Long Term Memory

I was watching this video earlier and one quote stood out for me. "Long-term memory is the seat of understanding."
I had started watching the video in order to improve my retention while I'm learning Dutch. I thought to myself that the quote about long-term memory had much broader ramifications on our consciousness. Long-term memory is the seat of understanding. What happens when our attention span is reduced to the point where we no longer retain or understand what we learn? What happens to our overall understanding of our lives and the world at large?

Right now we are living in a time where a huge amount of information is available to us. So much so that we substitute a Google search for actual learning. The problem that arises from this is that we no longer have to remember very much for ourselves. We can simply go and look it up. Another problem is that there aren't many controls on the quality of that information. Anybody can make up information and proclaim themselves an authority on something without any actual qualifications to back it up. We might be able to look things up, but we have no way of knowing whether the information we're looking up is accurate. The scientific community tries to safeguard against this by the use of peer review. The vast majority of information on the internet is not held to this standard.

Another thing that happens and has been happening since the advent of television is that our attention span has shortened. Not only does this impact long-term memory but also short-term memory. We retain information for a shorter period of time because the information we get is quickly shoved aside for more new information. Very little of it is retained. Very little of it is understood. Our brains never get the chance to integrate it. We get distracted much more easily. We are seldom allowed the luxury of being able to focus on just one thing for a longer period of time. The ability to multi-task is seen as a good thing as opposed to dedicating time to one thing and one thing alone. The irony is that the people who discipline themselves to focus on just one thing for a long period of time become the experts. They achieve mastery.

If we don't hold things in our long-term memory, we don't learn. We don't understand. It's much easier to rely on whatever we read and get our opinions second-hand from people who claim authority on the subject. We don't have to think about it or explain it ourselves. We skim along the surface of the information available and accept what we are told uncritically. This strikes me as dangerous. How can we avoid repeating mistakes if we don't retain enough long-term memory to understand where we went wrong? By relying on short-term memory only, we impede our ability to progress. Instead of producing new insights we simply repeat old points of view because we are discouraged from taking the time to consider a topic in depth. It stifles original thought.

There was an interesting study done on children to learn about working memory. That's the ability to remember what you are doing at the moment and where you are in the process. It turns out that children have the same capacity for long-term memory as adults, but their capacity for working memory is much smaller. It gets overwhelmed easily. Children are learning everything for the first time. Almost all information is new for them. They need information presented to them in small doses so that they can remember it. When their working memory capacity is exceeded and they're given more information than they can process all at once, it sabotages their ability to retain information. That overload would seem to be the current status quo for both children and adults.

It seems as if the takeaway from this is that we are being inundated with more information than we can process and it compromises our ability to learn. Why learn when you can simply look it up and agree with some self-appointed expert? Why read when you can watch television or drink from the information fire-hose that is the internet? All of it serves to reduce our attention span and make it impossible to retain what we see and hear. It doesn't leave us the time to examine what we're being presented with. If we don't remember it, we don't think about it afterwards. We don't understand it if we can't explain it to somebody else. It doesn't take root in our memory so that we can recall it later when it might be important. As a society and as individuals, it becomes much easier to manipulate us when we have short memories. Maybe that's the whole point of all of the information we are being flooded with. It makes it impossible for us to remember very much more than what we need for day to day functioning.