Recall without Remembrance
What Kids Lose When They Outsource Their Memories
Memorise this number: 51 36 75 42? Yes, there will be a test later.
As you’re committing it to memory, ask yourself: do you still remember your childhood home phone number? Your best friend’s? Your grandparents’?
If you were born before 1985, chances are the answer is yes. We were part of the memorising generations. Expected to carry essential bits of information in our heads, ready at a moment’s notice. It’s no great revelation that kids today memorise far less. In a world where nearly everything is indexed and instantly searchable, memory is a skill tilting toward obsolescence. Increasingly, technology allows us to access memories without ever needing to remember.
But is that all memory is? An archivist wandering among library stacks?
It makes me wonder: just as we don’t use a rowing machine solely to prepare for boat races—but to build strength overall—what cognitive muscles are we allowing to atrophy when we ask so little of our children’s memory?
Humans aren’t the only animals with impressive memories.
Elephants can recall water sources across decades. Crows recognise individual human faces. Certain birds cache tens of thousands of seeds and retrieve them with astonishing accuracy. Memory, in other words, is a deeply adaptive trait, shaped by evolution to support survival.
But human memory is unique in at least two crucial ways: we assign meaning to what we remember, and we’ve invented technologies to externalise those memories. To store them outside ourselves.
A bee may remember the location of a flower to return for pollen, but it won’t (as far as we know) assign special significance to one bloom because of how beautiful it looked in the morning light, or how the breeze felt on its wings.
We do.
We remember not just what happened, but what it meant and how it made us feel. We elevate certain moments for reasons not strictly tied to survival. These memories don’t just help us live; they help us live meaningfully. But that requires discernment. We must choose one moment while letting others go.
The second distinction isn’t biological, but technological. Humans have invented ways to externalise memory: thought gave way to image, image to language, language to writing, and writing to books, photographs, film, cloud storage, and now, machine learning models.
Each leap in this chain of externalisation brought new anxiety. Plato, deeply concerned with the cultivation of memory and understanding, warned in his dialogue, Phaedrus, that the written word would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it,” as people would come to rely on external records rather than internal recollection.
When Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press in the 15th century and revolution the availability of knowledge, it provoked a similar panic. Scholars and clergy feared that books would lead to intellectual laziness. If people could simply look things up, would they ever bother to remember? How funny to think that today the printed book is revered as the emblem of deep thought and authentic information.
With each shift, we’ve had to renegotiate the balance between remembering and offloading, between meaning and convenience.
And then, it became possible to take photographs on our phones. Thousands of them.
Our children are the most documented generation in human history.
To put it in perspective: a child born in 1979 (like me) might have had 200 to 500 photos taken by age seven. A child born in 2016 (like my son) will likely have over 50,000. That’s a staggering increase in just 40 years. It’s as if every moment is now memorialised.
And yet, most of those 50,000 photos will go completely unreviewed. This wholesale externalisation of memory carries an unintended consequence: we no longer assign meaning. When everything is captured, nothing stands out (and we behave more like bees!). Fifty thousand photos can’t all be meaningful, so are any of them? If scarcity creates value, over-abundance dilutes it.
It turns out that the two defining features of human memory (our ability to assign meaning and our impulse to externalise) aren’t necessarily complementary; they can, in fact, be in tension. Taken too far, the drive to externalise risks eroding the very meaning it was meant to preserve.
Even more striking is the explosion of AI-generated imagery. In just the past three years, an estimated 12 to 15 billion images have been created, roughly equivalent to every photograph taken by humans in the first 150 years after the invention of the camera. And the pace is accelerating. At current growth rates, AI may generate more images than the entire history of human photography within the next 5 to 15 years.
Let’s pause and consider this new strangeness: we now have the technology to create memories after the fact. If we prompt AI to build an image from our recollection, does the result qualify as a memory?
Sort of.
Not a memory of the moment, but a memory of its reconstruction. Compare a photograph of yourself standing in front of the Acropolis (an actual memory) with an AI-generated image you prompted of the Acropolis, one that you insist captures the slanting light you observed (just so!) the marble worn smooth by millennia of pilgrims’ footsteps. That second image isn’t a memory in the traditional sense. It’s a meta-memory: not what was, but how it felt.
No book has more clearly (or entertainingly) explored the nature of memory than Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein. What begins as a journalistic assignment covering the U.S. Memory Championship quickly evolves into a sweeping meditation on the workings of human memory. Foer immerses himself in neuroscience and revives ancient memory techniques. In a twist that underscores his point, he doesn’t just report on the competition, he enters it, trains intensively, and ultimately wins. His journey is compelling proof (not to mention a delightfully ’80s movie-style underdog story) that memory isn’t purely innate, it’s a skill that can be learned, practiced, and strengthened.
Along the way, Foer illuminates aspects of memory that are as poetic as they are profound.
For instance, every time we recall a memory, we don’t just retrieve it—we reshape it. In the act of remembering, the memory becomes temporarily malleable, like softened wax. We may attach new associations, blend it with recent experiences, or subtly alter the emotional tone. Then, when the memory is “re-stored,” it’s no longer exactly what it was. It has been edited, however slightly, by the act of remembering itself.
This is called re-consolidation, and it’s a fundamental feature of how the brain works. Memories are not fixed, they’re living patterns, subject to revision. It’s one of life’s great cosmic jokes. Every time we recall something we trigger a strange cognitive trade-off: to remember the world accurately, or to remember it often?
This helps explain why distant memories often improve with time and recall. A vacation that, in reality, was plagued by rain and food poisoning gradually transforms into a fond recollection of cozy family moments and afternoons spent exploring the natural history museum. The facts remain, but the emotional landscape shifts: reshaped by what we choose to remember and what we quietly forget.
Any chance you remember the number from the beginning of the article? Chances are neither would your kids.
Memorisation—despite Plato’s impassioned pleas—is no longer taught in schools. Modern curricula are largely shaped by a (over) reaction against rote learning, favouring creativity, critical thinking, and associative thought. It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s built on a false premise.
Current pedagogical logic assumes that memorisation and creativity are opposites, defining the poles of a mental spectrum. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, memory, association, and retrieval are deeply intertwined with both intelligence and creative thinking.
Neuroscience helps explain why. Our memories don’t live in tidy, sequential file cabinets. They are woven into associative neural networks, strengthened each time they’re accessed, connected to something else, or emotionally charged. The more connections a memory has, the more accessible and useful it becomes. To remove memorisation in the name of creativity is like weakening a building’s foundations in order to make it stronger.
And if neuroscience isn’t convincing enough, look to the AI models we now treat as intelligent. How do we make them smarter? By feeding them more data, expanding their memory. The better they remember, the more nuanced, fluent, and generative they become. Sound familiar?
Ultimately the most poetic insight in Moonwalking with Einstein is etymological. Foer reminds us that the Latin word inventio—which means “discovery”—is the root of two especially relevant English words: invention and inventory. To build we must first remember. What better proof that one is impossible without the other? In a single word, we find the book’s entire thesis: memory isn’t the opposite of creativity, it’s its engine.
Kids today face a dual challenge: a deluge of externalised memories and a de-prioritisation of internalised ones. Nowhere is this more perfectly (if unintentionally) captured than in the all-too-familiar parental alert: “iCloud Storage Almost Full.”
As parents, we shouldn’t fall into the alarmist trap that once ensnared Plato, Gutenberg’s critics, or the Luddites: each convinced that new technologies would dull the human mind or unravel the fabric of culture. But nor should we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because we can outsource memory doesn’t mean we should. The ability to recall may no longer be essential for survival but it remains essential for meaning, creativity and intelligence.
Ironically, the same technologies we fear might erode memory may also offer a path back to it. AI-generated images-as-memories, for instance, require intention. They begin with a prompt, with a question: What do I want to remember? How do I want to remember it? What mattered most about this moment? Neurologically, this process has more in common with how core memories are formed than the passive flood of digital photographs we now accumulate: snapshots taken without thought, stored without review. Overwhelming in volume, underwhelming in meaning.
I now feel compelled to help my kids practice remembering. Not out of nostalgia, or fear of change, but because memory is a muscle. I’ll teach them to memorise a poem, a phone number, a map. Encourage them to tell stories from memory, to hold something in their mind without immediately reaching for a reference.
And then there’s my childhood phone number. I can still recall it without effort, 485-0839. It comes not just as a string of digits, but bundled with memory: the backyard basketball hoop, the dusty red bricks, the time I broke my arm.
It’s no longer just a number. It’s a filter and a connection to everything I’ve chosen to keep and everything that I’ve let go in the process.