The access to data anytime, anywhere, through search engines like Google, is taking an effect on human memory, according to a new study, ultimately altering the way the brain functions.
With so much information available, there is less need to remember everything, especially with tools like Google allowing us find what we need quickly. The result ― the Internet becomes an "external memory" for humans.
At least that's what the study "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips" says.
Published by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, on the Web site of Science Magazine, the authors performed a number of experiments into how the human brain uses memory differently when computers are involved.
"The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger," the report says. "No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can 'Google' the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue."
As an example, about 60 Harvard students were asked to type 40 pieces of trivia, such as "An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain," into computers, and were told either the information would be saved or erased, the International Business Times reported.
People who believed the data would be saved were less likely to remember, according to the study published online by the journal Science.
"The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves."
The research also found that people are primed to look to the Internet first for knowledge.
Another experiment, run on 34 undergraduates at Columbia University in New York, showed that people remembered where they stored their information better than they were able to recall the information itself.
"We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems," the authors wrote in the paper. "We have become dependent on them to the same degree we are on all the knowledge we gain from our friends and coworkers ― and lose if they are out of touch."
It isn't clear what the effects of being so "wired" will have on people over time, the authors, led by Betsy Sparrow of Columbia, wrote.
But it suggests that the use of search engines is causing our brains to reorganize where it goes for information, adapting to new computing technologies rather than relying solely on rote memory.