Hi, this is Ray.

Quick question: without checking anything, what's 17 times 24?

If you're like most adults in 2026, your first instinct wasn't to do the calculation. It was to reach for a phone, open a calculator app, or just decide it didn't matter because the device would handle it whenever you actually needed an answer. The math was technically within your capability (it's middle school arithmetic) but the cognitive machinery that would have produced the answer felt like it required spinning up from cold storage, and you mostly decided not to bother.

This experience is universal now, and it extends way beyond multiplication. Most of us can no longer hold a phone number in our head long enough to dial it. We've forgotten how to navigate cities we've lived in for years without GPS. We can't spell common words without autocorrect. We can't remember birthdays without Facebook reminders. We can't sustain attention long enough to read a long article without scrolling away. We outsource recipes, directions, calculations, recommendations, opinions, and increasingly even the actual thinking that decisions used to require.

I want to be careful here. I'm not making a Luddite argument. The technologies that handle these tasks aren't evil. The cognitive offloading they enable has been one of the most powerful human strategies for thousands of years… we've always extended our minds through tools. The question isn't whether to use technology. It's whether the SCALE and UBIQUITY of modern cognitive offloading might be producing effects different from the historical pattern. The research is starting to suggest the answer is yes, and the implications for learners are worth taking seriously.

Today's newsletter is about that. What the science actually shows about specific skills being lost to technology, why this matters for learners specifically, and how to preserve cognitive capabilities without giving up the genuinely useful tools that have made modern life possible. Let's get into it.

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Let me start with what's become the cleanest empirical case study in cognitive offloading research. The relationship between GPS use and spatial memory has been studied for over a decade now, and the findings are striking enough that they deserve their own newsletter.

According to the foundational research, people with greater lifetime GPS experience have worse spatial memory during self-guided navigation, i.e., when they are required to navigate without GPS, and an important effect of GPS use over time was observed, whereby greater GPS use since initial testing was associated with a steeper decline in hippocampal-dependent spatial memory. Translation: the more people use GPS, the worse they get at navigating without it. Not just slightly worse. Measurably worse on standardized spatial memory tasks. And the effect was longitudinal… people who used GPS heavily over three years showed declining spatial memory compared to people who used it less.

The research even ruled out the obvious alternative explanation. As the researchers noted, those who used GPS more did not do so because they felt they had a poor sense of direction, suggesting that extensive GPS use led to a decline in spatial memory rather than the other way around. It's not that people with bad navigation skills use more GPS. It's that using more GPS produces worse navigation skills. The causation runs the way the worried headlines suggest.

A 2020 UCL study published in Scientific Reports replicated and extended this finding. According to research summaries, heavier lifetime GPS use predicted measurably worse spatial memory on independent (no-GPS) navigation tasks, and the 2024 UCSB extension replicated the finding across age cohorts, geographic settings, and specific spatial-memory tasks. This isn't a single odd finding. It's a robust pattern that holds across multiple studies, multiple populations, and multiple measurement approaches.

The mechanism is direct and worth understanding. Self-guided navigation (figuring out where you are, where you're going, and how to get there) engages the hippocampus in a specific way. The hippocampus is your brain's spatial memory and overall memory hub, and it's the first brain region affected in Alzheimer's disease. When you navigate using GPS, you're not engaging those hippocampal circuits. You're just following turn-by-turn instructions, which is closer to following a recipe than to actually navigating. As one analysis put it, interestingly, this effect was not limited to individuals with baseline navigational difficulties… those with previously strong spatial skills also showed declines over time, suggesting that digital navigation tools may weaken hippocampal circuits that would otherwise be maintained through active use. Even good navigators lose ground when they stop navigating.

The implications go beyond just getting lost. The same article noted that chronic underuse of spatial memory systems may reduce cognitive reserve, potentially accelerating age-related decline or increasing vulnerability in at-risk individuals. The hippocampal exercise you're getting from active navigation isn't just for navigation. It's contributing to the cognitive reserve that protects against decline later in life. Skip the exercise, lose the reserve, become more vulnerable. This is real, measurable, and increasingly well-documented.

The research on calculators and mental math is less clean than the GPS research, but the broad pattern points in a similar direction.

According to an analysis from the Ivy League Education Center, research shows that students who rely heavily on calculators tend to have significantly weaker mental calculation skills than their peers who use them sparingly, and this weakness is not just in calculation speed but also in number sense and conceptual understanding. The pattern is what you'd expect… people who don't practice mental arithmetic become worse at it. But the implication isn't just that they can't add quickly. It's that they lose the underlying number sense that makes mathematical reasoning possible.

A more recent study examined how college students respond when calculators give wrong answers. The researchers found that participants often failed to catch obvious errors, suggesting their mental math intuition had degraded to the point where they couldn't reality-check the calculator's output. As the study noted, more recent findings suggest a negative association between calculator use and mathematical skill in K-12 curricula as well as habitual calculator use more broadly. When you can't catch a calculator's error because you don't have the mental math intuition to know the answer is implausible, you've lost something important. You're not just dependent on the tool. You're vulnerable to its failures.

There's an interesting connection to broader cognitive trends here. Barbara Oakley, whose work on learning I've cited before, has argued that some of the observed declines in IQ scores in recent decades (the reverse Flynn effect) may be related to cognitive offloading. According to her analysis, when students never memorize math facts because "they can always use a calculator," or when we "just Google it" instead of wrestling with information internally, we may be weakening the very cognitive foundations that enable advanced reasoning. The argument isn't that any single act of cognitive offloading is harmful. It's that the cumulative effect of offloading nearly everything, nearly all the time, may be eroding cognitive capabilities at a population level.

The honest caveat: the research on calculators isn't unanimous. Some studies, particularly from earlier decades, found no negative effects of calculator use on learning. The newer studies showing negative effects may reflect a shift in how heavily and broadly calculators are now used, not necessarily a flaw in older research. But the trajectory of the more recent findings is concerning enough to take seriously.

GPS and calculators are the cleanest examples, but the pattern extends across many domains where we now rely on technology. The research is starting to fill in the picture.

According to a recent paper called "Distributed Atrophy 2.0," researchers found that GPS use impairs spatial memory, camera use reduces memory for visual scenes, and automation increases complacency and degrades monitoring performance over time. Together, these findings highlight the cognitive costs of offloading… including spatial atrophy, memory disengagement, and skill decay. The mechanism keeps repeating across domains. When a tool handles a cognitive task, the underlying cognitive capability associated with that task tends to weaken with disuse.

Specific examples worth knowing about:

Cameras and memory. Research by Linda Henkel found that taking photos of things actually REDUCES your memory for those things compared to just observing them. The act of photographing seems to outsource the encoding work to the camera, and the brain skips the deeper processing that would have produced a memory. This effect is now widely replicated.

Autocorrect and spelling. While the research is less developed, the pattern many writers and educators report is consistent… people increasingly struggle to spell words they used to know reliably because autocorrect has been quietly handling the work.

Search and memory. The classic "Google effect" finding showed that when people know information is easily searchable, they remember less about the information and more about WHERE to find it. The brain optimizes for what's actually being asked of it. If the question is "where to find the answer," the brain stops storing the answer itself.

Phone numbers, birthdays, schedules. Most people now remember almost no phone numbers, dramatically fewer birthdays than they used to, and rely on calendar apps to know what they're doing tomorrow. The mental capacity that used to be devoted to this information is now devoted to other things, but the capability to do this kind of memorization has atrophied.

Reading attention. This one is harder to measure but widely reported… the capacity to sustain attention on a single long piece of text has declined sharply as fragmented short-form content has taken over screen time. The reading itself isn't the activity that's lost. The sustained attention IS what's lost.

I want to be honest about something the research community has been wrestling with. Cognitive offloading isn't a new phenomenon, and it isn't categorically bad. Humans have been extending cognition through tools for thousands of years. Writing itself was, when it emerged, a controversial form of cognitive offloading… Socrates famously worried that writing would weaken memory. The printing press, calculators, calendars, address books, libraries… all of these have been ways of offloading cognitive work to external systems, and humans have generally come out ahead from the trade.

As one balanced analysis noted, cognitive offloading (delegating memory or problem-solving to external tools) has long been a hallmark of human intelligence, reorganizing rather than atrophying mental processes. Parallels with GPS navigation illustrate that delegation changes which brain systems are engaged but does not imply cognitive "shutdown". The framing matters. We're not turning into vegetables. We're shifting which cognitive systems we use.

But (and this is the part that concerns the researchers), the modern scale of cognitive offloading is genuinely unprecedented. The printing press let you offload some knowledge to books, but you still had to navigate the world, do arithmetic, remember the names of people you met, and sustain attention long enough to actually read the books. Modern technology offloads ALL of these simultaneously, all the time, for almost everyone. The cumulative effect on a population of people who have grown up with this level of cognitive support is genuinely uncertain, and the early evidence isn't entirely reassuring.

The smart move isn't to reject the tools. It's to use them deliberately, while also preserving the underlying capabilities they make optional. You can have GPS AND still be able to navigate without it. You can have a calculator AND still maintain mental math. You can have autocorrect AND still know how to spell. The technologies don't have to subtract from your capabilities. They subtract only if you let them.

Okay, the practical part. If you've read this far and want to actually preserve some cognitive capabilities that are at risk of atrophying, here's what I'd prioritize.

Navigate without GPS sometimes. The cleanest action item from the research. Don't abandon GPS… use it when it's genuinely useful. But for familiar routes, regular destinations, walking around your own neighborhood, try doing it without GPS sometimes. As one resource recommended, navigate familiar territory without GPS sometimes… your usual route to work, the shops near your home. The act of orienting yourself, paying attention to landmarks, and building mental maps is what preserves the hippocampal function. Even one or two GPS-free trips per week makes a difference.

Do mental math regularly. When you're making decisions involving numbers, try doing the math in your head before reaching for a calculator. Estimating costs, calculating tips, splitting bills, comparing prices… these are all opportunities to keep the mental math machinery active. You'll be slower than a calculator. That's fine. The exercise matters more than the speed.

Write some things by hand. Not everything. But notes you actually want to remember, lists for tasks that matter, journal entries, letters to people. The handwriting research I covered briefly in another newsletter shows specific cognitive benefits that typing doesn't provide. The slowdown isn't a bug… it's where the encoding happens.

Memorize some things deliberately. Phone numbers of close family. The birthdays that matter most to you. The address of a friend who lives somewhere you visit often. Whatever you'd genuinely miss if your phone died. The memory exercise has benefits beyond the specific information you're memorizing.

Read long-form content sometimes. Books. Long articles. Things that require sustained attention beyond what scrolling provides. This is where the reading attention I mentioned actually gets preserved. The ability to sustain attention is a meta-skill that affects everything else you try to learn.

Spell things yourself sometimes. Turn off autocorrect occasionally. Write something where you have to actually know how to spell. The spelling is a small thing; the underlying language attentiveness is a bigger one.

Take fewer pictures of things you want to remember. When you encounter something genuinely meaningful, try just experiencing it instead of photographing it. The Henkel research suggests this actually produces stronger memories than photography. The camera is documenting… it's not memory.

Here's what I want you to take from all this. The cumulative effect of outsourcing nearly every cognitive task to technology isn't neutral. It produces specific, measurable changes in the brain regions associated with those tasks. Sometimes the changes are fine (we don't need to memorize the phone numbers of everyone we know, and the freed cognitive capacity is genuinely available for other things. Sometimes the changes are concerning) the hippocampal atrophy associated with chronic GPS overuse might contribute to age-related cognitive decline, and the mental math decline might be eroding broader numerical reasoning.

The decision about which cognitive capabilities to preserve isn't binary. You don't have to choose between living in the woods without technology and outsourcing every thought to a device. You can use the technologies that are genuinely useful while also preserving the underlying capabilities that matter to you. The middle path requires intention. Without intention, the default trajectory is toward maximum offloading, which produces the measurable atrophy the research is documenting.

If you've felt vaguely uneasy about how dependent you've become on technology for tasks that used to feel like basic human capabilities, the unease is probably accurate. The fix isn't dramatic. It's small deliberate practice of the skills you want to keep. A few GPS-free trips a week. Mental math when you're not in a hurry. Some handwriting. Some sustained reading. Some memorization. The maintenance is light. The capability preservation is real.

You're not going to out-compute a calculator or out-navigate Google Maps. That's fine. The point isn't winning against the machines. The point is keeping the cognitive systems that those machines bypass active enough to keep you sharp, engaged, and capable. The technology is a tool. The capability is yours. Both should remain available.

Even Gandalf knew how to find his own way without a GPS. The wizards walked. The walking was part of the wisdom.

Keep learning (and keep doing some of it yourself),

Ray