thinking out loud

Selective memory: does this exist? Can people pick and choose what they want to remember? There are so many things I wish to remember and maybe even more things I wish I didn't. I started thinking about this, and I wonder how people remember things better than others. And it's interesting how sometimes people remember things differently. Very strange.

This past weekend, the topic of wisdom teeth amongst my friends was brought up. Patty Cakes had just gotten his taken out, and this fueled the subject of the importance of these sets of teeth. SweetNSour said she read somewhere that when we were cavemen (this assumption supports the evolution theory, of course), we needed our wisdom teeth more at that time because our molars weren't enough to break down the type of food we needed to eat. They didn't have tenderizers or knives to help cut anything. As technology advances, the breakdown of food became easier, and centuries later, these wisdom teeth became nonfunctional. Since we don't need them as much (if at all), our body adapted to this change.

In fact, this concept applies to other parts of the body as well, like your muscles. It seems that as we use less of something, that part of the body becomes dispensable. If this is true, then I'm a little worried. Here's why.

Technological advances are exceeding at a rapid rate. Every month, there's a new gadget or invention that supersedes its predecessor in order to make our lives much easier. What does this mean? It means we can get more out of less work. There are jokes all the time about people wasting their lives away in front of a computer. And not just the computer! That iPhone is really changing people's lives, I hear. Between Outlook and PDAs and mini computer phones, we have no excuse to slack off, and yet, it seems like we do. These gadgets are meant to enhance our knowledge and work productivity, and somehow, it seems like they're doing the exact opposite. Obesity is increasing, and social skills are becoming less prevalent (online social networking via facebook and/or myspace, on the other hand, is skyrocketing). So I wonder, all this storage space we use to help remind us about certain events, keep our photos, manage our time, is all this helping or hurting us? As we depend more and more on electronics, we use less and less of our minds, our memory in particular.

So I wonder, as we rely our memory more on technology, is it possible for a particular part of our brain to become obsolete? Will the term "fading memory" take a literal turn? And finally, in regards to evolution, what will happen if we begin to utilize our brains significantly less than we already do? If it can happen to wisdom teeth, can't it happen to brain cells?

Time to crank up my mind exercises even more so than usual.