Brain Rot: What is tech doing to your memory?

All In The Mind

ABC

Life Sciences, Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	ABC Listen, Podcasts, Radio, News, Music and more.
0:08.2	Christopher and Pixie Skace flaunted their wealth.
0:12.0	27 white limousines and the champagne flowed.
0:15.3	It couldn't be bigger than Pixie's blonde hair.
0:19.0	Spending other people's money, and when they were found out, Pixie paid the price.
0:24.0	This sort of gilded cage that she was a prisoner in.
0:26.9	I'm Mark Humphreys.
0:28.4	Search for ABC Rewind and look for Skace, Fall of a Tycoon, on the ABC Listen app,
0:34.9	or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:37.5	What do you use your phone to keep track of?
0:40.6	For me, it's friends' birthdays, it's events coming up,
0:44.7	it's shopping lists, it's to-do lists, it's notes about upcoming episodes of all in the mind.
0:50.2	Basically, my whole life is on my phone,
0:53.2	but something I've been wondering about lately is
0:55.8	what all of this tracking, this outsourcing of data out of our brains and into our phones,
1:01.7	is doing to our ability to think and remember.
1:05.7	Today, on All In The Mind from ABC Radio National, it's episode three of BrainRot, a special series about your relationship with tech.
1:14.8	Here is Ang Lavoapierre.
1:17.3	Occasionally you see a meme so devastatingly accurate that it feels like a personal attack.
1:24.3	There's one in particular, I think of at least twice a week. It's of this elderly lady and
1:30.1	she's sitting in a rocking chair with a vacant smile, staring directly into my soul. And
1:36.4	superimposed in hot pink text are the immortal words. And to my great-grandchildren, I leave 42,567 screenshots.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from ABC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of ABC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.