The Price of Super Availability: Finding Information Online Degrades Memory

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Constant access to information on the Internet impairs a person's memory and slows down thought processes. This conclusion was reached by scientists at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Illinois at Urbana Shapmein.

“The more information becomes available through smartphones and other devices, the more addicted we become in our daily life,” says study author Benjamin Storm. He argues that people, without realizing it, are already using the Internet as an "additional hard drive" in their own memory system. He calls this "cognitive unloading": the ability to find secondary information on the Internet at any time allows us to free up brain resources for more important purposes. At the same time, as the study shows, own memory and other cognitive skills decrease. He suggests that this effect is especially noticeable immediately after the next session of searching for information on the network.

To test the hypothesis, he, along with colleagues Sean Stone and Aaron Benjamin, tested students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose average age is about 20 years. The researchers put together a set of sixteen questions from the fields of history, sports and pop culture. The experiment took place in a quiz format and was divided into two stages. At the first stage, students were asked eight relatively difficult questions - that is, those that, according to scientists, can only be answered without the help of the Internet by a few students at the University of California. For example, "What did King John do in 1215?" and "Who became the next president after John F. Kennedy was assassinated?" The students were divided into 2 groups. Participants of the first had to search for answers to all questions in Google Search, even if they were sure that they already knew the answer. And the members of the second group were banned from using the Internet and had to rely on their own memory.

At the second stage, all students were asked eight more questions, this time allowing them to use the Internet. The members of the second group, who had previously done without Internet access, tried to answer themselves and turned to the search engine only if necessary. In contrast, the members of the first group immediately searched for the answer on Google, although the level of the tasks was much easier than in the previous stage. The authors claim that 30% of them did not try to independently answer even the simplest questions, such as "What is Big Ben?" and "How many zodiac signs are there?"

See also: Brain Degradation

A repeated experiment showed that participants in the first group prefer Google even if it is time consuming and difficult to use (for example, if you need to work on an old inconvenient tablet).