Brain Rot: What is tech doing to your memory?

We're trusting tech with more tasks than ever — including the ones our brains once did.

We're Googling things we used to know, taking screenshots of things we'll instantly forget, and hoarding all kinds of data we'll never check again.

On this episode of Brain Rot: is tech giving your brain a holiday, or putting it out of a job?

You'll also meet a guy who's turned the tables, by using AI to help recover his lost memories.

This episode originally aired on Brain Rot, a series of the ABC podcast Science Friction. Sana will be back with all-new episodes of All in the Mind in mid-October.

Guests:

Dr Julia Soares

Assistant Professor, Mississipi State University

Morris Villaroel

Academic, Spain; Lifelogger

Max

Credits:

• Presenter: Ange Lavoipierre • Producer: Fiona Pepper • Senior Producer: James Bullen • Sound Engineer: Tim Symonds

This story was made on the lands of the Gadigal and Menang Noongar peoples.

More Information:

Memory in the Digital Age — Oxford Handbook of Human Memory, 2024.

Lifelog Retrieval from Daily Digital Data: Narrative Review — JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 2022.

People mistake the internet's knowledge for their own — PNAS, 2021.

Data Selves: More-Than-Human Perspectives — Deborah Lupton, 2019.

One man's 10-year experiment to record every moment — BBC, 2019.

The case for using your brain — even if AI can think for you — Vox, 2025.

You can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on the ABC Listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you'd like to access the transcript for this episode, head to its original webpage.