Can you remember the name of the London taxi driver who won Mastermind? You can see Fred Housego’s victory here. He claims his short term memory is poor and relies on his wife for this.
This is known as transactive memory. It may be a person or a device. In the case of injury, reliance on devices may be preferable to reliance on other people. In the uninjured, does such reliance weaken memory? Cyborg Anthropologist Amber Chase has a few words to say on this. That job title must raise an occasional eyebrow at Passport Control.
One person’s dependence-inducing device is another’s gateway to research freedom. 15-year old Jack Andraka researched much of the background to his groundbreaking pancreatic cancer detection device on a smartphone en route to school.
Aleks Krotoksi presents the programme here
Issue 2885 of New Scientist (6 Oct) has an 11-page feature on memory, which encourages you to ‘forget everything you thought you knew’.
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