The Google Effect

The availability of internet search engines has made life a lot easier for many people but it has also brought concerns. With the reduced need to remember it has raised concerns that the capacity of the human brain may wither on the vine due to lack of use. Now a new series of studies has examined exactly what effect Google is having on the human mind.

It has been said that the effect of the internet will be to reduce the need for memory and empty the mind, making the human race collectively more stupid. Yet is this apocalyptic thinking justified? A series of experiments published in the journal Science may have an answer.

In the first experiment subjects were asked a series of trivia questions. Afterwards, they saw a list of words written in different colours and had to name the colours in question. People take longer to do this if the word captures their attention, because they find it more difficult to ignore its meaning and focus on its colour. After seeing questions they couldn’t answer, the volunteers’ reaction times were slower if they saw computer-related words (Google, browser, internet) than non-computer words (telephone, paper, pencil). It seems that when you are faced with a gap in your knowledge, you are unconsciously primed to turn to the computer.

So the existence of computer search potential has seeped into our consciousness but what are the implications of this?

In the next experiment researchers asked subjects to read 40 trivia statements (like “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain”) and type them into a computer. Later, they had to write down as many of the statements as they could. Subjects remembered fewer facts if they were told that the computer would save their work, than if they thought their words would be erased. If they knew they could look up the statements later, they didn’t make the effort to remember them but does this mean the capacity to remember is reducing?

In a third experiment subjects were again given the trivia statements but after typing in every statement, they were either told that their entry had been saved, saved in a specific folder, or erased. Later, they saw 30 statements, half of which matched the earlier ones, and half of which had been subtly altered. When asked if the statements were exactly what they had read, the students were worst at spotting the changes if they thought their words had been saved somewhere. However, when asked if the statements were saved or erased, the students were better at identifying the ones that had been saved than the ones that had been erased. If they thought that information would be accessible later, they were worse at remembering the actual trivia, but better at remembering whether it would be accessible.

In a final experiment the trivia game was played with with subjects, who expected all the statements to be saved into one of several folders named “Facts”, “Items”, “‘Info” and so on.
When they were asked to write down as many of the statements as possible, they only remembered 25 per cent of them. However, when asked what folder they were in they remembered the location of 50 per cent of the statements. This suggests that when people expect information to remain continuously available as with internet access, they are more likely to remember where to find it than to remember the details.

So what doe all of that mean? It means that the Google Effect might not be quite as dire as has been suggested.

After all, outsourcing memory has been going on for a long time. Just consider any long term couple. More than likely it will have fallen to one of the couple to remember family birthdays where perhaps the other remembers to pay bills. Together they have a collective memory that both can draw upon. The internet is just providing a computer based extension of that shared memory. What the experiments above show, is that memory capacity does not disappear but is just reallocated to other tasks.

The other thing to keep in mind is that new technologies have always instigated prophecies of doom. Socrates was concerned that the advent of the written word was going to destroy human memory. The printing press, radio, and television have all spelled various forms of doom that have yet to eventuate.

So it seems that reports of the death of the human mind at the hands of the internet have been exaggerated. New technologies arrive and the human mind adapts, it does not diminish. Life, as usual, finds a way.