Image source: Google
Recently, a friend of mine and I were arguing on the date of birth of Cristiano Ronaldo, and in an instant we got the answer by “Googling” it. When was the last time you hadn’t searched anything on the internet. Almost all of us are daily faced with such situations where we simply “Google” our questions and in a fraction of a second we have all the answer. We may know the answer as it is stored somewhere in our brain but instead of making an effort to search it on our brain memory, we simply type the question and in a matter of a few clicks we have the answer on our fingertips. There is no such piece of information which we cannot get on the internet, sounds good right? But have you thought that how can this actually harm our memory? Our recalling capacity? Yes you read it right! Such a phenomenon which we encounter almost daily in our lives are actually making our recalling capacities weaker, a phenomenon now rightly termed as the “Google Effect”.
It is quite surprising that these tools which make our lives so easier can actually harm us indirectly. Psychologists have been fascinated by such questions long ago and now a recent research study conducted by Daniel Wegner termed as “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” shows that when people can easily access the search engines or the internet, they tend to remember fewer facts and less information because instead of storing the information vigilantly and attentively in their brain and attending to it properly, they simply rely on the search engines as it is easily available there.
Another study confirming to Wegner’s study was one conducted by Columbia University Professor Betsy Sparrow. He concluded that "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.”
According to both these researches, people tend to look more often for the information on Google, and when it is easy to find, they are more likely to remember where they found it rather than the information itself. On the contrary if the information is not easily accessible only, it is more easily remembered.
Another psychologist, Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember and The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us, further explains the phenomenon. According to him when we remember or recall any piece of information, we actually make connections with what we know and this becomes part of our personal knowledge. The more we recall any piece of information, the stranger connections we are making. If we are not recalling, we are not making rich connections and hence we are not creating knowledge. And all this contributes to our weak memory regarding any information.
This phenomenon can be generalized to smartphones and other technological advances as well. You see people in the past used to easily remember the phone numbers of their lose family members, or even the extended family because they were not as easily available as it is nowadays so people used to commit to the information stored in the brain and used to store it attentively. Same goes to the birthday dates, while long ago people used to remember the birthday dates of their loved ones quite easily, but now it is easily available everywhere, you can store it in your mobile phones, it is there on the social media websites and you easily get notified about the birthdays of your closed ones so people do not make an effort to store and recall it, hence the connections becomes weaker and they are easily forgotten.
Conclusion
Although, Google is a very useful and helpful tool, don’t get me wrong here! Just be aware of the consequences it is causing by your dependence on it. Next time when any such situation occurs where you have to find and piece of information, before immediately reaching to your electronic device, first try if you can find the information in your own memory system rather than the internet. This will help you improve your memory in the long run – you will have better item memory, accessibility, and retrieval.