Of those surveyed by memory researcher Catherine Loveday in 2021, 80% felt that their memories were worse than before the pandemic. Prolonged periods of stress, isolation and exhaustion – common themes since March 2020 – are well known for their impact on memory. Our brains and our smartphones form a complex web of interactions: the smartphonification of life has been rising since the mid 2000s, but was accelerated by the pandemic, as was internet use in general. Does having more memory in our pockets mean there’s less in our heads? Am I losing my ability to remember things – from appointments to what I was about to do next – because I expect my phone to do it for me? Before smartphones, our heads would have held a cache of phone numbers and our memories would contain a cognitive map, built up over time, which would allow us to navigate – for smartphone users, that is no longer true. When memory lapses like mine happen (which they do, a lot), it feels both easy and logical to blame the technology we’ve so recently adopted.

Memory is weird, unpredictable and, neuroscientifically, not yet entirely understood. But on the same day, I remembered the name of the actor who played Will Smith’s aunt in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in 1991 (Janet Hubert).

One interesting aspect of async/await (and the Task type that we need to use to wrap such code when calling it from a synchronous context) is how objects and values often end up being implicitly captured while our asynchronous code is being executed.įor example, let’s say that we’re working on a DocumentViewController, which downloads and displays a Document that was downloaded from a given URL.Last week, I missed a real-life meeting because I hadn’t set a reminder on my smartphone, leaving someone I’d never met before alone in a café. While Swift’s relatively new async/await syntax does make many kinds of asynchronous operations easier to write, it still requires us to be quite careful when it comes to managing the memory for the various tasks and objects that are involved in such asynchronous code. Managing an app’s memory is something that tends to be especially tricky to do within the context of asynchronous code, as various objects and values often need to be captured and retained over time in order for our asynchronous calls to be performed and handled.

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