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Google Isn’t Destroying Your Brain
The internet is changing the way we remember facts — and not necessarily for the worse
How many times have you been asked a question that you weren’t sure about, so you fished out the phone from your pocket, opened a search engine, and in about two seconds (a little more if the Wi-Fi wherever you were was bad), you had your answer?
The modern dependence on the internet has spurred many psychologists to explore the possibility that the web may be affecting how we think and how we store information in our brains.
In 2011, Daniel M. Wegner — a former professor of psychology at Harvard University and a renowned social psychologist — published a paper called “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” He argued that with the increasing reliance on the internet, we tend to remember fewer facts and far less information than in the pre-internet era.
Indeed, from the perspective of our brain, tapping on the Google search button is a much better — and more efficient — way to retrieve knowledge than trying to file that information into our long-term memory.
The internet is becoming our brain’s very own USB drive.
This phenomenon is known as transactive memory, a hypothesis proposed by Wegner himself and defined as a mechanism in which we encode, store, and retrieve information. As Wegner explained in his study: “[It’s] this whole network of memory where you don’t have to remember everything in the world yourself, you just have to remember who knows it.”
It makes sense that we would want to rely on the internet. The internet is becoming our brain’s very own USB drive. We can rely on the search engine to give us the desired information anytime, anywhere without wasting any storage space in our brain. That is evolutionary perfection.
Not relying on the internet for information is akin to wasting 15 GB of storage on your phone to store photos when you could save the on-board storage on your phone by uploading the photos to the cloud, where you can access them at anytime, anywhere.
