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A new survey released by a psychologist, Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University says that ‘The Google Effect' is changing the way people's brains choose to remember.
We all know the situation, you get into a conversation with a friend and they say ‘I Google'd this', or ‘Google it!'. With the search engine being such a big part of everyone's lives, it appears that it is actually altering our brains. Well according to Betsy Sparrow.
Her teams report, published in today's issue of Science isn't claiming that the search engine is making people dumber, but it is indicating that people are becoming more reliant on Google and search engines in general.
She says “We're not thoughtless empty-headed people who don't have memories anymore. But we are becoming particularly adept at remembering where to go to find things. And that's kind of amazing.”
Sparrow and her team conducted a series of four experiments. The memory test was particularly interesting, because 40 pieces of trivia were keyed into a computer via people (test subjects) involved. 50% thought that the information would be saved and the other half believed the information would be purged.
Those people who thought it wouldn't be stored to disk made more of an active effort to remember the data, knowing that they might not be able to find it again later.
Another experiment asked people to remember a trivia statement, but also a folder, out of five, in which it was stored. People were able to recall the folder, better than the content of the folder.
This is classed as ‘transactive memory' which means that the information location can be recalled, but not the actual data itself. Sparrow gave an example “I love watching baseball. But I know my husband knows baseball facts, so when I want to know something I ask him, and I don't bother to remember it.”
Sparrow added “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member, or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”
Kitguru says: Are you a child of the search engine? Find it hard to remember the details?
I have a policy with my friends that if something comes up in conversation that one of us wants to Google, we have to make a bet first to keep it interesting. Just think of the future when our brains are interfaced to electronic devices and we can Google just by thinking. Scary but possible.
I live on google search engine, even at night I would search for things that just pop into my head.
last night for instance, I saw a story on a bear protecting her cubs from a tiger or leopard and I started to find out about bears and their habitats etc.
Its educational if its used right, but maybe it does make us lazy to retain info. I can honestly say ive learned a lot by using it, in areas I would never have access too. im ashamed to say I just dont read books.
My brain always worked like this. When I was in school and at university (most of that was before Google was around, or even Altavista), I could often remember if a piece of information appeared in the left or right page of a book, and about where it was in the book. The details of the information itself were beyond me, however.