Study Shows Using Google Makes Us Forgetful
A new study by Columbia University psychologists does just that. A new type of amnesia, called the Google Effect, is impacting how humans remember facts because we rely too much on search engines to remember small details or facts. The study was published Friday in the journal Science. The full report can be read on the journal’s website. For now you can tell others that Google does have an impact on your memory!
“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,” Professors Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel Wegner wrote in their report. “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”
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