You there, how many hours have you been online? Five you say? Well you may be getting dumber by the minute! Apparently a new study shows that the internet use is negatively affecting our memories. Like all innovations that made our lives better, it also leads to our dependence on technology.
With the widespread use of search engines and online databases since the 90’s, the ability to remember information has affected people. The team of scientists, led by Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia, investigates if people are likely to remember information that easily available. This is similar to students trying to memorize information for tests and exams.
Dr. Sparrow and her teammates, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, created four different experiments on memory. In the first experiment, participants were sometimes confronted with difficult questions, and people begin to think about searching for answers online.
In another test, participants were asked to remember a trivia piece of information as well as the computer folder this information was stored in. Surprisingly, most were significantly able to recall the folder than the information itself.
“That kind of blew my mind,” Dr. Sparrow said in an interview. For these experiments explores an aspect known as transactive memory, a notion that we rely on our family, friends, colleagues and reference materials to store information on our behalf. Sparrow believes that this new development may lead to us being smarter, for we will not be spending energy in memorizing information, thereby saving brainpower for the understanding of concepts. “If you take away the mindset of memorization, it might be that people get more information out of what they are reading and they might better remember the concept,” she explained.
“I love watching baseball,” Dr. Sparrow said. “But I know my husband knows baseball facts, so when I want to know something I ask him, and I don’t bother to remember it.” While the Internet’s effects on memory are still largely unexplored, it seems to indicate that the Internet is fast becoming our external storage system.
