Are We Losing Our Minds to Technology?

When was the last time you memorized a phone number? Or navigated to a new destination without relying on GPS? Can you even remember the last time you did mental math without instinctively reaching for your phone’s calculator? And let’s be honest, how often do you Google something you already know, just because it’s easier than thinking?

We’re all guilty of outsourcing aspects of our mental workload to technology. Alexa remembers the shopping list, Facebook tracks family birthdays, Apple handles our passwords, and Google? It remembers everything. This type of cognitive outsourcing acts like a clever workaround in a world swimming with information — a modern way to manage the overwhelm of the digital age.

In 1986, long before the internet became our collective second brain, the average person processed the equivalent of 40 newspapers’ worth of information each day. Fast forward to 2025, and the digital world is generating a staggering 463 exabytes of data daily — that’s about 212 million DVDs worth of data – Every. Single. Day. In a clever act of survival, we’ve learned to outsource our increasing cognitive load to stay afloat in an information deluge.

But is there a price to pay for this convenience? Every time we rely on our devices to handle tasks for us, we skip important mental exercises that keep our brain’s memory…