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Noticed

Dumbed-Down Dialing

Credit...Christopher Serra

AFTER a day by the surf in Daytona Beach, Fla., last year, Travis Erickson, 21, discovered that his cellphone had been either stolen or lost in the sand. He also discovered that he was stranded.

Though there were plenty of pay phones and beachgoers willing to lend their cellphones, he couldn’t call his girlfriend of over a year — with whom he lived and who was on her way to pick him up. He didn’t know her phone number.

“I didn’t even think about trying to know it, because we lived together,” says Mr. Erickson, a model.

Like many of the 91 percent of Americans who are cellphone users, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group, he programs all his numbers into the phone, and dials by calling up names — not numbers — on the screen. “I never had to know it,” Mr. Erickson said, “because it was always in my pocket on my phone.”

With our increased reliance on these dialing shortcuts, it may be that the only phone number many of us will remember in the future is the one in the 1982 Tommy Tutone song with the catchy chorus, “867-5309.”

Elizabeth Loftus is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies memory. In the days when you made a phone call by dialing, she said, that action “provided an active rehearsal of the information,” essential for committing information to long-term memory. Before digital address books, she said, “you might be exposed to a phone number hundreds of times. But now you just look it up. Technology has taken that rehearsal process away from us.”

Michael Casarella, 28, an owner of the men’s accessory brand Barking Irons, says he hasn’t remembered a phone number since middle school. “As soon as high school came around,” he said, “your friends got cellphones, and you stopped remembering their numbers.”

He was stunned when a girlfriend of three years once rattled off his phone number by heart. “I didn’t understand how she knew my number offhand,” he said. “I never would spend a minute trying to commit these numbers to memory.”

When Tristan Tarwater’s husband, Chris, a soldier in the Army, was shipped out to the Middle East this summer, she went to a Verizon store in Augusta, Ga., where they live, to suspend his cellphone service for his deployment. Upon arrival she was startled to realize that she didn’t know his number. The cellphone store employees, she said, didn’t seem to find her predicament unusual.

“I felt kind of surprised because I remember old phone numbers from when I was younger, like my first phone number,” she said. She and her 3-year-old daughter, Sophia, speak to her husband, who is still overseas, every day by e-mail, instant message or Skype, she said. His phone number “didn’t seem important to know.”

“What was a phone number like anyway?” Ms. Tarwater said. “It can be reassigned. It’s just a way of getting in contact with someone.” It’s not, she said, “the actual communicating.”

Mr. Casarella feels the same way. Memorizing numbers, he said, “was practical or necessary at the time, but the fact that we don’t do it anymore doesn’t bother me — nobody likes to be reduced to a number.”

But will cellphone address books and other technological advances that do our remembering for us have an impact on our ability to memorize, and thus affect our intelligence?

Professor Loftus didn’t sound worried: “There will be other things for people to do that will challenge the mind and keep them active. We won’t have phone numbers in our long-term memory anymore, but we’ll have plenty of other things.” For example, the multitude of passwords much technology now demands.

“The one downside will be that when you need a number, in the old days you would have had it immediately in mind, and now you won’t,” she said.

Stuck at the beach, Mr. Erickson was forced to call a different number he did remember: that of an ex-girlfriend from that distant era when land lines and even pagers ruled the day. She was friends with his current paramour and provided her number.

Picking him up at the shore, his girlfriend was not happy. “I told her that I really had no need to memorize it because I always had it,” he said. “She was still upset.” They broke up two weeks later.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section ST, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Dumbed-Down Dialing. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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