La Voz de Galicia – August 29, 2025 →
In English it’s called cognitive offloading, and according to Risko & Gilbert it is “the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task so as to reduce cognitive demand”. Which, translated into my own language, refers to everything we delegate to a physical action in order to reduce our cognitive load: for example, writing a shopping list instead of memorizing it, using a calculator to solve operations, or, in my case, taking random photos so I don’t forget the things I do every day.
I was thinking about this lately precisely because of those photos I take, photos of which I sometimes have neither the memory of having taken them, nor the memory of the moment itself (something that, by the way, is also scientifically documented). When I look at my phone’s photo album, I’m able to say “on that day I was in that place,” but I’m not always able to retrieve the memory of the specific moment, unless there’s some emotional trigger that takes me back to it.
It’s curious, because my relationship with technology is fairly peaceful. I do my best to stay up to date, to learn new tools, to understand the role of artificial intelligence in our lives. And I don’t know if it’s the years, this moment of life, or my relationship with technology, but I feel that the more I learn, the more I forget. As much as I delegate my cognitive load to those endless lists where I jot down the things I need to do, I’m not really sure whether it would be better to relearn how to memorize everything or to simply set the panic aside and accept that my memory wasn’t very good even before technology took over my life…
