It has answers to almost every question in the world, but spending too much time on the search engine could be making us forgetful, so says the latest research.
Research from Harvard found that people were more likely to forget facts shown to them on a computer if they thought the information had been safely stored. And those who believed it would be immediately erased were more likely to remember it.
The results, which came about after both groups were told to actively remember what they had seen, are not surprising.
Memory, like other tools, will decay without exercise. When the calculator was introduced at schools, people stopped doing basic sums in their head. Likewise, when writing was invented, Socrates worried that reliance on writing would stop people from using their memory.
With so much information now available in print and digital formats at the click of a mouse, his belief appears to have an element of truth. I remembered far more as a child. Like other children, who had no phone or internet, I used retain phone numbers, poetry and birthdays with ease. Doing that today without a smartphone is far more challenging and I have to work harder to remember numbers.
As Daniel Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard University, and Adrian Ward from the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote in the journal Scientific American: "Using Google gives people the sense that the internet has become part of their own cognitive tool set. We off-load memories to ‘the cloud’ just as readily as we would to a family member, friend or lover."
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