43 Folders recently posted about something I’ve noticed (and been a bit disturbed by) several times in recent years. As we dump into our Blackberries or laptops all of our knowledge of phone numbers, birthdays, and other important information about our friends, family, and colleagues, we’re losing our ability to recall that information without relying on whatever technology we stuck it all in.

I run into more and more people that not only don’t know the phone numbers of people they are veryclose to, they sometimes have to look to remind themselves of their own phone number! In fact, I worked at a place recently for over a year without ever memorizing my number there.

So my question is: is this a problem? It is certainly an interesting new issue as we rely on technology more and more for remembering this sort of thing, but I’m not sure it’s that big of a thing to worry about. We have to remember so much other information to do our work nowadays, since there’s just so much more information to know, that I think maybe we’re just being more efficient about how we’re utilizing our gray matter. What do you think?