The Internet Is Rewiring our Brains

Psychologists have learned that the Internet is becoming a primary form of transactive memory, meaning the information is external or stored outside of the person.

For some it is becoming far easier to reach for a keyboard than to try to extract a piece of information from the brain. Google and Yahoo! are among the first words people in a new study thought of when asked a trivia question.

Researchers say that rather than knowing the answer to a question we are learning how to seek the answer and fast. Over the last few decades intelligent quotients have been gradually rising but many people don’t feel any smarter.

But the research from Columbia University finds that the Internet is already changing the way we remember. Betsy Sparrow asked a bunch of trivia questions (including, which Best Picture nominee lost the Academy Award to Gone with the Wind in 1939?)

She is studying memory, specifically types of external memory, ranging from other people to the Internet. In this study, Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips, which is published in the current issue of the journal Science she looked at whether people think about their computers when they don’t know the answer to something.

She says, “We found that they do. Secondly, we found that people when they don’t expect to have access to information later remember it better than if they do expect to have that access.”

Before the Internet, we still relied on outside resources to find information. We called them other people. Other research shows that after the death of a spouse or even divorce, some people experience memory loss because they have lost their partner, a memory resource.

Now we are offloading much of the information we used to hold in our working memories and shifting to create memories of how to access the information rather than the information itself.

“We also found that people tend to prioritze where to find things over the things themselves, which is adaptive in this case I think.” — Betsy Sparrow, Columbia University

Is this part of our natural evolution or is technology driving the change? Please leave your comments below.