The Cars

The Colbert Report:

Stephen: But now there’s a modern way to cram all the data into our sense holes, and it brings us to tonight’s Word: Head in the Cloud. Folks, to deal with information overload the human brain uses something called transactive memory, relying on friends and family to remember things you don’t have space for, like when a husband remembers to pay the electric bill while the wife remembers everything he’s done wrong for the past 10 years. (Like criticizing her on TV) Now our brains are applying the same technique online. It seems that Betsy Sparrow, Columbia researcher and Decemberist song lyric recently publishes a report called Memory in the Age of Google. (Look it up on Bing) Subjects in the study were asked to type facts into a computer such as: An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. (Research provided by Snapple caps) Now to determine how the internet affects our memory, half were told those facts were saved in the computer and the other half were told they would not be saved. The results were fascinating but I didn’t commit them to memory because I could always look them up on YouTube.

(Video: Betsy Sparrow: When people think you look up stuff online over and over again it’s continually accessible then they won’t remember it as well.)

Read the whole story: The Colbert Report