The WEB is becoming our main store of memory instead of our own brains, a recent study shows.
In the age of Google, our minds are adapting so that we are experts at knowing where to find information even though we don’t recall what it is.
Researchers at the universities of Harvard, Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia found that when quizzed participants wanted to know something, they used the internet as an “external memory” just as computers use an external hard drive. Some “actively did not make the effort to remember” when they thought they could later look up trivia they had read.
“The internet has become a primary form of… transactive memory, where (data) is stored collectively outside ourselves,” the paper said. – Daily Mail