Internet is ‘changing our memory’

The collective memory of the internet may make us simply remember less. Computers and the internet are changing the nature of our memory, research in the journal Science suggests.

Psychology experiments showed that people presented with difficult questions began to think of computers.
When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.
The researchers say the internet acts as a “transactive memory” that we depend upon to remember for us.

Lead author Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University said that transactive memory “is an idea that there are external memory sources – really storage places that exist in other people”.
“There are people who are experts in certain things and we allow them to be, [to] make them responsible for certain kinds of information,” she explained to BBC News.
Co-author of the paper Daniel Wegner, now at Harvard University, first proposed the transactive memory concept in a book chapter titled Cognitive Interdependence in Close Relationships, finding that long-term couples relied on each other to act as one another’s memory banks.
“I really think the internet has become a form of this transactive memory, and I wanted to test it,” said Dr Sparrow.