Saving Computer Files Makes Your Human Memory Work Better

The Huffington Post:

Saving a computer file appears to improve your human memory, a scientific study suggests.

The act of recording something artificially appears to “free up space” in the brain, and make it easier to recall different information.

Whatever way you do it, the result is a fundamentally better ability to recall new information, the study published in Psychological Science by Benjamin Storm of the University of California, Santa Cruz says.

The study looked again at older evidence that saving information makes it more difficult to remember that specific information. That might be true, the study says, but a side-effect is that remembering new data is made easier by the same process.

In the study, 20 students had to open and study a file containing a list of 10 common nouns. Half the students had to close the file before opening another list, while half saved the file to a specific folder first. They then studied the second file, were tested on recalling the list, and then had to recall the nouns from the first file.

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post