How many times have you been asked a question that you weren’t sure about, so you fished out the phone from your pocket, opened a search engine, and in about two seconds (a little more if the Wi-Fi wherever you were was bad), you had your answer?
The modern dependence on the internet has spurred many psychologists to explore the possibility that the web may be affecting how we think and how we store information in our brains.
In 2011, Daniel M. Wegner — a former professor of psychology at Harvard University and a renowned social psychologist — published a paper called “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” He argued that with the increasing reliance on the internet, we tend to remember fewer facts and far less information than in the pre-internet era.
Indeed, from the perspective of our brain, tapping on the Google search button is a much better — and more efficient — way to retrieve knowledge than trying to file that information into our long-term memory.
The internet is becoming our brain’s very own USB drive.
This phenomenon is known as transactive memory, a hypothesis proposed by Wegner himself and defined as a mechanism in which we encode, store, and retrieve information. As Wegner explained in his study: “[It’s] this whole network of memory where you don’t have to remember everything in the world yourself, you just have to remember who knows it.”
It makes sense that we would want to rely on the internet. The internet is becoming our brain’s very own USB drive. We can rely on the search engine to give us the desired information anytime, anywhere without wasting any storage space in our brain. That is evolutionary perfection.
Not relying on the internet for information is akin to wasting 15 GB of storage on your phone to store photos when you could save the on-board storage on your phone by uploading the photos to the cloud, where you can access them at anytime, anywhere.
Wegner’s experiments
Wegner conducted four experiments during his study to examine the effects of transactive memory. In the first experiment, participants were asked for answers to easy and hard trivia questions, divided into two problem sets. The trivia questions are along the lines of “How many yards in a kilometer?” or “What is the capital of Azerbaijan?”
The results showed that participants were more likely to think of search engine names like “Yahoo” and “Google” after being asked trivia questions.
In the second and third experiment, participants were made to type a series of unrelated facts into a computer.
Half of the participants were then told that their typed-up facts would be saved on the computer while the other half were told that their facts would be erased, forcing them to rely on their own memory during fact-recalling.
The results were consistent with the transactive memory phenomenon: Participants who thought they’d have access to their typed facts recalled fewer facts than those who were told that their series of facts were deleted.
In the final experiment, participants typed a series of statements into a computer as in the previous experiment, except this time the participants were shown which folder location their statements were stored. When asked to recall both the folder location and the actual statement, more participants remembered the folder location than the actual statement.
These four experiments showed a trend toward external storage in order to remember less and less on our part.
Implications of Wegner’s experiments
It may seem like this is an imminent crisis for humanity — the internet will soon cripple the thinkers and scholars of the next generation given how much information will be offloaded from the human brain.
But this isn’t the first time in our history as a species that we underwent drastic changes in the way we store information.
When humans first invented writing more than 5,000 years ago, it resembled a proto-internet. Instead of relying on their memory, humans could now store information on a parchment. Offloading that memory from their brains to that parchment made the information still accessible if they ever needed the facts, but it no longer occupied an active part of their mind.
Take a more recent example: calculators. In the ’80s, most math classes strictly prohibited calculator use on tests. Fast forward to the present and calculators are ubiquitous in most high school and college testing. It allows students to show what their creative mathematical minds can actually do and takes the boring computational tasks out of the equation.
We will still somehow remember the last three words of an instruction manual we read two weeks ago but forget where we left our keys last night.
After all, that’s why we study science in the first place — to automate what we already know so we can focus on what we don’t know. As Wegner wrote, “We still have to remember things, we’re just remembering a different range of things.”
Given this chance to declutter our brain with esoteric or complicated information that has little relevance to our daily lives, we allow the information left in our brain to be truly important and useful to us every single day.
Of course, just because we can rely on Google doesn’t mean our brain automatically becomes evolved enough to filter out every single piece of useless information. We will still somehow remember the last three words of an instruction manual we read two weeks ago but forget where we left our keys last night. And some have argued that the cluttering nature of technology isn’t helping either.
That’s mainly because of our brain physiology — a collection of different factors that affect which memories are held on to in the long-term memory and which ones we discard in the short-term memory.
As for whether allowing massive amounts of information to be transferred from our brain to search engines will eventually impact our critical thinking skills and logical reasoning, only time will tell.
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