According to recent research, we're remembering fewer and fewer basic facts these days.

neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

You could argue that by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely "human" tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming.

Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?