TOTAL RECALL?: The advent of the Internet and near-ubiquitous information at our fingertips makes it less critical for us to commit items to memory. Using the Internet as a mental crutch is not necessarily a bad thing, according to researchers.
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Has the Internet dumbed down society or simply become an external storage unit that enhances the human brain's memory capacity? With Google, Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia at our beck and call via smart phones, tablets and laptops, the once essential function of committing facts to memory has become little more than a flashback to flash cards. This shift is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it irreversible, according to a team of researchers whose study on search engines and learning appears in the July 15 issue of Science.
Led by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow, the researchers conducted a series of experiments whose results suggest that when people are faced with difficult questions, they are likely to think that the Internet will help them find the answers. In fact, those who expect to able to search for answers to difficult questions online are less likely to commit the information to memory. People tend to memorize answers if they believe that it is the only way they will have access to that information in the future. Regardless of whether they remember the facts, however, people tend to recall the Web sites that hold the answers they seek.
In this way, the Internet has become a primary form of external or "transactive" memory (a term coined by Sparrow's one-time academic advisor, social psychologist Daniel Wegner), where information is stored collectively outside the brain. This is not so different from the pre-Internet past, when people relied on books, libraries and one another—such as using a "lifeline" on the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?—for information. Now, however, besides oral and printed sources of information, a lion's share of our collective and institutional knowledge bases reside online and in data storage.
The idea for Sparrow's research sprang from a common occurrence in many homes—a few years ago she was watching a movie with her husband and saw an actress whose face she could not quite place. Using Internet Movie Database on her laptop, she quickly discovered that the actress was Angela Lansbury (debuting in 1944's Gaslight), who went on to star in dozens of movies and the popular Murder, She Wrote TV show of the 1980s and '90s.
What would Sparrow's alternatives have been if the Internet never existed? Most likely, if she could not eventually come up with the answer herself, she would have asked a friend or family member for help. Another option would have been to consult a cinema reference book. Or she would have simply had to live with that nagging curiosity and moved on.
The situation with the Internet is in many ways not all that different than it ever was, Sparrow says. "It's different in the sense that information is much more available than it was," she says. "In the past you would have to go through the filing system in your brain, maybe with the help of someone else to try to remember."
Some people are troubled that information gleaned online plays too large a role in their fact-access process, yet this reliance on external memory seems to bother them less if the information resides in the brain of another person. "It's not as salient to people that we do this with other people, but it's obvious to them that we do this with the Internet," Sparrow says.
Besides, memorization is overrated, according to Sparrow. "Obviously we need some baseline skill in memorizing things, but I personally have never seen all that much intellectual value in memorizing things," she says, adding that it is far more important to understand information on a conceptual level. As an instructor, she has seen how some students struggle with cognition related to the things she teaches, whereas they would do much better if they simply had to memorize a bunch of answers. "Memorizing is the easier thing to do, which is why students do it," she says.
Sparrow continues to research the impact on learning if instructors remove the expectation of memorization. "Will students better be able to learn focusing on conceptualizing and understanding information rather than simply remembering it?" she asks. "More likely, if a person does not think the information will be available later, they will try to memorize it, often at the expense of understanding the concepts."
And if our gadgets were to fail due to a planet-wide electromagnetic pulse tomorrow, we would still be all right. People may rely on their mobile phones to remember friends' and family members' phone numbers, for example, but the part of the brain responsible for such memorization has not been atrophied, she says. "It's not like we've lost the ability to do it."
John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., and author of the online book The Psychology of Cyberspace, agrees. "I suspect that we're still going to remember information that's important to us, while relying on the Internet to verify what we think might be true or have forgotten, and to provide new information to which we were never exposed," he says.
Perhaps the more pressing issue is whether people will develop the ability to scrutinize online information. "If you look long and hard enough, you will find a Web site that validates almost anything you might want to believe, whether it's true or not," Suler says. "It's also clear that cyberspace is filled with differences of opinion, contradictory 'facts,' and the propagation of information from one site to another that gives the illusion of consensual validation."
In this respect, the Internet is just like any other memory system—the need for critical thinking does not diminish, regardless of where the information is stored.
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16 Comments
Add CommentBrain injuries, here. Struggled for decades with crates of books, notebooks and other media as an external memory, since I have trouble with my own. Internet changed all that: everything stored digitally, easy to retrieve. Frankly, internet helps memory A LOT! I've learned SO MUCH about literature, science, politics, art, animal husbandry, sustainable living and on and on. I NEVER would have learned all this with books and libraries. Give the trees a rest. If our minds are free from storing minutia, might they not create the paradigm shift that could save us and our planet from ourselves?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBetsy Sparrow said, "I personally have never seen all that much intellectual value in memorizing things."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgreed. Who had a higher intellectual value to society: Kim Peek (Rain Man), who could memorize an entire phone book, or Albert Einstein, who could not remember his own phone number?
I read a similar article several decades ago which maintained that the rise of literacy in the West and then throughout the world caused peoples' ability to memorize to deteriorate. I'm somewhat oversimplifying their argument but it was a case of use it or lose it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProve it!If you remember how!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor an elderly person, names and facts that used to be well known now may not come to mind, however hard one tries to remember them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut by Googling something connected with the subject, the word needed will spring out.
I've been noticing this phenomenon with my memory. Over the past 4-5 years, I've been shifting from rote memorization of appointments, events, phone numbers, facts, etc. to storing them as notes, Google calendar reminders, and other apps on my phone/computer. I seem to recall a lot less information than I used to. Recently, I worried if this was in fact a harm. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I can't remember things if I try...I think I just stopped trying once I knew my phone or email would remind me ;)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLooks like others here agree that it's not so bad, after all =)
"Know where to find the information & how to use it. That’s the secret of success." quoted from Albert Einstein
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do think that the Internet is just another source of information that is quite handy, convenient, allows for rapid access and other factors that help the mind and memory functions. It also helps with environmental issues and I reduce trips to libraries and book stores. I suffer from a mild form of autism (slow learner, memory issues in term of transfer to long term memories) and find that easy access to information of the "printed" type does increase my retention. Repeat, repeat, repeat is key to improved information retention for me. The Internet has improved my abilties to find, learn, practice,repeat so I have improved reading and retention abilities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMemorising something does not mean that it is understood.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnless the information can be made use of then it is useless.
PS . My vote is for Albert.
Others have worried about this also and wondered what would happen to society with this new change in technology now that memorization was no longer necessary. Yes, Plato recorded Socrates worrying about what would happen to memorization with this new technology called the book.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have trouble memorizing spelling so the internet helps me in lots of ways, that is if you dont have something completely new...I also need glases to read books, glasses I do not have.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA book, but you cant click and change the font size.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is nice to have so many references available online, but you still have to have the "Key" to access that data. There is more to forget than ever before. Like that Bing ad there is an excess of information as well. There may be things we can access that we couldn't before. It is very nice to have the convenience of "look it up" on any curiosity as well, which makes one, indeed, smarter. It is fun being smarter. However there is information that one simply cannot access on the internet. How well does the internet help you with your job? The data is more available and there is more data than ever, but you must still do the thinking to get results.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Is the Internet Replacing Our Ability to Remember?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat was the question again?
(google makes for stupid people. wiki gives them the illusion they are not stupid, until it is no longer available. Facts without context are little more than trivia, which is all people get from their internet sources)
I dont think its a big of a deal its just things that make life easier for us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour case sounds like, use it or lose it. I myself rely too much on the technologies that when I talk with my friends, I could hardly use the correct terms or recall the precise information. And this seriously interrupts my communication when my cell phone or notebook is out of my reach. I can't say technologies are harmful to our memory system but it does affect the way we communicate. Imagine if we are canoeing with a friend, and everything that's being talked about is vague because no Internet is available at that time. This air-headed conversation might bore everybody on boat to death... Just my personal opinion.
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