(Image Source: Business Insider)

BY: JING ZHAO


Can you imagine a life without Google or a Wikipedia? Search engines have changed the way we find facts -- and they may have changed the way we think as well. KGO-ABC reports-

“New research suggests that we are outsourcing our memory to Google and other search engines. Researchers say the internet puts so much information at our fingertips that we’re remembering fewer facts and merely remembering where to get the information online." 

The researchers performed two studies on how “I’ll just Google it”-thinking affects memory. The first one examined whether we’re more likely to forget things when we think we can just look them up later.

The New York Times has the details. 

"...participants  typed 40 bits of trivia -- for example, ‘an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain’ -- into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased. The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later."

So are search engines clouding our memory? Well, not exactly. The second study -- Mercury News explains -- shows an upside.

"...the team proved that people are better at remembering where to find facts, rather than the facts themselves. The students, they found, recalled the names of files where information was stored, rather than the information itself."

So it looks like internet thinking is making us fact-finders instead of fact-rememberers. But PBS asks the lead researcher -- what happens when the internet goes out?

“It depends on how much you want to know the answer to the question. If it’s something that’s really crucial to something you’re doing at a time, you will find some other way. Right? You’ll call up the person who might know. You’ll actually trek over to the library to look up the information. It really depends." 

But is calling up a friend any different than calling up a website? A writer for Wired says this isn’t new -- human beings were never good at remembering mountains of data. Instead, we relied on other people to be our search engines.

“The headlines are already emphasizing the amnesiac effects of the internet, as if Google were a pox on the hippocampus. … What these experiments reveal is that we treat the search engine like a particularly clever friend, a buddy with a gift for factoids and trivia."