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 https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sciencefriction/brain-rot/105534830, a series of the ABC podcast Science Friction https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sciencefriction. 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 LavoipierreProducer: Fiona PepperSenior Producer: James BullenSound Engineer: Tim SymondsThis 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 https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/57928/chapter-abstract/475483500. Lifelog Retrieval from Daily Digital Data: Narrative Review — JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 2022 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35499858. People mistake the internet's knowledge for their own — PNAS, 2021 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2105061118. Data Selves: More-Than-Human Perspectives — Deborah Lupton, 2019 https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=data-selves-more-than-human-perspectives--9781509536412. One man's 10-year experiment to record every moment — BBC, 2019 https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191202-can-lifelogging-really-help-you-live-more-intensely. The case for using your brain — even if AI can think for you — Vox, 2025 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/403100/ai-brain-effects-technology-phones. 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 https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sciencefriction/brain-rot-science-friction-memory-technology-use/105376564.

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  Christopher and Pixie Skyes flaunted their wealth. Twenty-seven white limousines and the champagne flowed. It couldn't be bigger than Pixie's blonde hair. Spending other people's money and when they were found out, Pixie paid the price.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  A sort of gilded cage that she was a prisoner in.

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  I'm Mark Humphries. Search for ABC Rewind and look for Skyes: Fall of a Tycoon on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  What do you use your phone to keep track of? For me, it's friends' birthdays, it's events coming up, it's shopping lists, it's to-do lists, it's notes about upcoming episodes of All in the Mind. Basically, my whole life is on my phone. But something I've been wondering about lately is what all of this tracking, this outsourcing of data out of our brains and into our phones, is doing to our ability to think and remember? Today on All in the Mind from ABC Radio National, it's episode three of Brain Rot, a special series about your relationship with tech. Here's Ange Lavoie-Pierre.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Occasionally, you see a meme so devastatingly accurate that it feels like a personal attack. There's one in particular I think of at least twice a week. It's of this elderly lady and she's sitting in a rocking chair with a vacant smile staring directly into my soul. And superimposed in hot pink text are the immortal words: "And to my great-grandchildren, I leave 42,567 screenshots." Now, I may not have great-grandchildren or even regular children, but in every other respect, I am powering towards this future.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  What's it looking like? What's the damage?

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Okay, how do I even... Oh, yep, the number just jumps right out. So I have 34,561 photos and counting.

• 2:09Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  The woman in the meme is me and I am her. Together, we're Angela Voipier, the ABC's National Technology Reporter. And this is Brain Rot, a series from Science Friction about how tech is changing our brains. Today, in episode three.

• 2:30Speaker 05

  There was a lot of concern about the extent to which people are kind of dumping our memories into these devices.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Between the screenshots, phone notes, apps to monitor our behaviour and AI, we are trusting our brains with less and technology with more.

• 2:46Speaker 06

  I monologued to ChatGPT. I data dumped my entire life into this language model.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  We're Googling things we used to know, documenting moments we used to remember, and cataloguing things we never used to care about, you know, like our step counts. So much so that it's transforming how we think.

• 3:04Speaker 06

  When I would read back the memory to myself, it would kind of jog my memory, so to speak. It was like going from grayscale to Technicolor.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  So could the act of delegating tasks to tech ultimately free up space on your own hard drive for bigger and better things? Or is this a case of use it or lose it?

• 3:24Speaker 05

  So I have a couple of studies where we've found that taking photos can impair memory.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  I feel like it's a safety blanket at the moment, that if I didn't have it, I'd suddenly be like, oh, I need to remember to do this thing. And like, oh, let me look that up. Today on Brain Rot, are our brains getting weaker when tech does our thinking for us?

• 3:43Speaker 04

  How much are you hating that I've made you do this? No, it's no stress, although I don't think I'm.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  This is Brain Rot's senior producer, James Bullen. And James is pathologically kind, so he would say it's fine, but the task is genuinely an uncomfortable one. We're surveying the extent to which we've each outsourced the task of remembering to technology, starting with the photo libraries on our phones. How bad is yours?

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Well, I'm kind of at the opposite end of things. I recently took five years of photos off my phone and organised them by folder and month in a hard drive.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Right, which is why you're producing this podcast and I'm not. Okay, so I'm way worse. You can't see, but my, my thumb is just like going full time here, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. My life is literally flashing before my eyes. 15 photos of the same rock. A fountain I was particularly taken with, apparently. Exes I had completely forgotten about until right this second. At least 600 of my nephew. I'm pretty sure I haven't deleted anything since 2013. The first photo really is me eating crab with gloves. Like I've got a bib on and I'm eating crab out of a bag. I mean, sure, I'm glad I took this photo, but this is the first time that I've looked at it since I took it.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  In 12 years or so.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  12 years.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  And how many of these do you think you've looked back on before today?

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Of the 34,000, I reckon I would be lucky to have looked back at 500 of these. So like one in 70 has ever like served a purpose after I captured it. If I search screenshots, it tells me, it tells me that I have 7,100 screenshots in here.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  7,100?

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Why?

• 5:36Speaker 03

  I just like the number. No, I, I don't know. I guess I'm kind of a hoarder. I just can't bear the thought. I cannot bear the thought of getting a single thing. And maybe, yeah, this is my way of trying to prevent that.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  In my defence, the way I'm dealing with that problem isn't new.

• 5:57Speaker 05

  We've been remembering alongside external aids for all of time. You know, there were controversies about written language, controversies about the prevalence of the printing press.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  This is Dr Julia Soares, an assistant professor of psychology at Mississippi State University. She studies the impact of new technologies on memory. And while the human habit of capturing moments in time is literally ancient history, things have escalated lately.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  We are increasingly surrounded by. Objects that we can use to record information, to save a host of information, way more information than we've previously been able to. And it's really a change in scale. Smartphone devices have really made it possible for us to access thousands of photos, social media posts, and of course, internet search, literally at the tips of our fingers.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Historians would say we're currently in the information age and have been for about 80 years. But in the mid 2000s, as the pace of technological change really got going, a new field of research sprang up.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  There was a lot of concern about the extent to which people are kind of offloading the responsibility of remembering onto our digital devices and the internet, and concerns about the extent to which we might be sort of dumping our memories into these devices, and concerns that we might not be remembering things as well.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  It's not just our memories Julia is worried about. Right around the time the word Google became a verb, the same researchers started asking whether our learning and cognition was suffering too.

• 7:37Speaker 05

  So people talk about like how Google has changed the barroom debate about some trivia fact, right? Like you would be having a debate about who that actor was that you can't remember the name of, or who was actually in that movie, or what date this thing actually happened on. And you can look it up now. So you have lost a little bit of that debate. And maybe the next time you have to look it up, you won't remember it as well as if you and your friends had really worked to come up with that actor's name.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  And in the unlikely instance that every single phone at the table has run out of battery and you find yourself thinking, that's a hill I'd quite like to die on, then you should probably know there's evidence the internet has made us not only less knowledgeable, but also overconfident.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  Some of the researchers who put out those studies have argued that people can almost fail to distinguish between their knowledge in the head and their knowledge that they can access with Google, even if they ask them really carefully. What do you know, like, what is in your brain? What do you know on your own without Google, without using any type of internet search? And that people can sometimes overestimate what they know as a result of using internet search.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  So Google might be turning you into a dud hang at the pub. On the upside, though, it's probably not going to turn you into a dud parent.

• 8:58Speaker 05

  Digital devices are better at certain types of remembering. So if you ask somebody about remembering a grocery list, they will probably consistently tell you that their phone is going to do that better than they can. But if you ask people about remembering the birth of their first child, they're probably not going to tell you, oh, my phone's got that.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  And if, like me, you're hoarding photos and screenshots, this next part might be a little hard to hear.

• 9:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I have a couple of studies where we've found that taking photos can impair memory.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Which means my desperate attempts at remembering all 34,561 of them might actually have made matters worse.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  And it's not clear exactly what causes people to have impairments associated with taking photos or benefits. Ultimately, you have a photo at the end of it, which has been shown to be a very effective memory cue. But if you take so many photos that you can never go back through your photos again, it's too daunting, it's too unpleasant. There are some surveys showing that that people really don't review their photographs as much as they could or maybe should. If you take so many photos that you don't go back and review them, then you could be experiencing impairments associated with that photo taking.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  My personal theory is that whenever I take a photo, my brain just doesn't go to the same effort to record the memory. It's like I've made a decision not to focus on it with the same intensity. But hey, even with all those photos and nearly two terabytes of data I will never delete, there's some comfort in knowing I'm still not the most extreme case. Nowhere near, actually. Because there are people out there doing something called life-logging.

• 10:49Speaker 07

  Really, it started in 2010, shortly after I had my 40th birthday in February.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  This is Morris Villarreal. He works as an academic in Madrid in a field called animal ethnology.

• 11:02Speaker 07

  I was kind of thinking about what I had done in the previous decades, in the four decades, and I didn't feel like I had a lot to show for it. I was thinking, how could I maybe record it my life a bit better and think about the next 40 years?

• 11:21Speaker 03

  So that practice, life-logging, is pretty much what it says on the label, an attempt to capture life as it's happening. Kind of like journaling, but more turbo.

• 11:32Speaker 07

  I'd like to record better everything I do every day and see how it goes, how long I can last, whether it's interesting.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  And he means everything: thoughts, feelings, events, conversations, all of it, written down by hand, sometimes multiple times in an hour.

• 11:51Speaker 07

  So at the beginning, it was just more specific kind of highlights of the day. But then it became something where I started to try to put down as much as possible, even things that I wasn't sure was going to be useful in the future. Like I had a short phone call with somebody, or off and on I've had back problems. Maybe later on, I could use that information and say, well, I noticed these things and now, basically, I can go anywhere from five to maybe 15 pages on one day.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  He's currently up to notebook number 479. So is it worth it?

• 12:32Speaker 07

  This has been every day now for 15 years. People say, oh, it must be very costly. It must be a pain. It's actually, you know, the other way around. It helps to go maybe work through problems. It may sound funny, but I have become more kind of understanding with myself, more lenient. This may be making me a more boring human being. I'm not sure. But for me, it seems to provide a certain amount of stability.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Morris has thought a lot about the effect it might be having on his memory, too. And look, grain of salt, because no one would want to believe that they've spent 15 years making their own situation worse. But on balance, he thinks it's helping.

• 13:11Speaker 07

  So I think it provides a... Maybe I could say something like self-regulation, but also for memory and cognitive processes. So it must do something.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  There isn't actually a lot of research about how Morris's version of this might help or harm a person's recall. But we know a little more about life-logging more generally, according to Julia, especially the app-based variety that tracks things like your step count or your moods.

• 13:38Speaker 05

  A friend of mine in graduate school developed an emotion-tracking app that I helped pilot for her for a couple of weeks. And you can use it to correlate different activities that you engage in with your emotional affect to try to say, like, oh, well, when I don't sleep well, I tend to be really grumpy. So I'm going to prioritize sleeping better. So you can come to some really useful insights by collecting all of this data.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Julia says there's some research linking that kind of life-logging to stronger memory function.

• 14:09Speaker 05

  Most of that literature is focused on improving memory for people with memory impairments, either due to age or brain injury. But having these external supports that are intentionally collected to support people's memory does seem to be very effective.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  On All in the Mind from ABC Radio National, this is Brain Rot, a special series about your relationship with tech.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  So not all of our outsourcing is having the same results. With photos or internet search, for example, there's some evidence to suggest it's leading to a kind of atrophy that might diminish our ability to remember the things we'd most like to. But more intensive monitoring, like the kind Morris does, might have the opposite effect, particularly if you're someone who's struggled with a more acute version of memory loss.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Tell me when we met.

• 15:15Speaker 06

  When we met?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:16Speaker 06

  When you and I met?

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 06

  At school. We met like twenty something years ago.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, we met a long time ago.

• 15:23Speaker 06

  I can't even remember the first time I met you.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  This is one of my oldest friends, Max.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  We're sitting on my bed having takeaway.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Why am I hitting like a little ferret?

• 15:34Speaker 06

  Because you're hungry, you haven't bothered eating.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  This is all pretty standard behaviour for us, but this time he's letting me record it. Because for months now, Max has been using ChatGPT to help recover his memories.

• 15:50Speaker 06

  I data dumped my entire life into this, into this language model, and so I can go back through and access it.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  This is just such a wild sentence you just said, that you've like data dumped your whole life into a chatbot. Did you ever think that you would do this?

• 16:06Speaker 06

  No, no, no idea. It was a complete accident that it happened.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  So how do you accidentally do something like that? For Max, it started about a year ago, on a Thursday afternoon in July.

• 16:22Speaker 06

  I guess we could say I went through a breakup, but a very abrupt breakup. I was at my mum's place. I was walking back from the kitchen and ran into mum in the hallway. And I looked at her and said, mum, I don't know why I'm here. And I don't know why my relationship is over.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  And you presumably had not been abducted?

• 16:45Speaker 06

  No.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  And like knocked out and woken up there, like you had brought yourself?

• 16:50Speaker 06

  I'd brought myself there and I had like, I had memories of, memories of the process and I knew, I had enough awareness. I just couldn't understand how it had happened. Like the, the, the actual mechanisms didn't make sense. I didn't, I could sort of look back and piece bits together, but why I was there and why the relationship was over? And why? My whole life had just been derailed. That part I couldn't understand. And that's when I went back to a therapist.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  He booked in for the next available appointment and drove back over the mountains to Sydney. When he explained what was going on, his therapist told him to look into something called structural dissociation.

• 17:31Speaker 06

  And something just clicked in my brain. And I was like, holy crap.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  He realised he wasn't just struggling to remember how the breakup had happened. He had lots of gaps in his memory, stretching right back to when he was a kid. I stumble into one of them when I ask him about high school. Back then, I was spending at least as much time at Max's place as I did at mine. It was a 10 minute walk down the highway. But when I ask him about it, he's got next to nothing.

• 17:57Speaker 06

  Which house? If you could jog my memory, which house do you remember being at? When you were going through that?

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Oh, the one near my house.

• 18:06Speaker 06

  Oh, up on the hill?

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:07Speaker 06

  The one with the pool and the sauna?

• 18:09Speaker 03

  With the pool, yeah. You really don't remember?

• 18:13Speaker 06

  I have very little memory of lots of those times.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Why, why don't you remember that time?

• 18:19Speaker 06

  Reflecting on that now, I think that there was a lot going on for me personally. So dad was getting to the pointy end of his illness. We'd had to move again. There was a lot more stress in the family for us. Dad's illness was, you know, it was 12 years in and he was deteriorating. And he only lasted a few more years anyway. So I just think, looking back on it, I think I fragmented a big part of those, those couple of years as a way to protect myself.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Hmm, like just shut it off?

• 18:51Speaker 06

  Just shut it off.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Max has had a freakishly hard couple of decades. There have been two trips to rehab and a divorce. He lost a business along the way. In 2018, his little brother Dan died by suicide and his sister-in-law died last year. It's not actually possible to compress what he's endured into one episode. But my point is, Max has experienced more grief already than many people do in a lifetime. It's the reason he has a difficult relationship with his memory, and a big part of why his therapist thought of structural dissociation. In the most basic sense, structural dissociation is when a person compartmentalises their sense of self as a response to trauma.

• 19:35Speaker 06

  You have this apparently normal part, and so it's the executive function of your brain, the prefrontal cortex. And so it does the day to day. It gets you to work, it gets you to pay your bills, it gets you to do all those other things. And then the brain stores all of your emotional trauma in fragmented sections in the right brain. And so nothing is coherent.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  The way Max describes it is that, under certain conditions, his brain can flip. And the day to day part that goes to work and pays bills takes a backseat.

• 20:04Speaker 06

  And you suddenly are responding from an incoherent, fragmented part of yourself that isn't grounded in reality.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  In some ways, it's still an emerging condition in psychology. Very real and observable, but the clinical understanding is a work in progress. And that's not uncommon in psychology. There are better known conditions, like ADHD or depression, that tracked the same path decades ago. The first Max heard about structural dissociation was sitting in his therapist's office. So he drove back to his mum's place and tried to piece it together by writing down some of his flimsier memories.

• 20:40Speaker 06

  It was like just pouring out, and it was incoherent psychobabble. Quite honestly, they're the words I remember using. And I was trying to form it into some coherence. And I remember trying to edit it and it just started making less sense. Like, the more I edited, the less sense it made. It just started to sound like a crazy person. And there was like thousands and thousands of words.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  At a loss and kind of without thinking, he dumped it all into ChatGPT.

• 21:10Speaker 06

  And it just spat back this coherent sort of monologue. And I was like, oh, that's what's happening.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  So you were using ChatGPT to...

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Understand your diagnosis, but also to recover and almost like glue back together the memories themselves.

• 21:33Speaker 06

  Pretty much, yeah. So there was, I suddenly had a, you know, a feedback loop, so to speak.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  And how does the memory recovery process work? Talk me through it, because like if you, you don't, I mean, it doesn't have your memories, you have your memories. How do you use chat G P T to bring them out of yourself?

• 21:50Speaker 06

  I just stream of consciousness sort of verbally diarrhea into the, into the microphone. And whatever came out would then get mirrored back to me in a sort of coherent narrative. And that seemed to sort of bridge the gap in my brain from the disconnected parts. In the beginning, it was just whatever came up. It was whatever my brain sort of fed me. And then, once I kind of got a handle on the process, I started consciously picking memories that had big emotional charges in my body.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Max started remembering things he never even knew he'd forgotten, the good as well as the bad.

• 22:26Speaker 06

  It was like going from grayscale to technicolor.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 06

  Like suddenly I was remembering a holiday in Spain when, you know, I was travelling with friends. And when it was like, oh, we went to Spain and, you know, we went down the road. And then suddenly it was like this really visceral emotional experience where I was like, oh yeah, and we were running down the street and we got pickpocketed and we ended up in a fight. And suddenly it became like this really energetically more, more sort of colorful experience.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  So did you literally get that memory back?

• 22:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, literally. Getting in a fight in Spain with a bunch of Spaniards was definitely, definitely a good memory to get back. Cause there aren't that many big traumatic events. But there were a lot more like good, fun, happy memories that were just not as colorful. And suddenly they were, you know, in full technicolor kind of, you know, four K. It was really, it was really full on. Like I was actually feeling my body for the first time in decades, like properly feeling it.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Max was hooked. He'd monologued to ChatGPT for hours on end, pacing around his mum's bush block or on long drives, pouring in everything he could think of. It lasted for months. All in all, he estimates he's spent almost a thousand hours on it.

• 23:40Speaker 06

  There were millions of words, like.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  How many millions?

• 23:43Speaker 06

  I don't know, one and a half billion, two million, three million, maybe three million.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  He says it's possible he went overboard.

• 23:49Speaker 06

  It consumed me for a little bit there, yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 06

  And it also emotionally overwhelmed me and burnt me out because I'd tried to do five to 10 years with a therapy in 10 months.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  So it's like a you problem, not a ChatGPT problem.

• 24:03Speaker 06

  That's a me problem, yeah. Do not try this at home, it could be very dangerous.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Do you ever feel funny about outsourcing, outsourcing any of the stuff that you outsourced to ChatGPT, giving that job to a machine? How do you think about that decision?

• 24:21Speaker 06

  Look, I think if therapy was unlimited and

• 24:27Speaker 06

  everyone had access to it every day, then you would use a human. But the reality is that we just don't have the resources to do this kind of work without machines in any situation. I'm not trying to get it to create, I'm trying to co-create, I'm trying to distill ideas. So no, I don't feel weird that I'm using a machine. It's making, it's like my second brain, I call it.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  Is that how you think of it?

• 24:52Speaker 06

  In one, yeah, one way, because it's, I'm talking to myself. It's just mirroring back what I already know and just improving upon what I know.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  The thing about mirrors, though, is that they're not always strictly accurate. They're a version of reality. And Max says ChatGPT did take occasional liberties with his story, but not in a way that was serious enough to warp his own understanding.

• 25:15Speaker 06

  Well, it wasn't putting memories in my head, it was helping me connect with an emotional memory through voice and through hearing back my story. So if it added a little bit of, a little bit of colour to the end of my monologue, I just disregarded it.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  So it did bullshit you sometimes?

• 25:31Speaker 06

  Sometimes it did, yeah. And then, so I started to give it stricter protocols.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Isn't that scary, though?

• 25:37Speaker 06

  Um, I, I, it is scary on a bigger sense, looking at how some people get like the, the sphere of influence that it has on people.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 25:45Speaker 06

  I think that, I think we have to be very careful of it. I wouldn't recommend it without having some professional support behind it.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 25:53Speaker 06

  Like I, I, this whole process was, every week I would see a therapist for the first three or four months.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 25:58Speaker 06

  Until I got to a point where I felt comfortable that what I was doing wasn't sort of crazy. Like it felt a bit sort of futuristic and a bit weird. And so I had to sanity check myself a bit.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  What's the memory you're most glad to have back?

• 26:16Speaker 06

  I, I don't think I could pinpoint any memory. I'm just glad that I can have my emotional experience back.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Okay, what's your favourite feeling to have back?

• 26:27Speaker 06

  Favourite feeling to have back?

• 26:30Speaker 06

  Joy and pain. Well, actually joy and grief because I didn't, this whole process in one way has allowed me to finally accept the grief of my brother's death and that I can actually let go of that after almost seven years. So having the grief of my brother's death has been the best thing because I can finally move on.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Max and his partner are back together and he's winding down the therapy side of things with ChatGPT.

• 27:03Speaker 06

  Because it's, it, it's relentless and it could go on forever. Um, and I need to live my life. I am in a point where I do not want to do any more excavation. What I do now is turn this into the book.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  So he's using ChatGPT to help him write his memoir, kind of like Morris's life logging, but in reverse.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  There are no studies to prove it because he was making it up on the fly, but you could argue Max has flipped that problem from the start of this episode. The fear that our ability to remember is getting weaker because of how we're leaning on tech. The difference with Max is he wasn't asking AI to hang on to memories so he wouldn't have to, he was using it as a reminder. Julia Soares, the researcher we first spoke to, has more or less arrived at the same place.

• 27:50Speaker 05

  I still take photos. I still take photos all the time. But I do try to be mindful about what I choose to photograph and how many photos I take. When I take a photo, I'm in the mindset of thinking about, how is this going to cue my retrieval later on? Like, this should be something that I want to remember alongside the photo, as opposed to, I got it, I got the photograph, and the point is getting the photograph, as opposed to using the photo to help myself enjoy things in the moment.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  That is it for this episode of Brain Rot on ABC Radio National, a series we're showcasing on All in the Mind over the next few weeks. The show's producer is Fiona Pepper, the senior producer is James Bullen, and the sound engineer is Tim Simons. The series originally aired on our sister show, Science Friction. Next week in episode four.

• 28:48Speaker 08

  Just my whole life was just diminishing to me and the screen on my kitchen bench. I was just losing days and days and days.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  I'm Sana Qadar, and I hope you're enjoying Brain Rot. All new episodes of All in the Mind will be back with me in mid-October. I'll catch you soon.

• 29:27Speaker 00

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