What it is
The term comes from a 2016 review by Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert. They define it as the use of physical action to change what a task asks of your mind. You write a list and do not hold it in your head. You turn your head to read a tilted page and do not rotate it in your mind.
People have always done this. Writing is offloading. So is a knot in a handkerchief. What is new is how much a phone can hold, and how little effort it takes.
What the studies found
| Year | Study | What it found |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Sparrow, Liu and Wegner, Science | People who expected a fact to be saved on a computer remembered the fact less well, and remembered where to find it better. |
| 2014 | Henkel, Psychological Science | On a museum tour, people remembered fewer objects, and fewer details of them, when they took a photo of each whole object than when they only looked. |
| 2015 | Storm and Stone, Psychological Science | People who saved one file before they studied a second file remembered more of the second file. The effect went away when the save was not reliable. |
| 2020 | Dahmani and Bohbot, Scientific Reports | Among 50 regular drivers, those with more lifetime use of GPS had worse spatial memory when they had to find the way without it. |
The cost
The pattern in these studies is the same. When you know that a tool has the information, you put less work into keeping it. You remember where it is and not what it is.
The museum study has a useful detail. When people zoomed in to take a photo of one part of an object, their memory was not worse. The zoom made them look with attention. The camera was not the cause of the loss. The cause was the decision to let the camera do the looking.
The benefit
Offloading is not a fault. In the 2015 study, a file that was saved stopped competing for space in memory, and people learned the next file better. This is the reason to write things down: the mind is then free for the task in front of you.
Nobody needs to keep a shopping list, a door code for a hotel, or a meeting time in their head. To hand these off is the correct use of a tool.
What is not known
Most of these studies measure memory minutes or days after one task in a laboratory. They do not show that tools change a person’s memory in general.
The GPS study is the one that looks at a long period, and it is small. It had 50 drivers, and 13 of them were tested again three years later. It shows that more use of GPS goes together with worse spatial memory. The authors give reasons to think that the GPS is the cause, but a study of this type cannot prove it.
When to offload, and when not
- Offload what you only need to find. Dates, numbers, lists, addresses.
- Keep what you need to think with. You cannot reason with a fact that is in a file. The ideas of your work, your subject and your craft must be in your head.
- Keep what you will be tested on. In an exam, in a meeting or in a conversation, there is no time to search.
- Offload after you try, not before. Try to recall, then look. The attempt is what builds the memory.
- Use the tool with attention. The zoom in the museum study shows that how you use a tool matters more than whether you use it.
AI is the newest form
A chatbot can hold facts for you, and it can also do the thinking: the summary, the plan, the solution. This is offloading of a larger kind. The article Does AI make you dumber? gives the studies on it.
Gillo uses AI for the part that is safe to hand off. The AI builds the course. Then you answer the questions, from memory, and no tool answers them for you.