Do you suffer from long term memory loss? Can’t remember? Well Google probably has the answer.
The famous line from the song by pop group Chumbawamba, called Amnesia, has some resonance in reality, new research claims.
A study by psychologists from Colombian University in the US, now says search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing fosters memory loss, known as the Google effect.
The study, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” looks at how the Internet is changing the way people store information and has found alarming reliance on search engines as a personal memory bank, rather than brain power.
“What surprised the researchers most was not people’s reliance on online information but their ability to find it,” says the study’s findings published in July edition of In Science magazine.
Sharp memorys are no longer necessary as the internet generation can Google just about everything (and if we can’t think of a person’s name we can just look it up on Facebook), which is generally regarded as”an external memory source that we can access at any time,” says Betsy Sparrow one of the principal researchers.
Rather than the remembering specific information stored, PC’s users are more likely to remember the computer folder or location where the content is stored, the research also found.
“The experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend. We must remain plugged in to know what Google knows.”
