Internet Changing Memory?

In an article posted yesterday (July 15, 2011) in Boston.com, the Boston Globe's Internet newspaper, reports from the recent issue of Science that the Internet is changing how people think and remember.

The headline says it all: "Memory slips caught in the Net: Web changing how people recall facts, study says." The author is Carolyn Y. Johnson.

To quote from one of the scientists interviewed for the Boston.com piece:
“Our memories are changing,’’ said Daniel Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard and the senior author of the study. “So we remember fewer facts and we remember more sources, which website you saw it on or whose e-mail to look in to find that. . . . It’s like having information at our fingertips makes us always go to our fingertips.’’

Well, the fingertips do have grey matter!

Ok, obvious puns about kinesthetic memory aside, the articles does make the point that people are using Internet searches a lot and that this experience is shaping 1) how they look for information and 2) how they store (or forget) information. It seems that people remember the information that is either unusual or is not "stored" somewhere on the computer. Also, they remember how they looked for and found this information.

Frankly, this isn't surprising. Studies have shown that people "off-load cognition" into objects as a way to decrease short-term memory load and as a way to improve memory. If the stone you picked up on the beach on vacation is a memory-marker, you don't have to think about your vacation all the time.... but each time you pick up that stone you probably will access those memories.

Also, given the way that neural networks are constructed, the more we perform an action, the more connections and speed that action will have in the neural network. Given the number of times in a day most of us perform Internet searches, it is no surprise to me that we don't remember what we've searched for and found especially after we've "bookmarked" that item, but we do recall the steps that got us to this information.

Just last weekend, I did the same thing in Reno, Nevada when I took a girlfriend to the bakery I had been to the day before: I drove, got lost, and corrected in exactly the same way as before -- only the second time I laughed at myself the entire time!
(By the way, it was Josef's Bakery and Cafe -- excellent breakfast.)

The other charming thing about the Sparrow, Liu and Wegner study is that it provides hope for our interaction with the Internet and learning.... having a memory aid is no bad thing. One of their points, however, is that while information may be saved to "the Cloud" and its social network, important information may need to be personally retained.

Like all tools, the use is what's important!

Study: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner,
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745,
Published Online 14 July 2011,
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1207745