When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind’s collective memory.

Joshua Foer makes this observation in the context of early-2010s anxieties about “outsourcing” memory to digital tools. After immersing himself in competitive memory training (a journey that culminated in his U.S. Memory Championship win), Foer became interested in how everyday technologies—GPS navigation, photography, and search engines—change what people bother to retain internally. The quote belongs to his broader argument that modern life increasingly treats memory as something to be stored externally and retrieved on demand, shifting attention from remembering facts and places to remembering how to access them (devices, apps, and search terms).

Foer is describing the modern “outsourcing” of memory to tools: GPS for spatial navigation, cameras for visual recollection, books for stored knowledge, and search engines for instant retrieval. The quote frames this shift as a trade: convenience and access to vast external archives in exchange for diminished reliance on internal recall. Implicitly, it raises questions central to Foer’s work on memory—whether constant offloading changes how we pay attention, what we retain, and how we form a coherent personal narrative. The line about remembering only “search terms” suggests a move from knowing to locating, where cognitive skill becomes less about retention and more about effective querying.