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Toral Contractor
This is Your Brain. This is Your Brain on Google.
July 21st, 2011
How many times have you said, “Let’s just Google it” when you couldn’t remember a date for a historic event or any other piece of trivia? Probably a lot more than you ever used to say it since it’s so easy to find it now on the Internet.
A recent study, led by Betsy Sparrow from Columbia University, found that the Internet is changing the way we recall or access information. The study explored an aspect of transactive memory where we rely on external resources for information. The study had four different memory experiments to recall different types of trivia. In one experiment, some subjects were told that the information of trivia would be saved on a computer while others were told that the information would not available on the computer. They found that the subjects did not bother memorizing the information if they knew that they could retreive it later.
In another experiment, subjects were shown a trivia statement about flags and then it was placed in one of five folders on the computer. The subjects were able to better remember what folder the information was in rather than the trivia statement itself.
This one study shows us that we are using the Internet as our primary source for storing information externally. There’s definitely a lot more research to be done to learn more about the effects that technology is having on us. “Human memory,” Dr. Sparrow told the New York Times, “is adapting to new communications technology.”
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Tags: cognitive science, memory
