For thousands of years humans have relied on each other to remember the exact details of their daily lives. Now we trust the "cloud" - and this changes the way we perceive the world around us and remember it.
A couple receives an invitation to a birthday party. From past experience, each of the spouses intuitively knows what needs to be done now. One of the spouses finds out if the dress code should be formal or not. The other partner mentally records the place and time of the event "in his head" so that they are not forgotten.
To one degree or another we all embellish the other's power to take care of mental tasks. When we are exposed to new information, we automatically distribute the responsibility for remembering the facts and concepts among the members of our particular group. We take it upon ourselves to remember a few things and trust others to remember the rest. When we can't remember the right name or how to fix a broken machine, we simply turn to someone else in charge of that particular knowledge. If the car makes strange noises we turn to Ray, our friend with the mechanical head. We don't remember who played in "Casablanca", Marcy, the movie expert will know. All types of knowledge, from the most prosaic to the mysterious, are shared among group members whether the said social unit is a married couple, or the accounting department of a multinational corporation. In each of the cases, we know not only the information that will be stored in our minds, but also "know" what information each of the other members of the group is supposed to remember.
This division of memory prevents an unnecessary excess of effort and expands the memory capacity of the entire group. When we delegate responsibility for a certain type of information to others, we free up cognitive resources that we would otherwise have to use to keep that information ourselves. In this exchange transaction, we undertake to use some of these resources to deepen our knowledge in the areas we are responsible for. When members of a group share the responsibility for some information, each member has access to a wider and deeper knowledge than he would have if he were alone. Sharing a memory binds the group together, each individual is incomplete without the ability to rely on the shared knowledge of the other members of the group. Individually, each of the couples mentioned here would be a loser, one, would be wandering the streets lost in the garb of the generation, and the other arriving at the party while wearing a hoodie.
This tendency to spread information through a transactive memory system developed in a world where relationships were face-to-face and human memory represented the pinnacle of information storage. This world no longer exists. With the development of the Internet, the status of the human brain dropped from a super conductor to just a memory device.
Once someone invites Siri, the iPhone's personal assistant, into a social group, it changes everything. Our research suggests that humans have come to regard the Internet as a human partner in group memory. We unloaded our memories into the "cloud" as easily as we would with a family member, friend or loved one. But in another sense, the Internet is not like another partner in the collective memory; He knows more and can provide the information much faster. Almost all information today is easily and instantly available with a quick internet search. It seems that the Internet is not only a substitute for other people serving as an external memory source, but also for our own cognitive sources. The internet not only obviates the need for a partner with whom we share knowledge, but also weakens the urge to ensure that important newly learned facts are etched into our biological memory bank. We call it the "Google effect".
New partner
An experiment we conducted recently demonstrates the extent to which the Internet is beginning to replace friends or family members in the distribution of day-to-day memory tasks. Betsy Sparrow from Columbia University, Jenny Liu, then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of us (Wagner) asked the participants to type 40 trivia details into the computer (for example: "The eye of the ostrich is very intelligent"). Half of the participants in the experiment were told that their work would be saved on the computer and the other half were told that it would be deleted. Also, half of the participants in each group were told to remember the information whether it was saved on the computer or not.
We found that the participants who believed that the list of facts was saved on the computer remembered it much less well. It seems that people treat computers as partners in a memory group that we began to explore a few decades ago, that is, to unload information to the brain "cloud" instead of keeping it inside. We were surprised to find that this tendency existed even when the people were explicitly asked to keep the information in their minds. It seems that the tendency to dump information into digital repositories is so strong that people cannot fix details in their thoughts when there is an online friend in their environment.
In another experiment we tested how quickly we turn to the Internet when we try to answer a question. To test this idea, we used a test that psychologists call the "Stroop task", in which the participants examine rows of words written in different colors and they have to identify the color of the word and ignore its meaning. Examining the speed with which they pierce the color of the word allows us to determine to what extent each of the words attracted their attention. If they linger on the color of the word we assume that the meaning of the word is relevant to something they were thinking about. For example, hungry people who haven't eaten in 24 hours will be slower at determining the color of a word denoting a certain food, compared to satiated people. Since words related to food are always relevant to subjects' current needs, it is very difficult to ignore their meaning and therefore always result in a long reaction time.
In our experiment, participants performed two Stroop tasks: one after answering simple trivia questions and the other after attempting to answer a series of more difficult questions. The words in these Stroop tasks were related to two groups of famous companies, one related to the Internet: for example, Google in red letters or Yahoo in blue letters, and the other related to general brands: among others, Nike in yellow letters or Target in green letters.
A know-it-all friend
A particularly impressive effect was observed after the participants were asked difficult trivia questions, ones that they could not answer on their own (for example, "Do all the flags of the countries in the world have at least two colors?"). Respondents' responses to color words related to the Internet were noticeably slower, implying that the Internet comes quickly into the minds of people who do not know how to answer questions. Apparently when we encounter a request for information we do not know, our first impulse is to think of the Internet - our all-knowing "friend" who can provide us with information after a simple tap on the keyboard or a voice command that does not require any effort. When we transfer responsibility for various types of information to the Internet, we effectively replace our natural collective memory partners, friends, family, and other human experts, with our always-available connection, the all-knowing digital cloud.
In many ways it makes sense to reduce the sharing of our information among the active partners in our transactive social network, which includes friends and acquaintances, and move to the use of the digital cloud. Allegedly, pentabytes scattered around the Internet to some extent simulate what is in a friend's head. The Internet stores information, pulls it out in response to our questions and surprisingly even maintains reciprocal relations with us in human ways: it remembers birthdays and responds to voice commands.
But in other ways the Internet is unlike any human we've ever met: it's always available and virtually omniscient. The amount of information that can be obtained through a smartphone is infinitely greater than that stored in the head of any person, and often also in an entire group of people. It is always updated and with the exception of disappearances such as during power outages, it is not subject to distortions or forgetting that impair the memories fixed in our heads.
The incredible efficiency of the Internet stands in stark contrast to the old search methods. Requesting information from friends involves locating them, hoping they will know the desired facts and waiting annoyingly as they rummage through their memory, stutter and rub their throats until they find the required answer. In the same way, finding information in a book sometimes involves going to the library, flipping through the tabs of catalogs and rummaging through shelves to find where the desired material is located. The very act of searching with an acquaintance or in a book emphasizes our dependence on external sources of information.
Google and Wikipedia changed all that. The difference between internal sources - what we keep in our heads - and external sources - what our friends know - changed radically as soon as the new secret person, the Internet, entered. The information retrieved from the Internet sometimes comes faster than what we retrieve from our own memories. The immediacy with which search results pop up on the smartphone screen can blur the boundaries between our personal memories and the vast digital treasures scattered across the Internet. We recently conducted experiments at Harvard University to examine the extent to which people integrated the Internet into their sense of self-identity. In this study we try again to verify how quickly our thoughts turn to search engines when we come across a trivia question. Before starting the study, we designed a measuring stick to examine the extent to which people estimate the capacity of their memories. Those who agree with the statements "I'm smart" "I'm good at remembering things" can be considered to have high cognitive self-esteem.
Then we asked the participants to answer trivia questions. One group was allowed to use Google and the other group answered the questions without using the search engine. Then we asked them to rate themselves on the measurement bar we designed. Those who had just used the Internet to search for answers rated themselves much higher. We were amazed to see that even those whose answers were copied verbatim from an internet site were convinced that their own mental faculties had created the information and not Google.
To make sure that participants did not feel smarter just because they answered more questions with the help of Google, we conducted a similar experiment in which the participants who did not use a search engine received false feedback from the system according to which they answered almost all the trivia questions correctly. Even then, although participants in both groups believed their achievements were equally good, those who used the Internet reported feeling smarter.
These results imply that the increase in cognitive self-esteem is not only due to the immediate positive feedback that comes from simply giving the correct answers. Using Google gives people the feeling that the Internet has become part of their cognitive toolkit. The participants in the study did not see any search result as just a figure, such as a name or a date, which they retrieved from a web page, but rather a product that resides in their own memories and allows them to credit themselves with knowing things that are a distinct product of Google's search algorithm. The psychological impact of splitting our memories equally between the Internet and the gray matter of our brains points to a growing irony. The advent of the "Information Age" seems to have created a generation of people who are sure they know more than they did before, while their reliance on the Internet means they know much less than they did before about the world around them.
And it is still possible that as we gradually become parts of "internet consciousness" we also develop a type of new intelligence, which is no longer anchored in the local memories that reside only in our minds. It is possible that when we are freed from the need to remember facts we, as individuals, can use the newly freed mental resources for more ambitious tasks. And perhaps the developing Internet consciousness will be able to combine the creativity of the individual human mind with the breadth of Internet knowledge to create a better world, and to correct some of the disarrangements we have made so far.
When progress in computing and information transfer blurs the boundaries between mind and machine, we can rise above the limits of memory and thought imposed on us due to the shortcomings of human mental processes. However, this does not mean that in this trend there is a danger of losing our self-identity. We simply merge the "self" with something greater and create an active mutual partnership not only with other people but also with a source of information far more powerful than anything the world has ever known.
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in brief
Remembering is a social enterprise. One person knows how to cook a turkey. His partner remembers how to fix a leak in the sink.
The Internet changes everything. With online access always available, people prefer searching on a smartphone to calling a friend.
Being online all the time changes our sense of self-identity as the boundaries between personal memories and the information distributed on the Internet begin to blur.
About the authors
He was a professor of psychology holding the John Lindsley William James Chair at Harvard University. He researched, among other things, trance-active memory and thought suppression. Wagner died in July 2013 after a long illness. The American Psychological Association stated that "his memory will be forever, not only for the creativity and breadth of his contribution to the science of psychology, but also for the obvious joy he derived from his research, which was passed on to his students and expressed in his writings."
He was Wagner's doctoral student at Harvard University. His doctoral thesis focused on the way in which people blur the boundaries between the Internet and "self". He is currently a senior research fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
More on the subject
Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind. Daniel M. Wegner in Theories of Group Behavior. Edited by Brian Mullen and George R. Goethals. Springer, 1986.
Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. Betsy Sparrow et al. in Science, Vol. 333, pages 776-778; August 5, 2011.
3 תגובות
There is a lot of information that we always prefer to get from friends and not from the internet, like learning to fix something, if there is a friend with technical knowledge we will prefer him over the internet because he knows us and knows how to explain to us better, he knew in advance what we can and cannot do without digging into the depths of the internet , plus there is something very important that people learn because of the internet, they learn how to search, if they don't know that, the internet is a very limited resource for them.
Apart from that, people's ability to explain far exceeds the internet's ability to explain, when someone stands in front of us and explains we understand better than text or video and if not easier to ask.
Of course, the Internet is still a very significant factor in how we think and act, when what we need to remember are general ideas and keywords and less text and complete material.
I think Tabula Rasa is right.
In addition, I do not agree with the introduction of the article-
The assumption that "this division of memory prevents an unnecessary excess of effort and expands the memory capacity of the entire group" is borrowed from the world of computers, on a computer, if your hard disk is full, you cannot save any more information unless you delete another file...
In our mind, it has never been proven that this is the case, in fact it is clear that we remember things by intuition and also this whole assumption is subject to great doubt. It is hard to understand how researchers rely on this.
I'll just point out that even in my unfounded opinion Google is changing our brains 🙂
But what happens to what we don't know we don't know? Intuition is a central component of our intelligence based on synchronization and synergy of the information accumulated in the brain. When we look for "creative" solutions, we need less specific and cataloged information and use more the synergy of all our experiences and learning in the past. The biography of Napoleon The treasure in the cloud will not help us at that moment unless it is also known to the gray cells?
Will there be a day when the human brain will be embedded in the cloud? Until then we will have to continue studying Napoleon's biography "ourselves" so that we can really use the lessons that can be learned from it.