Does it matter if Google is rewiring our minds? Ask Plato | Steven Poole

The debate we are now having about the effect of constant internet access on memory and creativity has precedents thousands of years oldDoes anyone know anything any more? The ease with which one can look up facts on a phone at any time is one of the wonders of the modern age. But are we becoming too reliant on it? A new study indicates, at least, that there might be a snowball effect to such reliance. The more we depend on Google for information recall, it suggests, the more we will do so in the future.In apaper for the journal Memory, psychologists Benjamin Storm, Sean Stone, and Aaron Benjamin describe how they first asked people a set of difficult trivia questions. One group was told to use Google to answer them; the other group attempted to answer them from memory. Next, all the subjects were given a set of easier trivial questions, and offered the choice of using Google or not. It turned out that the ones who had previously used Google were more likely to choose to use it again this time – even if it was made significantly more inconvenient to do so. Thus, it seems, “relying on the internet to access information makes one more likely to rely on the internet to access other information”.Continue reading...

Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - August 18, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Steven Poole Tags: Internet Technology Philosophy World news Science Psychology Google Source Type: news