Would you know a bottom if you saw one? - Kevin Delaney, WSJ
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Brits are replacing their memories with their phones
MILLIONS OF BRITS are suffering from 'numerical amnesia' as mobile phones increasingly replace memories to recall important numbers.
A study released by life assistance company CPP said that 23 million Britons can't remember their partner's mobile number, 30 million can't recall their best friend's number and 22 million forget their parents' mobile number.
An online memory test designed to assess the nation's ability to recall sequences of numbers revealed that four out of five Brits cannot recall a mobile phone number after five seconds.
But for some reason 92 per cent of adults were able to recall their own landline number and 60 per cent their mum's. This means of course that neglecting to call your mum has nothing to do with forgetting her phone number.
All this dependence on mobile phones is causing users to worry about losing precious data if their handset is lost or stolen, with nearly two-thirds anxious about losing the numbers stored on their phones.
Less than half back up their mobile phone numbers in a traditional address book, and just one in five store the data on their computers, which might account for some of the worries.
Shrink Dr Glenn Wilson said that as technology gets more sophisticated, our own memories are shriveling to the size of a peanut as we increasingly rely on information stored on phones and online.
It can also affect an individual's mental agility later in life. Like many other skills, memory needs exercising if the capacity is not to be lost.
More than half of UK adults can't memorise their bank account number and 44 per cent can't remember their national insurance number. µ
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Some people may also be using their phones to store numbers that they normally wouldn't be able to remember at all.
Personally the only one of those that I can't remember is my bank account number; but that's just because the bank keeps changing it...
I couldn't agree more. I, being an electrical engineer and a mathematics lover know how useless it is to memorize numbers. We like better to call the numbers "x" or "a", and ONLY if needed for some specific reason, then we change the letter for its numerical value. There's a few numbers we use a lot, like 1, 2, sqrt(2), e and pi, and not much else. And I never cared to learn the actual value of e or pi, and there is a reason for calling those numbers like that. No one says 3.141592 or 2.718281...
Some bemoan the demise of phone numbers as if they are this natural thing that are fading into extinction. Nothing could be further from the truth. A long string of generally random digits is absolutely the most unnatural thing anyone would need to remember. People have just become used to them since we've been using telephones. There's no other thing that's in common use and is so technical than phone numbers.
There's a reason why we don't refer to web sites using IP addresses, and there's no reason we should need to remember phone numbers. Good riddance.