Google Effect: Is technology making us stupid?
Can’t remember phone numbers or birthdays? You may be suffering from the ‘Google Effect’ – a theory that we no longer commit data to memory, that we’ve in fact outsourced our memories, safe in the knowledge that answers are just a click away.
A recent study suggested that 90 percent of us are suffering from digital amnesia. Most of us don’t know our loved ones’ phone numbers by heart, as our phones do the job. This even extends to photographs, where another study found that taking photos reduces our memories.
-640x293.jpg)
But is the Google Effect truly making us stupid? There are two sides to this question.
One argument says that technology helps us to live smarter, as we’re able to access answers. Technology enables us to address questions much quicker than before. The Internet simply changes the way we handle and store information, so the Google Effect makes us good at remembering where to find a given bit of information, but not necessarily what the information was.
On the other hand, others believe that technology is making us shallower. By trusting a computer to do what our memory usually does, we are not forming rich connections in our minds with what we know and what we feel, and thus we are not creating knowledge. In fact, a Microsoft study actually discovered that with the distraction technology offers, the average human attention span fell from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds today!
There is however a bigger issue here. Some experts believe that the important thing right now is how to teach creativity. We don’t need to learn facts and to remember stuff is less important, so how then should children be taught to think differently?
-640x360.jpg)
Meanwhile, one researcher advises people to spend time offline to protect their memories. Said Dr. Maria Wimber,
“The best way to make memory stick is to sit back, and mentally refresh what you learnt or experienced a minute, an hour or a day ago.”
Read another article about Google here.
(All images - credit: Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence)
