
tutoring systems: A meta-­analytic review, Review of
Educational Research, 86(1), 42 – 78, https://doi.org/10.3102
/0034654315581420.
60. For example, see C. D. Dziuban, P. D. Moskal, J. Cassisi, & A. Fawcett
(2016), Adaptive learning in psychology: Wayfinding in the digital
age, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Network, 20(3), 74–96.
61. P. J. Hughes (n.d.), Spaced learning to promote pharmacy
student knowledge retention via mobile learning. Unpublished
manuscript.
62. B. Sparrow, J. Liu, & D. M. Wegner (2011), Google effects on
memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our
fingertips, Science, http://science.sciencemag.org/content
/333/6043/776/tab-­pdf.
63. Researchers in this study used an established methodology for
demonstrating that a concept has been primed in our minds,
even if we aren’t consciously aware of it: the Stroop paradigm,
in which we have to ignore a printed word in order to name
the color the word is printed in. Concepts that we’re actively
thinking about tend to produce more interference, and slow
people down more, than other words.
64. B. Sparrow, J. Liu, & D. M. Wegner (2011), Google effects on
memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at
our fingertips, Science, 333 (6043), 776 – 778. https://doi
.org/10.1126/science.1207745, http://science.sciencemag.org
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65. D.L. Schacter (2022). Media, technology, and the sins of
memory. Memory, Mind & Media 1, e1, 1 – 15. https://doi.org
/10.1017/mem.2021.3
66. B. Storm (2021, July 16). Cognitive offloading and memory in
the digital age [Conference presentation]. Cognitive Offloading
Meeting 2021, Virtual conference.
 Notes to Chapter 4 243

67. For an example, see N. Carr (2008), Is Google making us

stupid?, The Atlantic, July/August, http://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-­google-­making-­us-­stupid
/306868/.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1. Sperling wasn’t the only researcher to employ this metaphor.

Much earlier, William James talked about attention and
spotlights as well.
2. G. Sperling & E. Weichselgartner (1995), Episodic theory of
the dynamics of spatial attention, Psychological Review, 102(3),
503 – 532, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033 -295X.102.3.503.
3. K. Cherry (2020, July 25), How psychologists define attention,
Verywellmind, https://www.verywellmind.com/what-­is
-­attention-­2795009.
4. D. Griffith (1976), The attentional demands of mnemonic
control processes, Memory & Cognition, 4(1), 103 – 108; D. G.
MacKay (1987), The organization of perception and action: a
theory for language and other cognitive skills, Springer-­Verlag;
D. G. MacKay & D. M. Burke (1990), Cognition and aging: A
theory of new learning and the use of old connections, in
T. M. Hess (Ed.), Aging and cognition: Knowledge organization and
utilization, 213 – 263, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0166
-4115(08)60159 - 4; S. W. Tyler, P. T. Hertel, M. McCallum, &
H. C. Ellis (1979), Cognitive effort and memory revisited,
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory,
5(6), 607 – 617, https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1984.54.3.850.
5. F. I. Craik, R. Govoni, M. Naveh-­Benjamin, & N. D. Anderson
(1996), The effects of divided attention on encoding and
retrieval processes in human memory, Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, 125(2), 159 – 180, https://doi.org/10
.1037/0096 - 3445.125.2.159.
6. N. L. Wood & N. Cowan (1995), The cocktail party phenomenon
revisited: Attention and memory in the classic selective
listening procedure of Cherry (1953), Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, 124(3), 243 – 262, https://doi
.org/10.1037/0096 -3445.124.3.243.
7. C. F. Chabris & D. Simons (2010), The invisible gorilla: And other
ways our intuitions deceive us, Crown.
8. M. D. Miller (2014), Minds online: Teaching effectively with
technology, Harvard University Press.
9. I want to credit Neil Bradbury, Professor of Physiology and
244 Notes to Chapter 4

Biophysics at the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral studies

at the Rosalind Franklin University of Science and Medicine,
for doing the work to uncover the origins of the ten-­minute
rule. For an in-­depth discussion of what he found, see this
episode of the Tea for Teaching podcast: http://teaforteaching
.com/16-­student-­attention-­span/; or this article: N. A.
Bradbury (2016), Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds,
10 minutes, or more?, Advances in Physiology Education, 40(4),
509 – 513, https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00109.2016.
10. N. A. Bradbury (2016), Attention span during lectures: 8
seconds, 10 minutes, or more?, Advances in Physiology
Education, 40(4), 509 – 513, https://doi.org/10.1152/advan
.00109.2016.
11. See, for example, https://business.linkedin.com/marketing
-­solutions/blog/best-­practices - content-­marketing/2016
/the-­great-­goldfish-­attention-­span-­myth — and-­why-­its-­killing
-­cont.
12. N. A. Bradbury (2016), Attention span during lectures: 8
seconds, 10 minutes, or more? Advances in Physiology Education,
40(4), 509 – 513, https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00109.2016.
13. A. E. Maynard, K. Subrahmanyam, & P. M. Greenfield (2011),
Technology and the development of intelligence: From the
loom to the computer, in R. J. Sternberg & D. D. Preiss (Eds.),
Intelligence and technology: The impact of tools on the nature and
development of human abilities (pp. 29 – 53), Routledge,
14. https://lindastone.net/about/continuous-­partial-­attention/.
15. Slack is a messaging and discussion application that’s designed
especially for workplaces.
16. A. Michel (2016, January 29), Burnout and the brain, APA
Observer, http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php
/publications/observer/2016/february-­16/burnout-­and-­the
-­brain.html.
17. H. C. Woods & H. Scott (2016), #Sleepyteens: Social media
use in adolescence is associated with poor sleep quality,
anxiety, depression and low self-­esteem, Journal of Adolescence,
51(October 2017), 41 – 49, https://doi.org/10.1016/j
.adolescence.2016.05.008.
18. H. Scott & H. C. Woods (2018), Fear of missing out and sleep:
Cognitive behavioural factors in adolescents’ nighttime social
media use, Journal of Adolescence, 68, 61 – 65, https://doi.org
/10.1016/j.adolescence.2018.07.009.
19. See, for example, T. Tokuhama-­Espinosa (2018), Neuromyths:
Debunking false ideas about the brain, W.W. Norton & Co.
20. For examples, see David Strayer’s work on cell phones and
 Notes to Chapter 4 245

driving; the influential theorist Alan Baddeley also has related

how he was able to process certain kinds of input while driving,
while others — such as visualizing the spatial arrangements of
players in a soccer match he was listening to — interfered with
each other: A. Baddeley (2003), Working memory and language:
An overview, Journal of Communication Disorders, 36(3),
189 – 208, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0021 -9924(03)00019 - 4.
21. L. M. Carrier, L. D. Rosen, N. A. Cheever, & A. F. Lim (2015),
Causes, effects, and practicalities of everyday multitasking.
Developmental Review, 35, 64 – 78, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr
.2014.12.005; H. Pashler (2000), Task switching and multitask
performance. Control of Cognitive Processes: Attention and
Performance XVIII, 277 – 307; D. D. Salvucci, N. A. Taatgen, &
J. Borst (2009), Toward a unified theory of the multitasking
continuum: From concurrent performance to task switching,
interruption, and resumption, Human Factors in Computing
Systems: CHI 2009 Conference Proceedings, 1819 – 1828, https://
doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518981.
22. For another good discussion of task switching versus true
multitasking, see P. A. Kirschner & P. De Bruyckere (2017), The
myths of the digital native and the multitasker, Teaching and
Teacher Education, 67, 135 – 142, https://doi.org/10.1016/j
.tate.2017.06.001.
23. Holbrook & Dismukes, 2005, as cited in K. A. Finstad, M. Bink,
M. McDaniel, & G. O. Einstein (2006), Breaks and task switches
in prospective memory, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(5),
705 – 712, https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1223.
24. R. K. Dismukes (2012), Prospective memory in workplace and
everyday situations, Current Directions in Psychological Science,
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721412447621.
25. D. Diamond (2016, June 20), An epidemic of children dying in
hot cars: A tragedy that can be prevented, The Conversation.
26. C. Cuttler & P. Graf (2007), Sub-­clinical compulsive checkers’
prospective memory is impaired, Journal of Anxiety Disorders,
21(3), 338 – 352, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.06
.001.
27. A. Gawande (2014), The checklist manifesto: How to get things
right, Penguin.
28. See, for example, Donald Norman’s 1993 book Things that make
us smart (Diversion Books).
29. J. M. Lang (2020), Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what
you can do about it, Basic Books.
30. J. M. Lang (2020), Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what
you can do about it, Basic Books.
246 Notes to Chapter 4

31. M. D. Miller, J. J. Doherty, N. Butler & W. Coull (2020),

Changing counterproductive beliefs about attention, memory,
and multitasking: Impacts of a brief, fully online module,
Applied Cognitive Psychology, 34, 710 – 723.
32. R. Junco (2012), Too much face and not enough books: The
relationship between multiple indices of Facebook use and
academic performance, Computers in Human Behavior, 28(1),
187 – 198, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.08.026.
33. R. Junco (2012), In-­class multitasking and academic
performance, Computers in Human Behavior, 28(6), 2236 – 2243,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.06.031.
34. For an example of the concept in the education literature, see
D. G. Oblinger, J. L. Oblinger, & J. K. Lippincott (2005),
Educating the Net Generation. EDUCAUSE.
35. M. D. Miller (2015, June 26), Can millennials pay attention
to classwork while texting, tweeting and being on Facebook?,
The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/can
-­millennials-­pay-­attention-­to-­classwork-­while-­texting
-­tweeting-­and-­being-­on-­facebook-­43100.
36. See, for example: P. A. Kirschner & P. De Bruyckere (2017), The
myths of the digital native and the multitasker, Teaching and
Teacher Education, 67, 135 – 142, https://doi.org/10.1016/j
.tate.2017.06.001; A. Koutropoulos (2011), Digital natives: Ten
years after, MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching,
7(4), 525 – 538.
37. D. T. Willingham (2015, January 20), Smartphones don’t make
us dumb, The New York Times.
38. B. D. T. Willingham (2010), Have technology and multitasking
rewired how students learn?, 23 – 29.
39. K. Subrahmanyam, M. Michikyan, C. Clemmons, R. Carrillo,
Y. T. Uhls, & P. M. Greenfield (2013), Learning from paper,
learning from screens: Impact of screen reading and
multitasking conditions on reading and writing among college
students, International Journal of Cyber Behavior, Psychology and
Learning, 3(4), 1 – 27, https://doi.org/10.4018/ijcbpl
.2013100101.
40. M. J. Berry & A. Westfall (2017), Dial D for Distraction : The
making and breaking of cell phone policies in the college
classroom, College Teaching, 63(2), 62 – 71, https://doi.org/10
.1080/87567555.2015.1005040.
41. M. D. Miller (2017, December 8), Addiction, accommodation,
and better solutions to the laptop problem, https://www
.michellemillerphd.com/addiction-­accommodation-­and-­better
-­solutions-­to-­the-­laptop-­problem/; R. Talbert, R. (2017, August
 Notes to Chapter 5 247

14), Laptop bans and the assumptions we make. http://rtalbert

.org/laptop-­bans-­and-­assumptions/.
42. A. Lepp, A., Barkley, A. C. Karpinski, & S. Singh (2019),
College students’ multitasking behavior in online versus face-­
to-­face courses. SAGE Open, 9(1), https://doi.org/10.1177
/2158244018824505.
43. John Doherty, to whom I’m eternally grateful.
44. R. Wiseman [Quirkology] (2012), Colour changing card trick,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3iPrBrGSJM.
45. R. A. Rensink, J. Kevin O’Regan, & J. J. Clark (2000). On the
failure to detect changes in scenes across brief interruptions,
Visual Cognition, 7(1 – 3), 127 – 145, https://doi
.org/10.1080/135062800394720.
46. RYDBELGIUM (2012), The impossible texting & driving test.
47. L. Festinger (1957), A theory of cognitive dissonance, Stanford
University Press.
48. E.g., J. Stone, E. Aronson, A. L. Crain, M. P. Winslow, & C. B.
Fried (1994), Inducing hypocrisy as a means of encouraging
young adults to use condoms, Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 20(1), 116 – 128.
49. M. D. Miller, J. J. Doherty, N. M. Butler, & W. G. Coull (2020),
Changing counterproductive beliefs about attention, memory,
and multitasking: Impacts of a brief, fully online module,
Applied Cognitive Psychology, 34(3), 710 – 723, https://doi.org
/10.1002/acp.3662.
50. C. I. Seymour, E. Erdynast, & M. D. Miller (2020), Gender
predicts beliefs and knowledge about attention among college
students, College Teaching, DOI: 10.1080/87567555.2020
.1853026.
51. https://pocketpoints.com/.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
1. H. H. Wilmer, H. H., L. E. Sherman, L. E., & J. M. Chein, J. M.
(2017), Smartphones and cognition: A review of research
exploring the links between mobile technology habits and
cognitive functioning, Frontiers in Psychology, https://doi.org
/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00605, p. 2.
2. S. Andrews, D. A. Ellis, H. Shaw, & L. Piwek (2015), Beyond self-­
report: Tools to compare estimated and real-­world smartphone
use, PLoS ONE, 10(10), 1 – 9, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal
.pone.0139004.
3. P. A. Leynes, J. Flynn, & B. A. Mok (2018), Event-­related
potential measures of smartphone distraction, Cyberpsychology,
248 Notes to Chapter 5

Behavior, and Social Networking, 21(4), 248 – 253, https://doi

.org/10.1089/cyber.2017.0630.
4. N. Barr, G. Pennycook, J. A. Stolz, & J. A. Fugelsang (2015), The
brain in your pocket: Evidence that Smartphones are used to
supplant thinking, Computers in Human Behavior, 48. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.029.
5. For a discussion of the right answer, and why it’s so hard for
people to hit on that right answer, see https://www
.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/a
-­new-­twist-­on-­a-­classic-­puzzle.html.
6. U. Lyngs (2017), “It’s more fun with my phone”: A replication
study of cell phone presence and task performance, Conference
on Human Factors in Computing Systems — Proceedings, Part
F127655, 136 – 141, https://doi.org/10.1145/3027063
.3048418; Bianchi, P. (2018), The Mere Presence Effect:
Attentional Bias Promoted by Smartphone Presence, San Jose
State University. However, note that one other study did
replicate the effect, using participants’ own phones and a
different set of tasks involving memory and attention: A. F.
Ward, K. Duke, A. Gneezy, & M. W. Bos (2017), Brain drain:
The mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available
cognitive capacity, Journal of the Association for Consumer
Research, 2(2), 140 – 154, https://doi.org/10.1086/691462.
7. U. Lyngs (2017), “It’s more fun with my phone”: A replication
study of cell phone presence and task performance, Conference
on Human Factors in Computing Systems — Proceedings, Part
F127655, 136 – 141, https://doi.org/10.1145/3027063
.3048418; Bianchi, P. (2018), The mere presence effect:
Attentional bias promoted by smartphone presence, San Jose State
University.
8. B. Sparrow, J. Liu, & M. Wegner (2011), Google effects on
memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our
fingerprints, Science, 333, 776 – 778.
9. Memorial Church, a popular site for architectural tours on the
Stanford University campus.
10. L. A. Henkel (2014), Point-­and-­shoot memories: The
influence of taking photos on memory for a museum
tour, Psychological Science, 25(2), 396 – 402, https://doi.org
/10.1177/0956797613504438.
11. G. E. Burnett & K. Lee (2005), The effect of vehicle navigation
systems on the formation of cognitive maps, Traffic and
Transport Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1016/b978
- 008044379 - 9/50188 - 6.
 Notes to Chapter 5 249

12. L. Hejtmánek, I. Oravcová, J. Motýl, J. Horáček, & I. Fajnerová

(2018), Spatial knowledge impairment after GPS guided
navigation: Eye-­tracking study in a virtual town, International
Journal of Human Computer Studies, 116, 15 – 24, https://doi
.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2018.04.006.
13. L. Hejtmánek, I. Oravcová, J. Motýl, J. Horáček, & I. Fajnerová
(2018), Spatial knowledge impairment after GPS guided
navigation: Eye-­tracking study in a virtual town, International
Journal of Human Computer Studies, 116, 15 – 24, https://doi
.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2018.04.006.
14. S. Dynarski (2017, November 22), Laptops are great. But
not during a lecture or a meeting, The New York Times;
D. Rosenblum (2017, January 2), Leave your laptops at the door
to my classroom, The New York Times; Senior, J. (2015, July 9),
The case against laptops in the classroom, The New Yorker.
15. K. Gannon (2016, May 15), Let’s ban the classroom technology
ban, https://thetattooedprof.com/2016/05/15/lets-­ban-­the
-­classroom-­technology-­ban/; R. Godden & A.-­M. Womack
(2016, May 12), Making disability part of the conversation:
Combatting inaccessible spaces and logics, Hybrid Pedagogy,
https://hybridpedagogy.org/making-­disability-­part-­of-­the
-­conversation/; M. D. Miller (2017, December 8), Addiction,
accommodation, and better solutions to the laptop problem,
https://www.michellemillerphd.com/addiction-­accommodation
-­and-­better-­solutions-­to-­the-­laptop-­problem/; R. Talbert
(2017, August 14), Laptop bans and the assumptions we make,
https://guides.himmelfarb.gwu.edu/APA/blogpost.
16. H. L. Urry, C. S. Crittle, V. A. Floerke, M. Z. Leonard, C. S. Perry
III, N. Akdilek, E. R. Albert, A. J. Block, C. Ackerley Bollinger,
E. M. Bowers, R. S. Brody, K. C. Burk, A. Burnstein, A. K. Chan,
P. C. Chan, L. J. Chang, E. Chen, C. P. Chiarawongse, G. Chin,
& K. Chin (2021), Don’t ditch the laptop just yet: A direct
replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) study 1
plus mini-­meta-­analyses across similar studies, Psychological
Science, 32(3), 326 – 339, p. 327, https://doi.org/10.1177
/0956797620965541.
17. I wrote about this replication soon after it was published in
the following blog post, which was also the basis for many of
the same ideas I’m writing about in this section: https://
www.michellemillerphd.com/a-­new-­replication-­study-­revives
-­the-­question-­is-­taking-­notes-­by-­hand-­really-­better-­for
-­students/.
18. K. Morehead, J. Dunlosky, & K. A. Rawson (2019), How much
250 Notes to Chapter 5

mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-­taking? A

replication and extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014),
Educational Psychology Review, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648
- 019 -09468 - 2.
19. H. L. Urry, C. S. Crittle, V. A. Floerke, M. Z. Leonard, C. S. Perry
III, N. Akdilek, E. R. Albert, A. J. Block, C. Ackerley Bollinger,
E. M. Bowers, R. S. Brody, K. C. Burk, A. Burnstein, A. K. Chan,
P. C. Chan, L. J. Chang, E. Chen, C. P. Chiarawongse, G. Chin,
& K. Chin (2021), Don’t ditch the laptop just yet: A direct
replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) study 1 plus
mini-­meta-­analyses across similar studies, Psychological Science,
32(3), 326 – 339, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620965541.
20. H. L. Urry, C. S. Crittle, V. A. Floerke, M. Z. Leonard, C. S. Perry
III, N. Akdilek, E. R. Albert, A. J. Block, C. Ackerley Bollinger,
E. M. Bowers, R. S. Brody, K. C. Burk, A. Burnstein, A. K. Chan,
P. C. Chan, L. J. Chang, E. Chen, C. P. Chiarawongse, G. Chin,
& K. Chin (2021), Don’t ditch the laptop just yet: A direct
replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) study 1 plus
mini-­meta-­analyses across similar studies, Psychological Science,
32(3), 326 – 339, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620965541.
21. To take one example, the author Evy Poumpouras claims in
one recent book that as a graduate student, she hand-­copied
her textbooks word for word as a study strategy, explaining
that this worked for her because handwriting is a research-­
supported way to make information memorable. Note that by
copying word for word, she would have been missing out on
the exact benefit that Mueller and Oppenheimer attribute to
writing by hand — namely, that it forces us to synthesize and
condense as we go along instead of transcribing verbatim.
E. Pompouras (2020), Becoming bulletproof: Protect yourself, read
people, influence situations, and live fearlessly, Atria Books.
22. F. Sana, T. Weston & N. J. Cepeda (2013), Laptop multitasking
hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers,
Computers & Education, 62, 24 – 31, https://doi.org/10.1016/j
.compedu.2012.10.003.
23. R. Talbert (2017, August 14), Laptop bans and the assumptions
we make, https://rtalbert.org/laptop-­bans-­and-­assumptions/.
24. S. Freeman, S. L. Eddy, M. McDonough, M. K. Smith, N.
Okoroafor, H. Jordt, & M. P. Wenderoth (2014), Active learning
increases student performance in science, engineering, and
mathematics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States of America, 111(23), 8410 – 8415, https://doi
.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111; E. Mazur (2009), Farewell,
Lecture?, Science, 323, 50 – 51.
 Notes to Conclusion 251

25. J. M. Lang (2020), Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what
you can do about it, Basic Books.
26. J. M. Lang (2020), Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what
you can do about it (p. 18), Basic Books.

NOTES TO CONCLUSION
1. J.R. Finley, F. Naaz, & F.W. Goh (2018), Memory and technology:
How we use information in the brain and in the world. Springer.
2. For an outstanding example, see B.K. Kirchoff, P.F. Delaney,
M. Horton, & R. Dellinger-­Johnston (2014), Optimizing
learning of scientific category knowledge in the classroom: The
case of plant identification. CBE Life Sciences Education, 13(3),
425 – 436. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.13-­11-­0224.
3. S. Jang, J. M. Vitale, R. W. Jyung, & J. B. Black (2017), Direct
manipulation is better than passive viewing for learning
anatomy in a three-­dimensional virtual reality environment,
Computers and Education, 106, 150–165, https://doi.org/10.1016
/j.compedu.2016.12.009.
4. M. D. Miller, G. Castillo, N. Medoff, & G. Hardy (2021),
Immersive VR for organic chemistry: Impacts on performance and
grades for first-­generation and continuing-­generation university
students, in press, Innovative Higher Education.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks go first to this book’s editor James Lang, whose work has
changed the course of history in higher education, very much for
the better. I’ve been a fan of his writing since I was a flailing new
faculty member devouring his Chronicle of Higher Education advice
columns through many a desk-­bound lunch break or poorly at-
tended office hour. He has been an eloquent and tireless advocate
for evidence-­based teaching and the forward-­t hinking faculty
mindset that goes along with it. His work has opened up a world of
possibility for people like me: psychologists hoping to communi-
cate what we know about learning to wider audiences, and hoping
to promote more learning in the world along the way.
Through James Lang, I was able to meet Derek Krissoff, who
gave this book a home and a path to existence. As director of West
Virginia University Press, Derek’s vision has been clear, powerful,
and ambitious, and nowhere more so than in the Teaching and
Learning in Higher Education series. It’s a project whose time has
come, and thanks to him, the work is making it out to the people
who need it the most.
I am grateful to the many brilliant scholars who created the
original research that supports so much of what I’ve said in this
book. Jeffrey Karpicke, Henry Roediger III, Robert Bjork, Pooja
Agarwal, Richard Mayer, Daniel Willingham, Daniel Simons,
Mark McDaniel, John Dunlosky, Pam Mueller, Alan Baddeley,
Jason Finley, Daniel Oppenheimer, Kayla Morehouse — these are
254 Acknowledgments

but a few of the researchers whose work has shaped our modern
understanding of how people learn and remember. Any misinter-
pretations or misapplications of their findings in this book are my
responsibility alone.
I was fortunate to have had the assistance of a team of NAU
student researchers who helped with many key stages of this proj-
ect: Dejah Yansen, Esmé Erdynast, Larissa Griefenberg, Zackary
Sinex, and Caitlyn Seymour. These whip-­smart and ferociously
hardworking undergraduates helped ferret out relevant studies,
surveyed the landscape of popular commentary about the topic,
and offered insights about learning and technology from a twenty-­
something student perspective. Caitlyn, Dejah, Larissa, Esmé, and
Zack: This book is better for your efforts, and was a whole lot more
fun to write with you all along for the ride. Thank you.
I also couldn’t have written this book without the experience
of getting to teach the Technology, Mind, and Brain course in all
its many incarnations throughout the years. Students in these
classes have offered creative, practical solutions to the dilemmas
we all face in a technology-­saturated world, and they have pushed
me to consider research in this area from totally new perspectives.
I especially want to thank students in my Spring 2021 cohort
who offered detailed feedback on an earlier version of the manu-
script: Casiah Gueyser, Scott Janetsky, Kennedy Lopez, Alyssa
Neal, Simone Simmons, Madeline Snyder, Jessica Valencia, and
Maxim Vinnikov.
The feedback I got from West Virginia Press’ excellent team of
peer reviewers also immensely improved this book. In particular,
Regan Gurung’s comments, springing from his deep expertise in
the psychology of learning, helped me strengthen the scientific
basis for my advice to teachers. This book also got a major boost
from the feedback provided by an anonymous WVU Press reader.
We academics kid around a lot about the grief we always seem to
 Acknowledgments 255

get from “Reviewer 2” — but in my case, that second review was

nothing short of inspirational. Thank you.
My husband Rick McDonald also inspires me every day with
his commitment to the grand mission of education, and through
his day-­in, day-­out work with students of his own. As someone
whose educational-­technology visions often exceed her skills in
executing said visions, I thank my lucky stars that I have my own
instructional design consultant available 24/7 — and an infinitely
patient one at that. Rick, your work influences mine more than
you know, and your support has kept me productive, motivated,
and un-­stuck for all the time it took to write this book.
It’s traditional to apologize to your family in the acknowledg-
ments section of a book like this, saying you’re sorry for the late
nights, “vacations” spent hunched over a laptop, and all the other
preoccupations that go with the territory of being an author. But
to be perfectly honest, this book was never a chore, imposition, or
unwelcome diversion. I had a blast writing it, and a happy writer
makes a happy home. So in lieu of apologies, let me just say thanks
for giving me space when I needed it and knowing that in the end,
this book would be another thing for us to celebrate, together.
This book might not exist, and surely wouldn’t be as good, if
not for the unflagging support and spot-­on advice of my longtime
friend and minimally compensated writing coach Gary Schoep.
Gary, you pushed hard to get me to put more of my own person-
ality in this work and cheered me along the long road to finishing
it, especially during the isolating ordeal known as the year 2020.
Brains plus brawn equals book!
I’ve had yet another cheering section through the course of
writing this book: my Mastermind group. I’ve gained so much
from watching your colossal talents in action, Masterminders, and
every time we talk, I come away feeling a little more optimistic
that I can, in fact, do the things that matter. I won’t list you all by
256 Acknowledgments

name, because as we all know, the first rule of Mastermind is what

happens in Mastermind stays in Vegas. But you all know who you
are, and please accept my deepest thanks for all of our discussions
during our five-­plus years together.
My professional network also includes an incredible group of
women who’ve encouraged me through this project and so many
others. Rebecca Campbell’s laser-­sharp mind and wit challenges
me, always with good grace and humor, to get better at everything
I do. Kristen Betts has been a wildly productive collaborator; she is
the one who invited me into her top-­flight research group to com-
plete the international neuromyths study I talked about the early
chapters of this book. Kristen — I’m perpetually in awe of your
energy and grateful for your friendship. Angie Moline — a brilliant
visual thinker if there ever was one — opened up alternative ways
for a word-­nerd like myself to illustrate complicated concepts and
big ideas. Rachel Koch and I laughed, visioned, and plotted during
discussions fueled by countless rounds of appetizers, and I always
came away feeling energized to stop planning and start writing.
Thanks, everyone. Let’s do it all again soon.
 INDEX

“A Dark Consensus About Screens attention span, 139–142, 144,

and Kids Begins to 149, 167
Emerge in Silicon Valley” attention: necessity of for
(newspaper article), 20 forming memories, 9, 59,
abaci, 31 100, 148, 166–168, 187,
action research teams, 103–104 199; differences between
adaptive learning systems, 117, older and younger adults,
121–125, 131 36–37; and noticing
advice to students on managing unexpected things in the
technology, 16, 169 field of view, 48; and the
aging, 14 central executive, 62;
AI, 1 and distractions caused
alerts, 153, 167, 188, 218–220 by technology, 129,
almanacs, 32 154–168; metaphors for
Amazon, 123, 231 understanding, 133–135;
American Academy of Pediatrics, movement around a visual
25 scene, 133–134; difficulty
American Journal of Geriatric of defining, 135; brain
Psychiatry, 36 structures supporting,
amnesia, 48, 51, 54, 71, 75 135–136, 167; suppressing
amplification of mental processes irrelevant information
via technology, 9, 29, 31–32 within, 136–137; common
anxiety, 24, 113–114, 118, 146, misconceptions about,
152 139–149, 167–168;
Arizona, 45–46, 66, 70, 81 intuitions about, 139;
artificial intelligence, 1 span, 139–140, 149; and
Atkinson, Richard, 53, 56, 57, 58, the ten-minute rule for
61, 62 students in class, 140–141;
Attention Matters! (online and introducing variety
module), 154, 159–168, and changes of pace
172, 201, 214 in class, 140, 144; and
258 Index

attention (continued) thinking, 11; remaining

prospective memory, 149– the same over time, 32,
154; video demonstrations 43; evolution of, 319,
of limitations in, 160–161; 3, 98–99; measuring
gender and beliefs processes using fMRI,
about, 164, 166; and 35; effects of injury
smartphones, 178–188; to, 51, 54, 71; and the
deliberate cultivation of, in three-part division of
education, 206 long-term memory, 65;
and procedural memories,
Babel (language learning 71; cerebellum, 71;
application), 121 visual processing within,
Baddeley, Alan, 61 98–99; limbic system,
Bain, Ken, 57 99; hippocampus, 99;
bandwidth, and attention, 140, structures supporting
148 attention, 135–136,
banking model of education, 57, 167; and the ten-minute
128, 203 rule for students paying
bans, technology. See technology attention in class, 141;
bans, in classes. supposed impacts on from
bare brains, 29, 43 spending time on devices,
Batty, Roy, 14 144–146, 221–222; ability
behavior change, intentional, 27, to multitask, 146–149;
161, 214, 219 organization as a parallel
Blade Runner (film), 14 processing system,
blogs, 20 146–147
Bloom’s Taxonomy, 88–89, 96, brain dump, 116
129 Brauer, Liz, 94–95
boredom, 143–144, 175 browsers, web, 34, 165
brain: interplay between digital bullet journals, 26
and biological, 7; studies Burns, Kathleen, 116
of, 10–11, 21; extending
capacity through calculators, 31–32
technology, 32; changes cameras, disposable, alternative
due to web experience, to smartphone cameras,
35–38; temporal lobe, 38, 186
occipital lobe, 38; changes cameras, smartphone, impacts of
due to reading, 38; using, 4, 183–186, 220
changes due to driving, Canterbury Tales, 225–225
38; “rewiring” due to Carnegie Mellon, 123
technology, 33–34, 38–39, cellphones, 23, 184. See also
42; processes within smartphones
during remembering and central executive, 62
 Index 259

Cepeda, Nicholas, 200 correlational study design, 36,

change blindness, 160 180
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 224–225 counterproductive beliefs survey
Chavarria, Athena, 20 (CBS), 163
checklists, 15, 153 course redesign, 12
children, and screens, 20, 24–26 Craik, Fergus, 72
Chronicle of Higher Education, cram and purge, 112
The, 3 cramming, 93, 115
chunking, in memory, 58, 60 creativity: enhancement through
classroom technology policies, technology, 20; damage to
16, 27, 159, 189–207, through technology, 25,
200–210, 214–215 145; damage to through
cloud storage, 213, 223 traditional education,
cocktail party effect, 136, 138 87–90, 225; damage to
Cogbooks, 122 through testing, 111;
Cognition and Education Lab, 90 in student-suggested
cognitive capabilities: solutions, 213
enhancement through critical thinking, 28, 43, 70, 89
memory, 8; declines cross-cultural research, 143
brought about by cues, in retrieval from memory,
technology, 22–23, 42–43, 68–70, 77, 80–80,
7, 22–23, 177; extensions Cumberbatch, Benedict, 68
through technology,
32; reallocating due deep processing, 72–74
to technology, 44; degrees, higher education, 3
complemented by demand characteristics, 142
technology, 167; digital detox, 23
protecting, in a digital distrust, 22
technological age, 212 digital duress, 22
cognitive neuroscience, 10 digital memory, relationship to
cognitive psychology, 5–6; 10 human memory, 1, 6–7, 32,
cognitive style, 177–178 77, 126–128, 226
Cohen, Stanley, 23 digital natives, 12, 157–158, 165,
college students, traditional-aged, 168
11 distinctiveness, as an influence on
computer metaphor, 6 memory, 63, 64, 75, 81–82
computers: as a metaphor for Distracted: Why Students Can’t
human information Focus and What You Can Do
processing, 6; advances in, About It (book), 154–155,
7; symbiotic relationship to 205
human mind, 7, 127–128 distraction, 129, 167: as a feature
continuous partial attention, designed into apps, social
144–145 media, and devices, 8, 205;
260 Index

distraction (continued) encyclopedias, 32

managing, 16, 154–169; engines, search, 4, 34, 90,
and memory encoding, 125–128, 182
137–139; arising from episodic memory, 65–66, 68,
internal off-topic thoughts, 70–71, 79, 83–84, 149,
139; and prospective 173, 183; definition,
memory failures, 151; 65–66; and the three-
and students, historical part theory of long-term
perspectives on, 154–155, memory, 65–70, 83; and
168; relationship to cues, 68; similarities to
academic achievement, semantic memory, 70–71;
155–157; and driving, contrast to prospective
160; real-life situations memory, 79, 149; relevance
involving, 180; and to teaching, 84; influences
smartphones, on by mobile devices,
182; and laptops in class, 173, 183; relationship
198–202 to digital memory, 212;
distributed practice, 114–116. See strengthening with digital
also spacing photographs, 220
“Do Schools Kill Creativity?” (TED ERP, 174–175, 182
talk), 87–88 event-related potentials,
Donne, John, 155 174–175. See also ERP
doorway effect, 79–80, 151 eWriters, 27, 195–195
Dr. Murk. See Murchison, Lynne Excel (spreadsheet application),
Duolingo, 119–122, 189, 216 29
experiential learning, 104–105
e-books, 157 eyewitness testimony, 51
educational technology, 15, 216,
222–223 Facebook, 156, 200
Ellerman, Evelyn, 28 feedback, 44, 108, 198: and
email, 144, 148, 152, 163, 165, retrieval practice, 108–
219 109; and adaptive learning
emotions: and cultural beliefs systems, 123
around child-rearing, field trips, and smartphone
24; and impacts on the cameras, 186
brain due to technology, flashbulb memories, 68
38; and memory, 60, 77, fMRI, 34–35
81, 83, 100–101, 104, FOMO (fear of missing out), 146
129; and distortions to foreign language learning, 64,
memories over time, 69; 119–121, 124, 208
and classroom atmosphere, Forest (screen time
105; and parallel processing management
within the brain, 147 application), 27
 Index 261

forgetfulness, 14 handwriting, physical difficulties

forgetting: different types of, with, 200–201
74–75; reasons for, 75–76, Hart, Gary, 66
81–83; of intentions, 150 Henkel, Linda, 184–185
Freedom (site blocking Hitchcock, Alfred, 75
application), 27 How Technology Helps our
Freire, Paolo, 56–57 Memories (article), 20
functional magnetic resonance human brain. See brain
See fMRI hypermnesia, 78
hypnosis, 48, 50–51
gamification, 118, 121 hypocrisy effect, 162
gaming, 171 hypothesis testing, simulated, 31
gauging rods, 32
gender, and counterproductive implicit learning, 138–139
beliefs about attention, in-class polling, 159, 209: low-
164, 166 tech alternatives to, 217
generational differences: inference, 109, 113
regarding technology, 8, influencer culture, 26
12, 39–40, 212–213; in informal learning, 2
thinking and memory, information processing, in the
10; and intergenerational human mind and brain, 6,
fearmongering, 11; in 34–35, 177
cognitive functions, 43 Instagram, 156
goals, connections to memory, intelligence, human, 20, 32
100–102, 129 intelligent tutors, 123–124
goldfish, as a comparison to Internet; addiction, 22;
human attention span, unplugging from, 27;
142–143, 222 comparison to early
Google, 92, 125–128, 145, 178, objections to radio, 28;
182, 190, 215 comparison to earlier
Google effect, on memory, innovations, 32; searching,
125–131, 182 impacts on the brain,
GPA (grade point average), 163, 34–37; and generational
166, 169 differences, 44; availability
GPS (global positioning system), of information on, 89,
187, 208 94; and quiz games,
Guardians of the Galaxy (film), 47 117; and unconscious
guidebooks for teaching, 15 associations to knowledge,
Gurung, Regan, 116 127; and mobile devices,
171; and experiments on
handwriting, perceived powers note-taking, 191; use by
of for boosting learning, students during class, 204
197–198 iPhone, 152, 171
262 Index

James, William, 78 language learning, applications

Jobs, Steve, 153 for, 117, 119–121, 131, 208
John F. Kennedy, assassination language processing, and working
of, 68 memory, 61–62, 64, 147
Junco, Reynol, 156, 163 laptops, 10, 23, 47, 219: and note-
just-in-time teaching (JiTT), taking, 10, 159, 189–207,
102–103 209–210; and in-class
technology policies, 14,
Kahoot!, 117–119, 131, 189, 209, 158–159, 200–210, 214;
216–217 and access, 200, 207; use
Kang, Sean, 90 for off-topic activities
Karpicke, Jeffrey, 113 during class, 198–200; and
keyword method, 93, 99, 105–106 forming a barrier during
knitting, 45, 46, 71, 147 class, 200; use for in-class
knowledge: collective, 1; polling, 217
rewards for acquiring, 1; learning by osmosis, 100, 138,
growing base of, 1; links 163, 168
to thinking skills, 8, 96; learning, informal, 2
acquisition of, 31, 48, 88, learning, lifelong, 3, 13, 16, 92
92, 138; transmission learning management systems,
of, 57; memorized, 97, 116
94–95; prior, in teaching, learning new words, 64. See also
101–102, 122; and vocabulary acquisition
organization in memory, learning sciences, 4, 101
113; and adaptive learning learning styles, 99
systems, 123–124, 130; lecturing, 11, 110–111, 140,
management, through 202–205
technology, 125; offloading levels of processing, 72–74
to computers, 126, 221; Leynes, P. Andrew, 174–175,
offloading to friends 181–182
and co-workers, 127; lifelong learning, 3, 13, 16, 92
value of building within lifelong teaching, 13, 16
a discipline, 129–130, Loftus, Elizabeth, 49
215–216; necessity of logic problems, 176–177
attention for acquiring, long-term memory, 4, 52–53,
168; effectively using, 172, 65–73, 77, 79, 82–85, 150
188; strengthening with Luria, A.R., 78
technology, 217
magical number seven, 58
Lajoie, Susanne, 31 “Meet your iBrain” (article), 19
Lang, James, 94, 154, 205–207, memorization, 87, 90, 93,
241 105–106, 129, 215–216
 Index 263

memory palace technique, 106 information within,

memory: relationship to 58–60; and visualizing
contemporary technology, information, 60, 98–99,
1; importance for teaching 104–105; in language
and learning, 2, 9; processing, 55, 61–62, 64,
relationship to thinking 147; and distinctiveness
skills, 2, 8, 90–92, 96, of information, 63–64,
129, 216; three-box theory 75, 81–82; and learning
of, 4, 52–57; sensory, new words, 64–65; and
4, 53; short-term 4, mathematics, 61, 65, 95,
52–54, 58–59, 61, 65; 110, 115; episodic, 65–66,
long-term, 4, 53–54, 68, 70–71, 79, 83–84, 149,
65–72; enhancement by 173, 183, 212; semantic,
technology, 8, 152–153; 65–68, 70–71, 79, 83–84,
erosion by technology, 149; procedural, 65, 71,
8, 15; as a source of 79, 83–84, 109; role of
fascination, 14; and cues, 68–70; 77, 150–152;
aging, 14; and existence, and depth of processing,
14; differences between 73–73; as an adaptation
older and younger adults, for survival, 77–78, 84;
36–37; paradoxical prospective, 79–80, 83,
qualities of, 46; as a 97, 149–151, 154, 167,
recording of experiences, 188, 220; and developing
47–48, 51, 164; common metacognition, 92–93;
misconceptions about, factors that accelerate
47–48, 51; vanishing over and enhance, 97–101;
time, 46; distortions of, and sensory cues, 99,
46, 76; intuitions about, 104; encoding, during
47, 49; reconstructive, new memory formation,
49–50; misinformation 137; changes in the
effect in, 49–50; and jury contemporary world, 211;
trials, 51; classic theories as a source of fun, 224
of, 52–78 working, 53, meta-analysis, 123–124
61– 65, 66, 157; role of metacognition, 92–93, 163, 169
meaning within, 55, 59, 98, metaphors for attention, 133–137
129; and understanding Microsoft (software company),
spoken sentences, 55, 142
65; distinct subsystems Miller, George, 58–60, 63
within, 56; seven plus or mind: relationship to machines, 6,
minus one capacity of, 58, 41, 43; processes within, 5
60; chunking information mind’s ear. See phonological
within, 58; recoding working memory
264 Index

Minds Online: Teaching Effectively neuroscience, 4, 21, 135, 144

with Technology (book), 12, Nickerson, Raymond, 31–32, 41
67, 94 Norman, Don, 20, 32, 33
misconceptions about attention, Northern Arizona University,
139–149 169, 214, 222
misinformation effect, 49–50 note-taking, 173: as a proxy
mnemonics, 60, 105–106, 130 for attentiveness, 141;
mobile devices: and distraction, and laptops versus
8, 172; and global effects handwriting, 10, 159,
on cognition, 23, 172–173, 189–207, 209–210;
reshaping the brain, 42–43; encoding function of,
generational differences in 195; storage function of,
experience with, 44; use 195; quality of, 196–197;
for quizzes, 118; wisdom of teaching methods for,
giving up, 188, 205; role in 198, 210; skills, 200
education, 171, 207; use for notifications: preventing, 27,
retrieval practice, 208; and 207; and choices about
multimedia capabilities technology, 40; and
of, 216 multitasking, 144; as an
Mondale, Walter, 66 affordance of technology,
moral panic, 23–24, 26–27, 42, 149; distraction power
52, 173 of, 155, 179, 181, 183,
Morehead, Kayla, 192–193, 207–208; novelty of, 223
195–196, 198
Mueller, Pam, 190, 193–194, 197, offloading: benefits of, 43;
198–199 impacts on memory,
multimedia, 105, 121, 130, 216 126–128,
multitasking, 138, 146–149, 159, 130–131; impacts on
161, 163–164, 179 thinking, 177; and
Murchison, Lynne, 224–225 digital photography, 185;
muscle memory, 71 and impacts on mental
processes, 188; and
narrative structure, 81, 96, memory for events and
129 errands, 220
natives, digital, 12, 157–158, 165, Ohm’s law, 95
168 older adults, 36
natural selection, 33 OLI. See Open Learning
navigation, technological aids for, Initiative
187–188, 208 op-eds, 11, 189–190, 194
net-naive, 35 Open Learning Initiative, 123
net-savvy, 35 Oppenheimer, Daniel, 190,
Netflix, 89, 123 193–194, 197, 199
neuromyths, 101 osmosis. See learning by osmosis
 Index 265

over-reliance on technology, 7–8, 117–119, 123, 131; in class,

209, 212 204
overconfidence, in studying, 111 quizzing applications, 117–119,
overwork, chronic, 145 131

paired-associates task, 92 radio, parallels to the

pandemic of 2020–2021, 157–158 introduction of the
PBL. See problem-based learning Internet, 28, 42
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (book), reasoning, scientific, 31
56 recoding, in memory, 58–60, 84
Peller, Clara, 45, 66, 76, 80 reconstructive memory, 49–50
Perkins, David, 29 Reefer Madness (film), 11
Pew Research Center, 21–22, 25 rehearsal, 53–54, 60, 62, 195
phonological loop, 62–63 reminders, smartphone-based,
phonological working memory, 149, 152–153, 163, 167
62–63 replication, in social science, 180,
Pinker, Steven, 23, 34 192–199, 209, 221
Pocket Points, 164–165 rereading, as a study technique,
Pogue, David, 89 60, 91, 109, 163
Poll Everywhere, 118, 131 retrieval practice: definition
PQ4R, 110 and examples, 107–108;
precommitment strategy, 27, 219 benefits of, 108–114, 125,
Princess Diana, death of, 68–69 130; reasons for impacts on
problem-based learning (PBL), 103 memory, 111; objections
procedural memory, 65, 71, 79, to, 111–114, 130; and
83–84, 109 transfer, 113; and test
processing, levels of. See levels of anxiety, 114; interaction
processing with spacing, 116; as it
prospective memory, 79–80, 97: relates to technologies for
and attention, 149–154; learning, 119–121, 124–
real-word examples 125, 208–209; teaching
of lapses in, 151–152; students about, 159, 214;
buffering failures with using notes for,
technology, 154, 167, 188, 196
220 “Retrieval-Based Learning:
psychology, cognitive, 5 Active Retrieval Promotes
pundits, 4, 39 Meaningful Learning”
(article), 113
Quizlet, 118, 131, 209 Rico, Oz, 150
quizzes: low-stakes, 107; Robinson, Sir Ken, 87
repeatable, 107; and Rosetta Stone, 121
attitudes about testing; rote learning, 88
technology for conducting, rote-memorization drill, 87
266 Index

“S,” case of, 78 memory, 4, 188; impacts

Salomon, Gavriel, 29 on thinking, 10, 176–177,
Sana, Faria, 200 188, 208–209; and
scaffolding, 122 automated reminders; and
screen time, 24–26, 146 education, 171–172, 207;
scrolling, mindless, 27 and negative perceptions
search engines, 4, 34, 90, about technology, 173;
125–128, 182 and difficulty of accurately
search, internet, 34–35, 37, 94, estimating time on, 174,
125–128, 177, 182, 188, 177–178; neural impacts
204: over-reliance on, 221 of, 174–176, 208; and
SelfControl (site blocking attention, 178–188; mere
application), 27, 219 presence of, impacts on
self-reference effect, 73. See also attention, 179–180; and
self-relevance memory for personally
self-relevance, 81, 83 experienced events,
self-teaching, 2–3 183–194; impacts of
semantic memory, 65–68, 70–71, using cameras within,
79, 83–84, 149 183–186, 220; and impacts
sensory memory, 4, 52–53 of using turn-by-turn
seven plus or minus one, capacity GPS directions, 187–188;
of short-term memory, positive cognitive impacts
58–60 of, 188–189, 208; do-not-
shallow processing, 72–74 disturb and call blocking
Shiffrin, Richard, 53, 56–58, functions, 219
61–62 “Smartphones Mean You Will No
short-term memory, 4, 52–56, Longer Have to Memorize
58–59, 62, 65, 79, 83 Facts” (article), 89
Simons, Dan, 47–50 social media: and distraction,
site blocking applications, 27, 164, 8, 27, 148, 155–156; and
219 digital distrust, 22; as
site visits, and smartphone a reflection of human
cameras, 186 desires, 40; and teenagers,
Slack (messaging application), 145; and cognitive style;
144, 219 and sharing digital
sleep, 145–146, 156 photographs, 183–184, 223
slide rules, 32 source amnesia, 70, 81
Small, Gary, 19, 37, 145 spacing, 114–117, 120, 124, 130,
Smart Sparrow, 122 214
smart watches, 5 spatial environments, and
smartphones, 4–5, 9–10, 24, memory, 106, 187
40, 89, 116, 153, 173; Spellbound (film), 75
and negative impacts on Sperling, George, 133–134
 Index 267

spotlight metaphor of attention, 91–92; capitalizing on

133–134, 137 memory principles within,
spreadsheets, 29–31, 44 101–102; and assessing
SQ3R, 110 prior knowledge, 101–102,
SRS technology. See student 130; and taking advantage
response systems of retrieval practice
standardized testing, 88, 112 and spacing, 116–125;
Stanford, 123, 248 and understanding how
statistics programs, 43 attention works, 137, 139;
Stone, Linda, 144–145 cross-cultural research on,
Stothart, Cary, 181 143; and the relationship
student names, forgetting, 46, 75, between memory and
82 attention, 166–167; general
student response systems, 118 advice for regarding
surprise, as an influence on technology and memory,
memory, 54, 81, 100–101, 213–218
106, 129 tech fasts, 16
switch costs, 148–149 tech-control apps, 27
symbiosis, 7, 126–128 technology bans, in classes,
158–159, 168, 189–190,
tablets, 5, 23–24, 219 201–202, 217–216. See
taking notes. See note-taking also classroom technology
Talbert, Robert, 201, 203 policies
Tamir, Diana, 183 technology policies, in classes.
task switching, 146, 148–149, See classroom technology
156–157 policies
teaching: in higher education, Technology, Mind, and Brain: Using
13; importance of memory Psychology to Thrive in a
for, 2, 9; lifelong, 13; Wired World (course), 12
guidebooks for, 15; and technology: over-reliance
misconceptions about on, 7–8; and potential
memory, 51; and the enhancements to memory,
banking metaphor for 8, 152–153; and potential
education, 57, 128, 203; degradation of memory, 8,
and transmission of 21, 125–130; generational
knowledge, 57; and capacity differences regarding, 8,
of short-term memory, 59; 39–40, 212–213; as an
and phonological working amplifier for cognitive
memory, 64; and depth processes and abilities, 9,
of processing, 73–74; and 15, 20, 29, 31–33; cultural
objections to emphasizing assumptions about,
memory, 89–90; achieving 9; history of cultural
transfer of learning within, reception regarding, 9;
268 Index

technology (continued) socialize with peers, 145;

cultural narratives about, emoji-laden, from one’s
9, 42, 43, 19–20, 43; mother, 155; sending and
incorporation into courses, receiving while in class,
15; and thinking skills, 155–156, 161, 163; and
21, 28; and well-being, driving, 160–161
20, 21–22; commercial “The Amazing Color Changing
products for reducing Card Trick” (online video),
dependence on, 26–27; 160
positive impacts on The Bachelorette (television show),
learning, 31; as a mirror 161
to the human mind, 41; “The Impossible Texting and
and potential degradation Driving Test” (online
of cognitive capabilities, video), 160–161
42; offloading of human “The Pen Is Mightier Than the
cognitive processes onto, Keyboard: Advantages of
43, 126, 128, 130–131, Longhand Over Laptop
153, 177, 185, 188, 220; Note Taking” (article), 190
and social change, 48; Things that Make Us Smart:
tools for taking advantage Defending Human Attributes
of retrieval practice and in the Age of the Machine
spacing, 116–125; and (book), 20
supposed changes to thinking ability, 8. See also
attention span, 141–144; thinking skills
and mental burnout, thinking skills, 1, 8, 89, 209;
144–146, 167; and effects changes due to smartphone
on sleep; 145–146, 156; use, 176–177
and resisting temptation, Thornton, Bill, 179–180
155, 159, 161, 172, 219, three-box theory of memory, 4,
220 52–57.
teenagers, and excessive TikTok, 156, 223
technology use, 145–146 tip of the tongue phenomenon,
temptation, 155, 159, 161, 172, 47, 68
219, 220 Tracy, Gene, 20
ten-minute rule, 140–141, 146, transfer, of thinking skills,
167 90–93; of learning, 113
test-potentiated learning, Tufts University, 197
110–111 Tulving, Endel, 65–66, 71, 79
textbooks, 4, 58, 60, 109–110, Twin Towers, September 11 attack
122–123, 134–135, 157 on, 68, 69
text messages, for retrieval Twitter (social media platform),
practice, 124–125; as a 144
primary way for teens to typewriters, 27, 221
 Index 269

UCLA, 34, 36, 38 watches, smart, 5

Urry, Heather, 197–198 Wendy’s (fast food chain
restaurant), 45
verbatim transcription, in note- Weston, Tina, 200
taking, 191–193, 195, 197, What the Best College Teachers Do
199–200, 209 (book), 57
verywellmind.com, 135 “where’s the beef?,” 45, 66
virtual reality, 222–223 Wikipedia, 46
visual learners, 99 Willingham, Daniel, 95
visual superiority principle, 104, Wilmer, Henry, 173
106 word processing, 31
visual-spatial processing, 175–176 working memory, 53, 61–66, 83,
visualization, 60, 98–99, 104– 142, 150
105, 129. See also visual
superiority principle You Still Need Your Brain (article),
visuospatial sketchpad, 61. 95
See also visual-spatial Your Brain On Drugs (public service
processing advertising campaign), 11
vocabulary acquisition, 64–65
Vorgan, Gigi, 19 Zoom (videoconferencing system),
VR. See virtual reality 158
TEACHING AND LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

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Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement

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Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and

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Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

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Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Notes

from a White Professor
Cyndi Kernahan

Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational

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Derek Bruff

Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds

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Jessamyn Neuhaus

How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective

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Joshua R. Eyler

Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning

in Higher Education
Thomas J. Tobin and Kirsten T. Behling

Teaching the Literature Survey Course: New Strategies for

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The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with

the Science of Emotion
Sarah Rose Cavanagh