JAKARTA – Having a wealth of information readily available at our fingertips on the internet may seem like a good way to advance human intelligence.
A new study, however, claims that Googling information actually makes us more likely to forget something, compared to reading it in a book. This is a phenomenon known as 'digital amnesia' or the 'Google effect'.
The study found that the human brain does not tend to process information deeply in search engines like Google because they know it is easily accessible and retrieved online. So modern humans don't bother to study it.
In fact, we are more likely to remember how to access information, such as keywords for search engine queries, than the information itself.
Humans are 'cognitive miser' creatures, which means we have an 'innate tendency' to avoid any cognitive effort. This is likely due to pure laziness, according to the study.
The research was conducted by Dr. Esther Kang at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Cologne, Germany, and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
"The ubiquitous internet access has provided easy access to information and has influenced users' attention and knowledge management," he said in the paper quoted by DailyMail.
"Having information at one's fingertips via electronic devices such as computers and smartphones often leads to reduced attention and reduced memory," the study said.
"When externally stored information is easy to access and retrieve, individuals are less inclined to process details in-depth as they can easily search for information whenever needed," the study added.
“Individuals have an inherent tendency to minimize their cognitive demands and avoid cognitive effort or "cognitive miserliness".
Dr. Kang conducted a total of three studies, dubbed 'learning', 'forgetting', and 'subscribing'.
The first experiment tested the ability of undergraduate students in the US to remember details of online credit card offers.
According to the findings of Dr. Kang, the higher the perceived ease of finding information, the lower the memory of credit card offering details.
In experiment 2, participants forgot the information in the ad once they knew it was available in an online search.
In experiment 3, Dr. Kang found that individuals were more likely to subscribe to an online blog if it was easily accessible.
The study found differences between people with higher or lower 'working memory capacity' and the ability to retain information while performing mental tasks.
Interestingly, those with higher working memory capacities showed less thorough learning of the detailed information available online.
VOIR éGALEMENT:
Perhaps the more information you can store, the less detailed each piece of information will be.
"This strategic knowledge management allows individuals to save a source of attention for other daily activities," said Dr. Kang.
Overall, this study demonstrates the effect of information storage on devices on the cognitive performance of the human brain.
This goes back to the dawn of civilization, where recording information anywhere other than the human brain proved controversial.
In ancient Egyptian myth, the discoverer Theuth, presented the concept of writing to the king of Egypt, Thamus, so that information could be widely distributed and known.
However, Thamus was not impressed by the concept of writing and opposed it for the good of human intelligence.
According to Neil Postman's 1992 book “Technopoly”, Thamus says those who learn to write 'will stop training their memory and become forgetful'.
"They will rely on writing to remember things by external cues, not by their own internal sources," according to Postman's book.
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