the partitioning of my brain

1 47 48
22 1 58
3 0 842

I have remembered these numbers for 35 years.
They are phone numbers. Those I would need to call if I needed my family to get me, or if I was in trouble. (Yeah, Iceland is small, and five digits were enough back then - I didn't list the other numbers that are still good... with the extra digits that when the number space was expanded a few years ago).

In the last ten years, I have had occasion to memorize precisely three phone numbers - not, I think, because my brain is ossified, but because I don't need to memorize phone numbers.
My phone remembers them.

So does my address book/Inbox on my laptop, and I expect to be able to access worldwide white, yellow and blue pages of ALL phone directories anywhere.

Last year, I was at a meeting, I saw an interesting poster, presenting some preliminary data, and pondered whether a previously-obscure effect could be a factor.
On the spot, order of magnitude estimates suggested it could be, but to be potentially interesting, it really needed to be estimated to better than factor of two - so scaling wouldn't tell me, I needed the actual numerical coefficients and details.
Back at the hotel, I googled.
Much to my surprise, the top hit was my own graduate lecture notes, pdf files from my own website - with the exact formula I needed, had recently taught, but did not have committed to memory - it was there, instantly accessible, from thousands of km away. (Might work, bit implausible, but then so are the alternatives, more data needed).

Much of the technical minutiae that goes with my work is now offloaded from my brain again, because I know that it is instantly accessible online in almost any situation I might need it. This includes formulae, technique details, catalog info - all set aside after years of learning. The important thing is to know that I know this, and hence can retrieve it, not to have most of the details frontloaded in my brain.

When I traveled, in the old days, like more than 3 years ago, I would plan trips - have tickets, reservations, maps, contact info all in hard copy and at hand.
Most of that stuff is now on my laptop or in my mailbox - much of it never gets to hardcopy (except for discount hotel bookings - always have those in hard copy - people working counters at 2 am on a stormy night are not impressed that you have an e-mail from cheapo-motels.com, but they will not argue with a printout of the same showing a confirmation number and $ figure. Weird that).

I don't memorize meeting times, or many short term committments, because they are on my calendar, in my inbox and most likely I'll be ping'd about them as the time approaches, if they are important.

A crude internal survey suggests that about 2/3 of my previous life minutiae, that took up memory and processing in my brain, is now outsourced - with about 1/3 effectively in my personal electronics - laptop, Inbox+Mail_archive, spotlight, cell etc, and another 1/3 given over to Google or other external sources like ADS or arXiv.
Much of what I do internally is indexing and prioritizing, not internalizing - my brain is operating differently on information. There is much more reliance on having large amounts of searchable external data at hand, with the internal operation focusing on processes and intelligent access.

This is an improvement, but it is also more fragile in some ways.
There is in an absolute sense more redundancy and more access options to the information, but the link to the outside world is also a bottleneck - to the point where I feel dumber without my laptop hooked up to the internet and with me.
Some of the science fictional aspect of the boosted mind is taking place, incoherently, in bits and pieces. Question is whether we will accept this development consciously and take on the changes coherently and with forethought, or to continue to do change piecewise and randomly.
Not actually sure which is the way to go, both paths have opportunities, and dangers.
Or maybe it is just me.

This is stuff I would love to have in an internal add on memory+processing unit, or more likely, a set of redundant heterogenous internal add ons - I want ADS in my brain, under my callup - like an external memory device, not crowding my housekeeping processes or swapping my soft high level memory. But, with instant access, smart indexing, and updatable.
For starts.

There's a lot of stuff that would be more useful interfaced more directly to my brain, rather than requiring device interfacing and low bitrate scanning - some, like books, would require quite sophisticated filtering, indexing and rating to avoid GIGO; some trusted databases would be good just in there - CRC, the PDG, a lot of physical data - stuff that I need rarely on an item-by-item basis, but which is really annoying not to have right at hand when needed. Updated of course.

It would also be interesting to have economic data, epidemiological studies, medical and drug reports, psychological and educational studies - but those would need some interesting firewalls and filters, methinks...

I don't know that I'd allow access to internal memory to truly dangerous data: laws, financial reports, political manifestos - memetic viruses, corrupt data that is intrinsically uncertifiable as trusted - leave that to Google, might give the rest of us a chance to upgrade before the eschaton...

In the meantime, I ponder what the teens, and pre-teens are doing with the capability...