Insight into the effects of the Internet on what one remembers.

[Tank]

Internet's memory effects quantified in computer study

Computers and the internet are changing the nature of our memory, research in the journal Science suggests.

Psychology experiments showed that people presented with difficult questions began to think of computers.

When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.

The researchers say the internet acts as a "transactive memory" that we depend upon to remember for us.

Lead author Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University said that transactive memory "is an idea that there are external memory sources - really storage places that exist in other people"...

An interesting insight into the way humans don't do what they don't have to. Consider a 'primitive' tribal society. There are specialist 'experts' supported by the tribe, usually a shaman of some sort and probably a chief. These members are unproductive in the day-to-day sense. They don't hunt or farm but are repositories of skills and/or knowledge. So tribal members don't have to know or remember what the shaman knows just the general things that the shaman should know.

Nowadays it would appear that the internet is being perceived as a 'shaman' or knowledgable authority.

Of course the other effect here is that a shaman may also be a tribal priest in addition to being the medicine-man and thus is perceived as authority on morals and cultural law.

It would appear that there is a human propensity to divest oneself of the burden of discovering/remembering that which we can access through other means.

[Tank]

Additional comentry on the article Google Is Like a 'Mental Prosthetic'