It’s Official! Google Is Making Me Stupid
Well I guess we all knew this but recently published research by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner for Science Magazine entitled “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” (snappy title isn’t it) confirms what we all feared.
Google is making us stupid!
So the science bit goes a little like this.
Our brains process information in various ways however when presented with a new piece of information that the brain expects to be able to access from an external source at a later date, instead of remembering said information, it remembers where to find it and in 2011 that means one thing. The Internet!
So people are actually using Google as their own personal memory banks. An extension of their own brains without being conscious they are doing so!
Or in science speak:
The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.
So the full research can be found over at Science Magazine (sorry but you need to subscribe to download the very long and detailed research paper) but it really does appear that without us realising it, our own brains have been moving to the cloud as well.
So are our children destined to just be a collection of meta directories on legs? Do you think Google can find a way to monetise this phenomenon? Will Google take over the world (and our minds)? Do you want fries with that?
Google has a whole range of productivity tools from Gmail to Docs. Enabling you to live and work in the cloud and all for free.
