The way search engines like Google make it almost effortless to find the answers to any question with a few taps of the fingertips could be changing the way our memory works, according to a study published recently in the research journal Science.
The report, co-authored by Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Columbia University; Jenny Liu at the University of Wisconsin Madison; and Daniel Wegner at Harvard, suggests that the brain is much less likely to recall information when it knows it can find the information quickly online. Instead, the brain will more often remember where the information can be retrieved, rather than what the information actually is.
The study was conducted in four experiments.
Volunteers, all college students, were asked to answer a series of questions or perform cognitive tasks. In one experiment, the students were asked trivia questions and asked to type their answers. Half the volunteers thought their information would be saved, the other thought it would be erased. Sparrow said the students who believed their data would disappear remembered the answers better than the other group.
In another experiment, the volunteers were told their information was being saved in general folders such as "FACTS" and "NAMES." The students remembered where there data was stored more often than they remembered the data itself.
The research suggests that someone who feels they have access to information later, like many people do with the Internet, are less likely to memorize small pieces of information since it is so often readily available.
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