Lest We Forget: Psalm 103 and the Memory on Our Phones

Have you ever spent an afternoon looking for an old photo to show someone, only to find it buried among tens of thousands of others? Or watched a loved one's birthday go by on the screen in pieces, between two-second videos, and the next day could not say what was said at the table?

This happens to a lot of people, and it is no reason for guilt. A phone keeps more than any person could keep alone, and that is real help. But the scene leaves a good question: what do I really want to remember, and what for? This text does not ask anyone to put the device down. It invites a calm look at a very old idea in the Bible: remembering is a way of giving thanks and of knowing who we are.

Remembering is not just storing

Storing is putting something in a place. Remembering is going back to something and letting it carry weight today. A file can sit in the cloud for years without anyone opening it, and from the file's point of view nothing is lost. A living memory, on the other hand, changes the person who remembers.

That is also true in science, in general terms: human memory does not work like a drawer of perfect files. Each time we remember, we rebuild the scene from pieces, and what we feel now enters the mix. That is why two people who were at the same dinner tell it differently without lying.

The focus here is what we do with what we have already lived, and what the Bible says about not forgetting.

Psalm 103: "forget none of his benefits"

What the text says. Psalm 103 is a song of praise, and its heading ascribes it to David. The speaker is not addressing a crowd but himself: "Bless the Lord, my soul" (verse 1). In verse 2 he adds, in paraphrase: and do not forget any of the good things he has done for you. Verses 3 to 5 give a concrete list: God forgives wrongs, heals diseases, rescues life from the pit, crowns the person with kindness and compassion, and satisfies them with good things, so that youth is renewed like the eagle's.

The psalm goes on, and in verse 14 it turns the picture around: God knows how we are made and remembers that we are dust. So it is not only the psalmist who must remember. According to the psalm, God remembers us too, with care.

What it means. Three points help to read it faithfully.

First, the psalmist speaks to himself. "Soul" here is the whole person, and he needs to remind it, which suggests that forgetting was possible even then. No one needs a warning about something that never slips away.

Second, "benefits" is not only good gifts. His list begins with forgiveness and goes on to healing and rescue. Remembering, here, is acknowledging where one came from and who helped, including in bad times.

Third, in biblical Hebrew, remembering is often more than recalling a fact: it tends to lead to acting, giving thanks, returning. The psalm's praise is the form that memory takes. Scholars such as Brevard Childs (1962) have pointed this out, though they discuss how far it reaches. What the text does not do is offer a memory technique. It does not say how to remember, only why it is worth it.

What changes in life. As an application, and not as something the psalm says about our time: the text invites us to ask which "benefits" in my own life deserve not to be forgotten. It may be a person who helped me, a healthy day after an illness, a meal at the table. Remembering, in this sense, is not a memory exercise but a gratitude exercise. And that holds for people of firm faith, for people with doubts, and for people just beginning to search.

Deuteronomy 6 and the Supper: remembering with signs

It would be a mistake to read Psalm 103 as if the Bible thought outside helps were bad. It uses many.

In Deuteronomy 6, Moses speaks to Israel before they enter the promised land. He tells them to listen and to love God (verses 4 and 5) and then says what to do in order to remember: repeat the words to the children at home and on the road, tie them on the hand, set them between the eyes, write them on the doorposts (verses 7 to 9). In other words, signs placed outside to help what is inside.

Soon after comes the warning (verses 10 to 12): when the people have cities they did not build and food in plenty, let them take care not to forget the one who brought them out of Egypt. Notice the reason. The risk the text points to is not a lack of memory. It is abundance, which makes gratitude seem unnecessary.

The same goes for the stones of Joshua 4:6–7, set up so that the children would ask what they meant. And in the New Testament, in Luke 22:19, Jesus breaks the bread at the last supper and says, in paraphrase, "do this in remembrance of me". The memory here is a gesture made together, with the body, in a group. Christian traditions differ on the exact meaning of the Supper, but all agree that it is, at the very least, an act of remembering.

If the Bible uses stones, markers and bread as reminders, the phone is not a problem in itself. The text's question is a different one: what does this sign do to me and to the people near me?

What the research measured, and what it did not

There are studies on remembering and technology. It is worth knowing what they actually did.

In 2014, the psychologist Linda Henkel published the study "Point-and-Shoot Memories" in the journal Psychological Science. Students took a tour of a university art museum. They were asked to photograph some objects and only observe others. The next day, they remembered fewer of the objects they had photographed, and fewer details of them, than of those they had only looked at. In a second experiment, when they photographed one part of an object, zooming in, that drop did not show up, not even for the parts left out of the frame.

The limits matter. The people were students, it was a single museum, and the photos were requested by the study, not chosen by them. What was measured was memory of objects shortly after, and not emotion, gratitude or the worth of having the photo years later. Other researchers, such as Barasch and colleagues (2017), in the same journal, found a mixed picture: taking photos by choice improved memory for visual details and worsened it for sound details. An honest summary: in some situations taking a photo can get in the way of remembering; in others it helps; and research is still working out when.

Another much-cited study is by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel Wegner, from 2011, in the journal Science: "Google Effects on Memory". In some experiments, people who believed that a piece of information would stay saved on the computer remembered less of it, and more of where to find it. The authors' reading is that we have begun to treat the internet as a kind of shared memory, as we already do with friends and colleagues. Care is needed here. In 2018, Camerer and colleagues, in Nature Human Behaviour, repeated only the paper's first experiment, a reaction-time test, and did not find the effect. The part about remembering less of what is saved was not tested in that project. How much the effect exists, and under what conditions, is still discussed.

None of these studies speaks of a "flabby mind" or of lost identity. And none deals with memory in the sense of Psalm 103. At most they give a reason to notice that, for some things, looking and living the moment leaves more of a mark than recording it.

A small step

Instead of a conclusion, a simple question: which benefit, however small, would I like not to forget this week? It may be a conversation, help received, a good day. You can take a photo if that helps, and then spend a minute looking at it calmly, and say thank you to someone, or to God, or just under your breath. If you like, read Psalm 103:1–5 slowly.

There is no right way and no scoreboard. If today did not work out, the memory is still there, and so is the invitation.

Readings

• Bible: Psalm 103:1–5 and 14; Deuteronomy 6:4–12; Joshua 4:6–7; Luke 22:19.
• "Point-and-Shoot Memories: The Influence of Taking Photos on Memory for a Museum Tour," by Linda A. Henkel, Psychological Science, 25(2), 2014.
• "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips," by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner, Science, 333, 2011.
• "Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015," by Colin F. Camerer and others, Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 2018.
• "Photographic Memory," by Alixandra Barasch, Kristin Diehl, Jackie Silverman and Gal Zauberman, Psychological Science, 28(8), 2017.
• Memory and Tradition in Israel, by Brevard S. Childs, 1962.