Is Google Ruining Your Memory?

Wired:

By now, you’ve probably heard about this smart study showing that Google is making you stupid, led by Betsy Sparrow at Columbia. The scientists demonstrated that the availability of the internet is changing the nature of what we remember, making us more likely to recall where the facts are rather than the facts themselves. Patricia Cohen of the Times summarizes the results:

Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased.

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write.

A second experiment was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember. “If asked the question whether there are any countries with only one color in their flag, for example,” the researchers wrote, “do we think about flags — or immediately think to go online to find out?”

Read the whole story: Wired