Internet Use Affects Memory

I had an interesting discussion with a professor about two years ago regarding our living in the information age. I don't even remember how it came up, but I postulated that rote memorization of facts is falling by the wayside as a result of the easy access of information at our fingertips. Why do I need to memorize my Greek lute tunings? If I ever need to know them, I'll be able to look them up on the fly. They're not something I need to know on a regular basis, but if I do, I have Google, encyclopedias (both wiki, and paid), online scholarly journals, old textbooks (looking at you, Grout), etc, etc. The information is stored in a very accessible manner, and gone are the days when needing to know something minute meant six hours in a library digging through books hoping against hope you'll find the answer you need. Information has truly become populist in accessibility.

Furthermore, anything you do need to recall quickly and on a regular basis, you will be able to because of repetition. If you use the information on a regular basis, you'll retain it. That's how our minds work. If not, you know where to find it. We won't become a society of inane robots who don't recall anything, rather we'll simply use our minds more efficiently, retaining that which is vital, which access to those facts that are less so.

And while clearly alien to this professor's experience, I could tell he didn't entirely disagree. Not sure he totally agreed with my viewpoint, but there was clearly some honest consideration of truth in my prediction.

Well, while I was blowing hot air about it, apparently scientists were actually researching it.

Abstract from study:

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.

And from the NY Times article where I first encountered this bit of info:

The scientists, led by  Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia, wondered whether  people were more likely to remember information that could be easily retrieved from a computer, just as students are more likely to recall facts they believe will be on a test.

Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased. 

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write. 

A second experiment was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember. “If asked the question whether there are any countries with only one color in their flag, for example,” the researchers wrote, “do we think about flags — or immediately think to go online to find out?”

In this case, participants were asked to remember both the trivia statement itself and which of five computer folders it was saved in. The researchers were surprised to find that people seemed better able to recall the folder. 

“That kind of blew my mind,” Dr. Sparrow said in an interview. 

The argument being made is that teachers might now start focusing more on broad concepts and synthesis than facts in their teaching style. (Which I think is something they should be doing anyway, but no one asks me.) Whether or not this will affect educational philosophy, I imagine we won't know for another decade or two, given how slowly these gears tend to grind.