Hey, absent-minded professional: Your favorite gadget could sap your ability to remember.
Only a few years ago, Michael Schell had a memory that put people to shame. The CEO for RW3 LLC, a New York-based expatriate cultural online training organization, had almost every important phone number, calling-card code, and PIN - hundreds of them - committed to memory. He also knew his entire schedule for the week without glancing at a calendar. "I could recall all the information instantly," he says.

Then he bought a personal digital assistant (PDA) and began storing all the data in it. "Now I can't recall my wife's cellphone number, and I find myself increasingly relying on the device to serve as my memory," he admits. "If you lose or damage the device, you can find yourself in big trouble."

These days, Schell isn't the only one worried about losing his mind. Amid a deluge of personal information - phone numbers, e-mail addresses, birthdays, passwords, PINs, credit-card numbers and expiration dates, government and employee ID numbers, and more - people increasingly rely on computers, PDAs, and cellphones to store data and auto-dial calls. The same people often find this same data disappearing from their brains.

That's leading some scientists to question whether gadgets undermine our memories and change the way we think. "Our brains have only a certain amount of memory capacity, and we have to pick and choose what we commit to memory,"­ says Dr. Gary Small, director of the UCLA Center on Aging and author of The ­Memory Prescription: Dr. Gary Small's 14-Day Plan to Keep Your Brain and Body Young. "There's
no question that these devices make our lives easier and allow us to retrieve information more quickly. The question is, Does it worsen brainpower or lead to negative results?"