Memory

Image via Wikipedia

It occurred to me today that we need to be more reliant on our memories today, probably, than at any point in our history. We need to remember passwords and email addresses as well as PIN numbers. All of this is just to ensure that we can communicate and operate in quite a normal electronic and business environment. Whilst everything is now much more instantaneous and we can buy so much over the internet all over the world, the flip side is that we need to be able to remember all of this information fairly reliably all of the time. It can be so embarrassing forgetting a PIN number in the middle of the supermarket with all of your shopping loaded in your trolley or having a mismatch between the card that you're using to pay and the PIN number which goes with it if you use more than one card, which has happened to me a few times when I've been fairly stressed.

If I find it stressful to cope with all of this at times I wonder how people who are totally unfamiliar with the technology manage at all.