On a recent late afternoon, I was having trouble remembering. My browsing history for the day suggested I’d read over a dozen news articles, numerous Slack messages, plenty of Twitter threads, and a bunch of notes for my next assignment. Yet, somehow, I couldn’t recall much of it. I remembered some vague contours of the content I had consumed but lacked the details.

That afternoon wasn’t particularly special — a few days later, I struggled to recollect the details of a lengthy COVID story I had read during a conversation with a friend. These instances weren’t some crises of memory, nor were they due to a head injury. I just had too much rattling around in my brain. No matter what or how much I read online, my mind can’t help but forget it shortly after. I don’t blame my brain, either. Most people consume an overwhelming volume of text every day — hundreds of thousands of words — so it’s no surprise that our memories struggle to retain more than a few scant details. “Humans have worse memories than we think we do, and memory for text, in general, isn’t great,” Virginia Clinton-Lisell, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of North Dakota, told me.

… Heyday, which bills itself as an AI-memory assistant, promises to fix the two key challenges I’ve faced with reading-list tools: it demands little to no effort from me and aims to help me remember things better. Instead of simply cataloging where I read something, it promised to help me recall what I’ve been reading. In the three weeks I spent with the app, I found it was effective at helping me remember things, but it comes with a catch: Using a memory tool like this has the potential to make your biological memory worse over time.   Read More