Perhaps this is why I can't remember anything these days. (It's not old age after all!)

Science just published an article entitled "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips." Apparently (according to this guy (or gal)) because the internet has given us the ability to look anything up, any time, the way we remember things is changing. Or, put another way, what we remember is changing. It seems we are less prone to remembering facts, and more prone to remembering where we can find facts. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but I sure know that it describes my favored memory retrieval process! The "Google effect," as it is called, is why you probably don't want me on your trivia team. I can't remember facts worth shit, but I sure can remember where I read about relevant content. (Thanks, brain. That's so useful for making me look like a non-idiot.)

As always, I am likely overgeneralizing the results of just one study. Here's the experiments that have led me to my rash conclusion (described here, as I don't currently have access to the full article.  Similar descriptions here):

In one experiment:

A group of dozens more undergrad participants read 40 trivia statements and then typed them into a computer. Half the participants were told that the computer would save their entry, the others were told the entries would be deleted. Participants in the "saved" condition performed worse at a subsequent recall test of the statements, as if they'd relied on the computer as an external memory store. Half the participants in both conditions had been instructed explicitly to try to remember the statements, but this made no difference to their memory performance. "Participants were more impacted by the cue that information would or would not be available to them, regardless of whether they thought they would be tested on it," the researchers said.

In another experiment:

A group of participants read trivia statements and then typed them out, with a message telling them which folder the statement had been saved in. Ten minutes later they wrote out as many of the statements as they could, and then they attempted to recall which folder each statement, identified by a single prompt, had been saved to (e.g. "What folder was the statement about the ostrich saved in?"). The striking finding here is that participants were better at remembering the location of the statements than the statements themselves. What's more, they were more likely to remember the location of statements which they'd failed to recall. It's as if we've become adept at using computers to store knowledge for us, and we're better at remembering where information is stored than the information itself.

Here's what I want to know: What the eff are we going to do when the apocalypse happens, and we can no longer access the internet??

Related:

XKCD