In July 2011, BBC News and others reported a journal in the journal Science that the internet changes the way that we think.
Psychology tests demonstrated that when we know that information we're about to be presented with will be available to access later, such as on the internet, we store it in our memories differently to when we know we might need to refer to it without accessing it again.
In the former case, we store less of the actual information in our brains, instead devoting storage space to remembering the location of the information and how to access it. This “transactive memory” has been described as an external memory store.
Despite the headline, it seems that this is nothing new, just an extension of what we as a social species have probably always done – specialise. We trust that some people are experts in certain things that we are not and have no interest in becoming, and allow them to do our remembering for us; remembering only who the expert is and how to find them.
For example, knowing which mushrooms are safe to eat is not something that I have need for much knowledge of, living in an industrialised city so it's not something that I need to remember. I do remember though where I put the book about mushrooms and that I can find from this book all I need to know when I'm in a forest.
This is not qualitatively different really to remembering the search terms I used to find a website with the same information on. So all the internet has done in this respect is enable us to have easier access to more experts, so we're probably just utilising this transactive memory more than we used to.
BBC News (2011). BBC News - Internet's memory effects quantified in computer study. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14145045. [Accessed 05 December 2011].
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