In the not so distant past everything you knew was carried around in the gray matter between your eyes and the back of your skull, and if you couldn’t remember a fact outright your only other choices were to find someone who could or search through any one of a thousand scraps of paper until you came across the book, magazine or journal which held your answer.

These days, we carry our brains around with us in our back pockets.

Mobile Minds

Just 15 years ago, the biggest storage device I remember owning that was portable enough to carry around was a personal organizer. It held something like 50 phone numbers, had a LCD display and let you attach 20 character notes to each name that you added. Fast forward a few years and many of us carry around MP3 players that would have swallowed my poor organizer whole and cell phones that would have given my home computer from early last decade a run for its money.

The result is that where once we relied on our memory to file away the odds and ends of our lives, now we have given many of these tasks over to “connectivity.”

When was the last time you committed a phone number to memory?

Most of the numbers that I still have stored away, I learned years ago. What’s the point in memorizing random arrangements of digits when my cell phone can do it all for me and never complain?

What’s the capital city of Romania?

If you can’t think of it right off, no problem, the answer is only a search box away and if your phone happens to have Internet access, you can look it up before anyone realizes you never knew in the first place.

We’re sitting at the cusp of what might be the first real evolution in education in the better part of a century. For the last 100 years or so, the driving principle behind learning was that people needed to commit facts to memory, pile them up into neat little stacks and only much later learn how to arrange them into “knowledge.” The first part was necessary because it would be pretty inconvenient to carry around your multiplication tables or a annotated map of the world with you everywhere that you go.

As broadband, municipal WiFi, Internet enabled appliances and ubiquitous connectivity become the norm, this sort of rote memorization is becoming about as useful as the pager. Learning itself is no longer about facts but instead about process. All the information you could ever want is at your fingertips, what you need to know now is how to find it, synthesize it and piece it together into something useful.

Think about how much information you consume during your day. How much of it do you remember, and how much of it do you “bookmark” for later? How much time do you spend arranging your feeds, friends and networks so that you can sort through them more easily? How much more do you get done because you leave the data storage tasks to the technology and instead focus your attention on the connections and creativity that make information meaningful?

What is more important to you — facts or the ability to find them?

Before you answer, I have one more story to tell. Late last week I lost my cell phone complete with the SIM card. Hundreds of numbers disappeared just like that, and I realized that I didn’t even remember half the people who I had lost. Had I not found it a few hours later, it would have taken me days to piece my phone book back together and that’s assuming I remembered every number I had (which I wouldn’t). I relied so heavily on the device to store my information, I never thought of what would happen if it just disappeared.

So I guess the lesson goes something like this — we are becoming a society that relies more on process than rote memorization, but we would do well to remember that all our tools are only useful up until the moment they disappear. Sure, you might not want to take the time to memorize your entire phone book or every capital city in the world but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to know a couple . . .

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