Summary

Piece of Mind: Is the Internet Replacing Our Ability to Remember?

Researchers study whether the use of the Internet as a memory aid leads to a lazy mind, or whether memorization is overrated

By Larry Greenemeier | July 14, 2011

The internet has changed the way we look for information. Before we had to remember everything, but now we have services like Google, IMDB and Wikipedia to do all the hard work for us at any situation. But can this commodity make us have lazy minds? Not according to researchers at the Columbia University. They say that when people are faced with difficult questions, they are likely to think that the Internet will help them find the answers.

In the pre-internet past, people relied on books, libraries and one another to get the information they wanted. Nowadays when you face a situation like when you don’t remember a name of an actress you can just lookup on IMDB and in instants you’ll know everything about her career.

It is known that the easier way to get information inside your brain is to memorize it. This technique is used by many students to pass on tests but it doesn’t really add much intellectual value to you, it is far more important to understand information on a conceptual level. On the other hand some people believe that memorizing eventually leads to understanding and even in an unusual event that our gadgets fail one day, we still would remember the things that are most important to us.

On the internet, if you look hard enough you’ll find a web site that validates pretty much anything you want to believe. The cyberspace if filled with contradiction and the propagation of information leads to false sense of consensual validation. So no matter where the information is stored you’ll always need to have a critical thinking.

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=internet-transactive-memory