A UK study has found that Google is rapidly decreasing users’ memories, making them more forgetful, as Google search has allowed them to become more forgetful.
The new report about Britons’ knowledge regarding famous historical events and their occurrence, commissioned by Grant’s Whisky, revealed that just less than half of the overall 2,000 adults surveyed were able to recall the year in which Princess Diana died, even though it occurred as recently as 1997.
Just less than a third were able to remeber the year in which the Berlin Wall fell, while only half of them were able to answer when man first walked on the moon.
Surprisingly, nearly four in ten were not aware of the year in which the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in the US occurred.
Grant’s Whisky spokesman said that some of the dates are impressed upon people a lot at school and tend to stick but clearly the art for remembering dates fades and it seems they are now retaining less.
"Particularly in terms of recent events, for example people were four times more likely to know when The Battle of Hastings occurred than they were to know when the invasion of Iraq took place," he said.
"The internet is an incredible resource which enriches and adds much to the quality of modern life, but it could be changing the traditional way we remember and process things – certainly compared to older generations.
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"Perhaps the ability to know the exact dates of things isn’t so crucial, but it’s important the human stories behind those events don’t get lost and we never stop appreciating what’s happened before."
About 63% of them believe that the younger generation fail to completely appreciate some of the big events in the UK history while about half of them responded that the older age groups are not appreciated anywhere nearly in modern Britain.
