Is Google Turning Our Memory to Mush?

Nicholas Carr has reasonably asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  His book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains” expanded on the theme. See my blog of June 14, 2010.Nicholas Carr has reasonably asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  His book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains” expanded on the theme. See my blog of June 14, 2010.

A recent study published by Betsy Sparrow in Science magazine and reported in the Columbia University Research Magazine takes this approach in a slightly different but very interesting direction.

The way people’s memory works has obviously changed over the centuries. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were originally “written” as oral texts by Greek bards. No one today could even imagine “memorizing” the entire Iliad. Similarly, for centuries the Bible was essentially an oral tradition, since only a very small number of priests has access to copies and knew how to read. The invention of the printing press in the late 15th century made the Reformation possible because for the first time people could actually read the Bible. Many of the medieval stained glass windows illustrate various biblical stories and served as a memory bank for the vast majority of the population that could not read. The encyclopedic memory of scholars from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century was notable.

Today, Sparrow and her co-authors argue, “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”

This is intuitively obvious. Think of phone numbers.  If you have a phone number that you call very often on speed dial, you may not be able to remember it if someone asks. “Let me check, I have it on speed dial.”  (I know this happens to me all the time).

Clearly the ability to remember data and Carr’s view of the analytical abilities to put things together are linked.  If you can’t remember any data, how are you supposed to analyze it, never mind come up with the links that are necessary for any new theories? In an internet world all facts appear to be equal, leading to what Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman criticizes as the “cult of balance.” To paraphrase him, if the Republicans were to declare that the earth was flat, the newspaper headline would be “Parties Differ On Shape of Earth.”

If society is headed toward an epoch when people can’t remember more than 140 characters at a time, we are in a sad way.
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