For millennia humans have relied on one another to
recall the minutiae of our daily goings-on. Now we rely on “the
cloud”—and it is changing how we perceive and remember the world around
us
A couple receives an invitation to a birthday party. Through long
experience, each intuitively knows what to do next. One partner figures
out whether the dress code is formal or casual. The other makes a mental
note of the time and place of the gathering so that they don't forget.
To some degree, we all delegate mental tasks to others. When
presented with new information, we automatically distribute
responsibility for remembering facts and concepts among members of our
particular social group, recalling some things on our own and trusting
others to remember the rest. When we can't remember the right name or
how to fix a broken machine, we simply turn to someone else charged with
being in the know. If your car is making a clunking noise, you call
Ray, your gearhead friend. can't remember who starred in
Casablanca?
Marcie, the movie buff, knows. All types of knowledge, from the prosaic
to the arcane, get apportioned among members of the group, whether the
social unit in question is a married couple or the accounting department
of a multinational corporation. In each case, we don't only know the
information stored within our own minds; we also “know” what kinds of
information other members of our social group are entrusted with
remembering.
In Brief
-
Remembering is traditionally a social enterprise. One person knows how
to cook a turkey. A partner recalls how to fix the leak in the sink.
-
The Internet changes everything. With nearly ubiquitous online access,
many people may first perform a smartphone search rather than calling a
friend.
-
Being online all the time changes the subjective sense of self as
borders between personal memories and information distributed across the
Internet start to blur.
This article was originally published with the title How Google Is Changing Your Brain.
How Google is Changing your Brain from
Joanny Causse on
Vimeo.
A new study confirms it:
Google (
GOOG)
is altering your brain. More precisely, our growing dependence on the
Internet has changed how -- and what -- our brains choose to remember.
When
we know where to find information, we're less likely to remember it --
an amnesia dubbed The Google Effect by a team led by psychologist Betsy
Sparrow of Columbia University.
Goodbye, soul-searching; hello, facts-at-fingertips.
The finding, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, doesn't prove that Google,
Yahoo (
YHOO)
or other search engines are making us dumber, as some have asserted.
We're still capable of remembering things that matter -- and are not
easily found online, Sparrow said.
Rather, it suggests that the
human memory is reorganizing where it goes for information, adapting to
new computing technologies rather than relying purely on rote memory.
We're outsourcing "search" from our brains to our computers.
"We're
not thoughtless empty-headed people who don't have memories anymore,"
Sparrow said. "But we are becoming particularly adept at remembering
where to go find things. And that's kind of amazing."
In a series
of four experiments at Columbia and Harvard, Sparrow and her team found
that students are more likely to recall a trivial fact if they think it
will be erased from the computer -- and forget it if they're assured it
will be there.
Similarly, the team proved that people are better
at remembering where to find facts, rather than the facts themselves.
The students, they found, recalled the names of files where information
was stored, rather than the information itself.
This creates a mental dependency on instant access to information, the team noted.
No
wonder the loss of our Internet connection feels like losing a friend,
they wrote. Once we become reliant on a huge reservoir of information,
it feels uneasy to be away from it, she said.
"We must remain plugged in to know what Google knows," the paper concludes.
But
in many ways, this is no different from humans' age-old reliance on the
"group memories" shared by friends, families and tribes, noted Sparrow
and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard
University.
We may not recall our aunt's birthday, the name of a
high school teacher or who gave us that nice bottle of wine -- but
someone we know does.
"We all have these people in our lives who
know certain things. And we dip into what they know, when we need it,"
said Sparrow. "We allow them to be responsible for it."
"I really think we are using the Internet the way we used to use people," she said.
While
Google said it could not comment on the premise of the paper, spokesman
Gabriel Stricker said, "Search is how Google began, and we're
constantly working to improve it. Search can always get better and
faster at helping you find what you want, when you want it, where you
want it."
Proving that the Internet is merely an expanded network
of people, New York University professor Clay Shirky, author of the book
"Cognitive Surplus," has done the math: The articles, edits, and
arguments on Wikipedia represent about 100 million hours of human labor,
he calculated. That's more than 11,400 years.
If we quit remembering, "the Internet would grind to a halt," Sparrow said. "Nobody would be feeding anything into it."
There
are losses -- unlike their great-grandparents, few of today's children
can recite poems like "The Rime of The Ancient Mariner." Perhaps this is
a skill that, when not practiced, turns rusty.
Sparrow disagrees
with Nicholas Carr, whose alarming 2008 article "Is Google Making Us
Stupid?" explains what he sees as the brain-corrosive side effects of
digital devices.
It doesn't prove that we're incapable of thinking
long and hard about anything, she said. "And it could be that once we
stop worrying about memorizing dates and facts and names, we're better
able to concentrate."
In fact, a wired life may actually open up
more creative things to do with our brain, the team said. Psychologists
have long known that it is easier to grasp an abstract concept when the
brain is not fixated on memorizing facts.
"Why remember something
if I know I can look it up again? In some sense, with Google and other
search engines, we can offload some of our memory demands onto
machines," Roddy Roediger, a psychologist at Washington University, told
Science in an accompanying article.
Sparrow became interested in
the topic one night at home, while watching the 1944 mystery-thriller
"Gaslight." She knew she recognized the maid -- but couldn't remember
her name.
"Before the Internet, I'd trace it back in my mind "...
thinking 'Where else did I see her? Was it in black and white, or color?
Was I with friends, or not? What book might know?' Anything to find a
clue," she said.
Instead, she went online and in seconds had an answer: An 18-year-old Angela Lansbury.
"I turned to my husband and said 'What did we do before the Internet?' "
Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 408-920-5565.
No comments:
Post a Comment