Your memory is determined by the number of active grey cells that you use in the brain. The more nerves are fired the better you are likely to recall something. These information highways that are created in the brain are a direct result of just how much data you try and remember.

The older generation often remembered a whole lot more information than our generation. They knew phone numbers to almost all members of the immediate family. They had street addresses memorized. They could recall a whole lot of data on their finger tips that today we need to look up on our smartphones.

Neuroscientists are concerned that our present generation is constantly depending on devices and gadgets to hold information. They barely make an effort to remember anything that they can feed into the cloud. This is known as cognitive offloading. The process is making us less reliant on our memory.

The fact that we no longer have to depend on our memories is resulting in a sort of “digital dementia” where the brain’s active grey matter size is shrinking. This atrophy of brain matter has been the subject of science projects and is a very real threat to our combined mental health as a species.