The Internet gradually changes the nature of human memory, scientists found out

As psychological experiments show, if people think that they can again turn to the facts reported by them, they tend to remember exactly where to look for them, and not what exactly contains the information received. In addition, when the participants in the experiments asked difficult questions, they began to think about computers, writes Science magazine.

The main author of the work, Dr. Betsi Sparrow from Columbia University, claims that the Internet has become a kind of transactionative memory. The initial idea of ​​transactive memory was that in addition to the personality of personality, there are peculiar "external storages" in other people.

“There are people who are experts in certain things, and we allow them to remain so, make them responsible for certain information,” said Dr. Betsy Sparrow in an interview with BBC .

The co -author of Sparrow is Daniel Wagner from Harvard University. It was he who was the first to propose the concept of transactive memory in his 1985 article “cognitive interdependence of close relationships”, having discovered that with prolonged relations in pairs, people rely on memory of each other.

“I really think that the Internet has become a form of such transactive memory, and I wanted to check this hypothesis,” says Dr. Sparrow.

In the first part of the study, scientists tried to test whether people will think about computers and the Internet if they ask difficult questions.

To find out, the researchers used a technique called a modified test scab. In the usual test, the scabs are measured how long it takes to read the name of the color in a person if the word denoting it is written in another color: for example, the word "green", written in blue letters.

In the modified version, people were offered questions with answers options correctly or incorrectly. At the same time, as it turned out, the response time on the topics in which she appeared the opportunity to contact the Internet, increased significantly, which could mean that when the participants did not know the answer, they already thought that this could be checked using the computer.

In another part of the experiment, participants were offered a set of certain facts. At the same time, half of the people were offered to decompose the information received on “folders”, and the other said that it would be impossible to return to the message after receiving it.

Participants from the second group, knowing that the information will not be available to them later, was remembered much more. Whereas those who placed the facts obtained on folders did not remember the essence of the messages very well, but they perfectly remembered where exactly they placed the data on a specific topic.

“This shows that the things that we find online are trying to store online - on an external medium,” says Dr. Sparrow.

According to her, the property of remembering the place where the necessary information is located, and not her itself, is a sign that people's memory did not get worse: just now we are organizing a huge amount of available information.

“I don’t think that“ Google ”makes us stupid, we just change the way of memorizing things,” says Dr. Sparrow. “If you can find something online, even when you walk along the street, then it becomes an important ability to know where exactly to look for this information.”