Author Topic: Is the internet reducing our BRAIN exercise?  (Read 3924 times)

Offline W1nTry

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Is the internet reducing our BRAIN exercise?
« on: July 15, 2011, 10:30:21 AM »
Came across an interesting article that sought to determine the relationship between the widespread availability of information via google and wiki and the deterioration or improvement of memory function. I for one have a saying (about my tertiary educations), "university made me dumb". Why you may ask? I considered myself much more creative and able to 'think outside the box' BEFORE I did my first degree IN Engineering. However the structure of the courses led me down a path of 'DO IT THIS WAY OR ELSE' for the sake of making the grade. That aside however, I do have to admit that with the ease of access of SO much information, it gives me the 'feeling' that I don't NEED to remember specifically as much as say when I was in primary school where they made you feel that you NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING. So without further delay, have a gander at the article and let us know what you think, how google and wiki have affected your intepretation of 'NEED TO COMMIT TO MEMORY' and if you feel NOW that you actually know LESS than you ought to without the internets....

Quote
Study: why bother to remember when you can just use Google?
By Kyle Niemeyer | Published about 20 hours ago
Study: why bother to remember when you can just use Google?

In the age of Google and Wikipedia, an almost unlimited amount of information is available at our fingertips, and with the rise of smartphones, many of us have nonstop access. The potential to find almost any piece of information in seconds is beneficial, but is this ability actually negatively impacting our memory? The authors of a paper that is being released by Science Express describe four experiments testing this. Based on their results, people are recalling information less, and instead can remember where to find the information they have forgotten.

The authors pose one simple example that had me immediately agreeing with their conclusions. Test yourself: how many countries have flags with only one color? Regardless of your answer, was your first thought about actual flags, or was it to consider where you would find that information? Without realizing it (even though I knew the content of the paper), I found myself mentally planning on opening up my Web browser and heading for a search engine.

This concept of relying on external sources of information is not new to the computer age. In group environments, people develop what’s known as transactive memory, which is the sum of information held by the group (one of the authors of the current paper, Daniel Wegner, is the Harvard psychologist who first proposed the concept in 1985). Think of it like a group of experts working as a team, where each person has their own area of expertise—when you need some information you don’t have, you just go to the person who does.

The authors argue that easy access to information via the Internet forms another transactive memory source. However, in this case, access to this source may actually hurt our memory.

In the first experiment, the authors gave participants a mix of easy and hard trivia questions, then tested their response time to colored computer and non-computer words through a modified Stroop task. The task relies on having a term printed in color; if the term itself is interesting, subjects have a harder time naming the color. They found that, when given harder questions, people took longer on computer-related words, suggesting they thought about computers when needing information.

The second experiment tested whether people remember information if they expect to have easy access to it later. Subjects were asked to remember a bit of notable trivia and type it into a computer; half were informed that the information would be saved. People who didn’t believe they would need information (because it was saved) recalled less than if they thought they would need to remember it. In other words, we may unconsciously make little effort to remember something we know we can look up in the future.

In experiment three, the researchers wanted to see if people recalled the location where information could be found. Again using trivia, they had the subjects type a tidbit into a computer, then either erased it, saved it to a generic location, or saved it to a specific location. Later, the participants were asked to recall the trivia statements, whether they had been saved, and if so where. According to the paper, people have better recall of things they believe will be erased. But they were even better at remembering whether it was saved or erased—even though people didn’t remember where it was saved, just that it was.

The final experiment tested if people recall where to find information more than the information itself. Similar to experiment three, participants were given trivia statements and told where they would be saved, then were tested on both the content of the statements and the save locations. Overall, people remembered the locations where the information was saved more than the information itself. If they remembered the trivia, however, its location was forgotten.

The results from all four experiments suggest that people expect computerized information to be continuously available, and actually remember less when they know they’ll have access to it later. We also seem to remember where we can find information instead of the information itself.

Our memory appears to be adapting to technology, for better or worse. Some argue that the changes to our brains caused by instant access to information are damaging and similar to addiction, but other results suggest that actively searching online can actually strengthen some brains. Most wouldn’t consider typical group transactive memory to be damaging, but beneficial—who’s to say these developments aren’t also a good thing? With access to unprecedented amounts of external knowledge, perhaps this now unused capacity of our brains can be used in other ways?

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/07/study-why-bother-to-remember-when-you-can-just-use-google.ars

P.S. Reminds me of an episode of 'the outer limits' where a person woke up to a new world where everyone was connected to a central database and could pull data wirelessly straight to their brains, thus eliminating the need to remember, the outcome, the central repository was destroyed and everyone save the 'outsider' in the plot had to LEARN everything from scratch.

Carigamers

Is the internet reducing our BRAIN exercise?
« on: July 15, 2011, 10:30:21 AM »

Offline Tomshask

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Re: Is the internet reducing our BRAIN exercise?
« Reply #1 on: March 29, 2014, 09:29:58 AM »
Thanks W1nTry , that's really interesting and useful post .

Offline TriniXaeno

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Re: Is the internet reducing our BRAIN exercise?
« Reply #2 on: March 29, 2014, 11:36:56 AM »
I totally agree but welcome the development.

Memory was never my strong point, even as a child.

Realtime processes, I was ace....but ask me in what year slaves liberated dominica and my brain cells would draw a blank.

Now with google and 4g, I can answer that question pretty much anywhere anytime. No need to tax the deep recessed grey matter.

Bring it on technology.....boom bang

Carigamers

Re: Is the internet reducing our BRAIN exercise?
« Reply #2 on: March 29, 2014, 11:36:56 AM »

 


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