Your Outboard Brain Knows All: The Cyborg Future Is Here

Writing in Wired magazine, Clive Thompson notes a real, more-than-generational change in the kinds of information young people are not bothering to clog up their heads with:

This summer, 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.

Also of interest in this issue of Wired, we have links for you to: "Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments," "Getting Things Done Guru David Allen and His Cult of Hyperefficiency," and "How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web's Hottest Platform."