New York - Pub quiz devotees and Trivial Pursuit fans, be warned. The internet is making us so lazy that we are starting to rely on computers and smartphones instead of our memory.
In the age of Google, we are adapting to become experts at knowing which web page to look at instead of actually recalling the information, a study has found.
Researchers in the US discovered that many of us actively don’t bother to let something sink in if we know we can look it up online later.
Instead, we use the web as our “external memory”, just as we might use an external hard drive on a computer to store data.
Psychologists from Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia University carried out tests which compared how well participants remembered something with how well they knew where to find it on the internet.
The results showed that when faced with a gap in our knowledge, we are now “primed to turn to the computer to rectify the situation”.
And those who expect to have continuous internet access are actually better at remembering where they can find things out than at recalling the information itself.
The researchers concluded that such is our dependence on the web that having our connection severed is growing “more and more like losing a friend”. They added: “The internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.” - Daily Mail