Is the Internet Changing the Way We Remember? (nbcnews.com) 54
"A study in 2019 found that the spatial memory used for navigating through the world tends to be worse for people who've made extensive use of map apps and GPS devices..." reports NBC News.
But that's just the beginning, according to Adrian Ward, who studies psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. NBC says Ward's research suggests "People who lean on a search engine such as Google may get the right answers but they can also end up with a wrong idea of how strong their own memory is." In Ward's research, published in October in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, he used a series of eight experiments to test how people used and thought about their own knowledge as they completed short quizzes of general knowledge. Some participants had access to Google while answering the questions — "What is the most widely spoken language in the world?" was one — while others did not. They also completed surveys. He found that people who used Google were more confident in their own ability to think and remember, and erroneously predicted that they would know significantly more in future quizzes without the help of the internet. Ward attributed that to Google's design: simple and easy, less like a library and more like a "neural prosthetic" that simulates a search in a human brain.
"The speed makes it so you never understand what you don't know," Ward said.
The findings echo and build on earlier research, including a widely cited 2011 paper on the "Google effect": a phenomenon in which people are less likely to remember information if they know they can find it later on the internet.... In a review of recent studies in the field, published in September, researchers at Duke University found that the "externalization" of memories into digital spheres "changes what people attend to and remember about their own experiences." Digital media is new and different, they wrote, because of factors such as how easily images are edited or the huge number of memories at people's fingertips.
Each photographic cue means another chance for a memory to be "updated," maybe with a false impression, and each manipulation of a piece of social media content is a chance for distortion, wrote the researchers, doctoral student Emmaline Drew Eliseev and Elizabeth Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of a lab dedicated to studying memory.
But that's just the beginning, according to Adrian Ward, who studies psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. NBC says Ward's research suggests "People who lean on a search engine such as Google may get the right answers but they can also end up with a wrong idea of how strong their own memory is." In Ward's research, published in October in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, he used a series of eight experiments to test how people used and thought about their own knowledge as they completed short quizzes of general knowledge. Some participants had access to Google while answering the questions — "What is the most widely spoken language in the world?" was one — while others did not. They also completed surveys. He found that people who used Google were more confident in their own ability to think and remember, and erroneously predicted that they would know significantly more in future quizzes without the help of the internet. Ward attributed that to Google's design: simple and easy, less like a library and more like a "neural prosthetic" that simulates a search in a human brain.
"The speed makes it so you never understand what you don't know," Ward said.
The findings echo and build on earlier research, including a widely cited 2011 paper on the "Google effect": a phenomenon in which people are less likely to remember information if they know they can find it later on the internet.... In a review of recent studies in the field, published in September, researchers at Duke University found that the "externalization" of memories into digital spheres "changes what people attend to and remember about their own experiences." Digital media is new and different, they wrote, because of factors such as how easily images are edited or the huge number of memories at people's fingertips.
Each photographic cue means another chance for a memory to be "updated," maybe with a false impression, and each manipulation of a piece of social media content is a chance for distortion, wrote the researchers, doctoral student Emmaline Drew Eliseev and Elizabeth Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of a lab dedicated to studying memory.
I have a pretty good memory (Score:2)
since I was born before the internet was invented
Re:I have a pretty good memory (Score:5, Funny)
How in the world do you know you were born before the internet was invented? Did you google it :) ?
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I was born in 1957
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I somehow lost my brain. :(
Re: I have a pretty good memory (Score:2)
The internet is a stash with facts, but you still have to know the keywords and what they mean to find useful info.
I don't really memorize all formulas, just the keywords like Navier-Stokes and similar to find what I need for the moment.
Same old, same old (Score:5, Informative)
Plato denounced the tool of writing, because it would end up with memory, [antiquitatem.com] essential human faculty.
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.
You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
Re:Same old, same old (Score:4, Interesting)
Though I also remember the other part of the spectrum as I've had a physics professor who would dump on his chemist colleague for 'wasting brain capacity for numbers that can be looked up'. He saw it as a merit of modern advancement that we 'physics-inclined' people can go to the library and look up specific numbers if we need them, or we carry a book with tables and numbers, or check our notes.
Personally I think this is a highly contextual issue.
If you're in the field and have to make split second decisions, it's probably good to memorize things. And fortunately for most people, repetition does help memorizing things, hence field experience tends to lead to people memorizing important things.
However if you're not in a situation where time is not a factor as critical, there's often enough leeway to pull out your phone and check your GPS maps, use the calculator or look up something on google.
TFA talks about another issue in conjunction with the former though, namely that the information we access this way is subject to more or less arbitrary change.
I'm not sure what the implications there are. Is it people are getting gaslighted without noticing it, because their supposed memory is so spotty that they won't notice changes? Something else?
I haven't read past TFA, yet.
Re:Same old, same old (Score:5, Funny)
He saw it as a merit of modern advancement that we 'physics-inclined' people can go to the library and look up specific numbers if we need them, or we carry a book with tables and numbers, or check our notes.
My fellow chrono-Americans will remember the Chemical Rubber Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, filled with the most important tables, functions and constants that might be needed by researchers . Every nerd had one of these. Pressed somewhere in its pages was a foil packet with that one hopeful condom that had grown dried and cracked with age.
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Looks like one too many "not" there, Butch....
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Just for clarification it was meant to say: However, if you're not in a situation where time is a critical factor.
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The ability to estimate and range-check calculations is very useful. It's easy to mis-key a number on a calculator, and if you have some idea of what the expected range of answers would be it's easier to spot.
Similarly for GPS and satellite navigation, it helps to be able to sanity check the instructions it's giving you. I think they actually teach it on the British driving test now.
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In such situations sacrificing precision for performance is also valuable indeed, called 'back of the envelope' (not sure what the English name for it is, that's what wikipedia suggested when using the German word "überschlagen")?
It's the closest fit approximations. To cite an example of today, there was a question how long the light from the Sun takes to arrive at Earth. From having played Elite: Dangerous I was familiar with the ~499Ls distance. Having m
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Usually yes, but I think there is cause for concern in the query.
And it has been studied somewhat, like that article I _remember_ reading about cab drivers in London (I believe) that when using gps instead of relying on memory lost their ability to recall addresses they previously had to learn for a license, or some such issue.
When I go to the capital of sweden (Stockholm) by car, I usually rely on my gps, but never in my hometown, I look up the way before hand, if it's a seldom visited place, and then go b
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When going into an area that I've never been I study the maps extensively, in an effort to become roughly familiar with the area before leaving. If there's time enough, I'm likely to spend a few hours a day for a week preparing. And then I rely on the audio cues from my GPS to assist in finding the landmarks and intersections that I've memorized.
I recently started working for a new company; it's located in the city where I grew up, and despite the city having changed drastically, I didn't need to study m
Re:Same old, same old (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up. "Illusory competence" is a very real thing, and, just like confirmation bias, it afflicts everyone regardless of their expertise. It may even afflict the competent the most: once you've really earned your place in a subject matter, you've done the hard work and suffered, you more easily fall into the trap of feeling competent in all areas.
But this is almost always, always false. You haven't earned your place. The world is complex and difficult, as you yourself should know! A swift Internet search doesn't make you any smarter than any other schlub who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Re:Same old, same old (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly.
Before the widespread adoption of the telephone, people weren't usually able to remember 7-digit numbers. This by the way is on the way out again because all contacts are stored by name.
Before everything had a schedule, punctuality was mostly guesswork and people didn't think in minutes.
Before cars on highways became widespread, people had a harder time with dealing with speeds over 40 miles per hour. They didn't focus far enough ahead.
So the whole article, while probably totally true, documents just yet another iteration of evolution. If it's needed, it will be learned, if not people will focus on things they care more about.
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This. It's people who have agency, not the machines they've built. The Internet doesn't "make" you smart or dumb, there are only smart or dumb uses of it.
Re:Same old, same old (Score:4, Informative)
Before the widespread adoption of the telephone, people weren't usually able to remember 7-digit numbers. This by the way is on the way out again because all contacts are stored by name.
And there was a long transitional period when the phone company (of which there was only one!) would use letters for the first two digits of each telephone number, supposedly because it was easier to remember "EXeter 5-2413" than all digits. In fact, when the letter mnemonics were ditched a protest movement thundered up as people demanded the return of the old familiar letters in their phone numbers.
Re:Same old, same old (Score:4, Interesting)
You should remember the basics - the internet has no longer made it necessary to know the details. So you should know about how to sort a list of items, and roughly what sort you'd use, but maybe unless you did it often, not remember the specifics. Those can be looked up as a quick refresher.
Instead of dedicating brainpower to remembering details that can be looked up, what should happen is less remembering, more critical thinking.
Being able to see a detail, remember it, and then spit it back out is a low level brain function - basic recall just isn't something we should bother with because computers have made it possible to do this for us. Instead we should be doing much higher level thinking - analysis, critical thinking, synthesis, all those things that are hard to do for humans, and even harder for computers.
The computers can do the remembering - or the books, if you want an offline repository for the information. That should free up our brains to do the actual work of thinking.
So technically, our ancestors have it easier - remembering things is fairly light in the load it presents the brain. However it was required to have because recalling it was useful. Now that everyone can instantly recall, though, it means we need to engage in higher level thinking.
Re:Same old, same old (Score:4, Interesting)
I've heard the same notion before in regards to the printing press. Soon after it came out people stopped committing those long epic poems to memory. Once printing became cheaper even the nursery rhymes were set down.
There are people who can still memorize long poems like The Raven, but that skill has always impressed me because I can't. The first verse of The Cremation of Sam McGee was about as much as I could get. And that with the rhyme and rhythm helping. Free verse like the Gettysburg Address, forget it.
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Google street view - what about that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Before a trip to Berlin for the first time (back in 2016), as my wife and I only had a few days in the city, I spent a week of evenings planning out a loose schedule of what we could fit in. From our hotel location, I plotted out walks, bus journeys, train journeys to various destinations and spent a considerable amount of time using street view.
It worked amazingly well. When we got there, we easily visited all the places I had planned out. I knew where bus stops were, where train stations were.
At one point, I told my wife that around the next corner, is a great little coffee shop - and there was.
"How did you know what?"
"I've been here before - virtually"
We've all experienced this if we've used street view.
This is a clear demonstration of the internet changing the way we remember in a positive manner.
So, it's not all doom and gloom, is it?
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The biggest thing that Google Maps, and all the alternatives I've tried, is lacking is tools to plan and save complex journeys.
What you describe is a common use case. You have a bunch of places you want to visit, and you want to know the most efficient order to visit them in and roughly how long travel will take so you can build an itinerary. When you get there you want to load your saved plan and follow it on your phone, pausing at each stop.
You can kinda do it in Google Maps, but the tools are clunky and
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I did a lot of rough photoshop work with bits of maps printed, some brief text explanations etc.
Printed it out into a little fold up booklet that neatly fitted in my back pocket.
I even took screenshots of key google site view locations - which turned out massively useful.
I didn't want to rely entirely on mobile navigation - and it turned out to be a wise move, as the mobile internet credit was stupidly expensive back when we visited.
I'm also not that keen on walking around a city holding a phone with a map
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There was an app I used, RMaps I think it was, that let you download Google Maps to your phone and view them using the GPS. It was a bit of work to set up, but worked well then.
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I did this once for a tourist destination. Never doing it again.
I felt cheated out of seeing things for the first time, of being surprised by a good cafe, no adventure of frantically looking for a bus stop. A lot less randomness, no surprise, everything as I expected it, as I had already in fact seen it before.
My favourite tourist experience was on a german autobahn, when we had everything planned out, satnav in place. But the satnav didn't know our exit was closed due to roadworks. It an hour longer to get
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I'm not sure if you are joking there :)
It's one of those old cliches about men, that they never ask for directions, never read instructions etc.
I've got no problem doing that. Whilst my research was great, it was really only to see a handful of destinations in Berlin.
We also met up with an old friend of mine, who had been living in the city for years and got to see loads of stuff we never would have - met some of his friends, did the "locals" thing, cool bars, nightclubs, places to eat.
I'll do the "land and
Errr... (Score:2)
What?
Like relying on speed-dial (Score:2, Informative)
"A study in 2019 found that the spatial memory used for navigating through the world tends to be worse for people who've made extensive use of map apps and GPS devices..." reports NBC News.
I imagine it's like relying on speed-dial or programmed phone numbers / contacts and then not being able to remember anyone's phone number ...
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More like not exercising the brains ability to work out spatial relationships.
Something, something.. (Score:2)
Most widely spoken? (Score:1)
Not surprising (Score:3)
Especially the part about people not knowing where they're going because they rely on GPS. Instead of actively looking where their destination is and how to get there, they let the computer do it for them. Which works well until it doesn't.
The same with memory. If you're not using it, it fades. And relying on a search engine doesn't help since it's a fleeting memory. You found the answer and you move on. You don't retain the information.
One need only look around at the people you interact with on a weekly basis to see how little information is retained because an answer is at someone's fingertips rather than retained for future use. Then again, considering the vapidness of conversations taking place on phone or via text, maybe it's not the ability to get information when you need it that's the problem.
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Especially the part about people not knowing where they're going because they rely on GPS. Instead of actively looking where their destination is and how to get there, they let the computer do it for them. Which works well until it doesn't.
I use GPS all the time to go to new places. But I also study the route suggested to guarantee that it makes sense, that it doesn't include any difficult or nonsensical section (which Gmaps often does), and also to learn the overall direction and main turning points, to be prepared for them.
This way, I get the best from both worlds. I enjoy the instant route planning and detailed alternative possibilities, plus the detailed knowledge of the terrain and travel speeds (that a classic map wouldn't have), but I
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I've found that my internal map is often wrong, something I wouldn't know without printed maps, GPS or otherwise. I'm very good at remembering and representing the turns I make, but the compass directions I associate with them are often wrong, and so my estimation of distances between two points using a novel route are not very good. Of course, if I looked at the map recently and just picture the map in my head, then I can give a good estimation...
People who don't pay a lot of attention often forget that yo
Writing out lecture notes and doing exercises (Score:2)
Once upon a time, my teacher said to always write lecture notes, even if there were printed handouts, because that way I'd remember them better. Similarly, always follow the lesson with exercises to understand what's been taught.
The trouble with relying on the Internet is we bother with neither, as we can always Google it again.
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I forget the details, but writing something down engages more parts of the brain which makes your memory better. It's why I still have paper notebooks full of notes from things like a Global powershell class.
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The trouble with relying on the Internet is we bother with neither, as we
You were doing better when you were at I but when you switched to we based only on I you turned yourself from thoughtful to idiotic.
I develop everything on a remote server (Score:2)
And I've had people slag me for looking up simple programming contructs ... "but what if the internet connection is down?"
Face, meet palm.
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You still haven't moved to developing locally and then deploying? Wow!
Face meet palm indeed!
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You still haven't moved to developing locally and then deploying? Wow!
Face meet palm indeed!
"Locally" on a remote development server. Of course we develop and then deploy.
It doesn't go down (or become unreachable) any more often than the literally local one we used to have ... life is full of tradeoffs, but this one is still better than the literally local one with the neckbeard trying to keep it going.
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You still haven't moved to developing locally and then deploying to your remote development server? Wow!
What you're doing was common 20 years, but not 15 years ago... for reasons.
The only tradeoff is that you're supposed to be using continuous deployment tools anyway, so there is no tradeoff unless your toolchain sucks really bad.
That you think you'd neckbeard the local setup just says you're a neckbeard. Everybody else uses the same tools locally that they're using to deploy to the servers. And then develo
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That's not a bug (Score:2)
Having instant access to external sources of information is an awesome power, I would never in a million years trade it for rote memorization, with one, single exception: when it's too slow to be useful. Are you playing a piece of music, where you need to be accurate within 1/75th of a second in your timing? Memorize it. Or are you calling some function in the code you're writing, and it's been a year since you last used it? Look it up.
Only if you let your GPS think for you (Score:2)
I make use of google maps to plan my trip in advance, and learn all the roads I'm going to be taking before I even leave. Street view lets me know what the place looks like around important turns. And I don't use a live nav thingy, they're just annoying to me. I will leave my phone on google maps while driving on a long trip, but that's mostly to know how much farther I have to go. It's a pain having to turn my phone back on all the time, so I won't check it very often. Also, taking side trips when going on