People do not memorize information because they believe find them online.
Study shows dependence on the internet to store information.
Search engines like Google and the databases on the Internet have become a kind of “external memory” of our brain, according to a
People do not memorize information because they believe find them online.
Study shows dependence on the internet to store information.
Search engines like Google and the databases on the Internet have become a kind of “external memory” of our brain, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal “Science”, which reveals that lose data retentive memory, but we gain skills in demand.
Educators and scientists have warned that the man was becoming increasingly dependent on online information, but until now there have been few studies that confirmed, notes psychologist Betsy Sparrow, an associate professor at Columbia University (New York) and author the study.
It was just his personal experience – to realize that often resorted to the movie database IMDB to remember the names of some actors – which led to further analyze the study habits and learning new generations.
Sparrow mentions the Doctor of Psychology and professor Daniel Wegner of Harvard University, who for 30 years had developed the theory of “transactional memory” refers to the ability to split the job of remembering certain type of shared information.
As an example, he pointed out a couple where the husband trusts his wife to remember important dates, such as doctors, as she trusts him remember names of distant relatives.Thus, both do not duplicate information or “hold” memory.
Because of this theory, Sparrow asked if the Internet was playing this role with all Internet users as a great collective memory. Along with her team, she held a series of experiments with more than 100 Harvard students to examine the relationship between human memory, the retentive data and the Internet.
The team found that when participants did not know answers to questions, your computer automatically thought of as the place to find the necessary information.
The researchers found that if students knew the information could be available at another time or they could go back to get it as easily, could not remember the answer so well as when they thought the data would not be available.
Another behavioral patterns indicated the study is that people do not necessarily remember to obtain certain information. However, they tend to remember where they found the data they need when they can not remember exactly the information.
The study, “Google on Memory Effects: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” (“Google Effect in Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having the information at your fingertips” in free translation) suggests that the population began to use the internet as his “personal bank data,” known as the “Google effect”, and the computers and search engines online have become a kind of system of “external memory”.
Sparrow says she was not surprised to see that more people do not memorize information because they trust that can get them with their search skills. “We are really efficient,” he says.