by an anonymous student writer
This anonymous student writer is a Computer Science major and a Massachusetts resident who describes himself as “interested in everything but passionate about nothing” — except not divulging any personal information. He presently spends his days secluded, enjoying living his ideal lifestyle enshrouded “in the devastating abomination that we all know to be the Internet.” He wrote this paper for a Composition II research assignment in order to rationalize a “terrible memory.” He is currently “overcoming(?) perfectionism after a long 4-year battle.”
It’s becoming increasingly harder for me to remember things. When I was younger, I used to remember a lot of things, such as people’s ages, their birthdays, their favorite foods, their favorite colors, their phone numbers, and even their license plates. Unfortunately, that’s all changed. Nowadays, I can barely remember their names without looking through my meticulously crafted stalkery profile of them on my phone. Before I jump to the glaring conclusion that I’ve reached a fairly early case of cognitive decline, I think it’s important to take a step back and think about what has changed since then.
When I was younger, I didn’t have a phone to take note of people’s birthdays or phone numbers or even their names. I just remembered them. I stored all of that information in a seemingly infinite directory that was my brain. What’s changed since then isn’t necessarily that directory, but rather where it’s kept. That phone that I have now, in which I store all of that information – the birthdays and phone numbers and names that I would never be able to remember today – has made it so that there’s not much reason to remember things like that anymore. That directory that once existed in my brain is now my phone.
But if my phone is now that directory, then what of my actual brain? Surely my brain exists and I can still memorize things to a lesser degree and with an increased effort, but how else has this change in location affected my brain? Searching just the terms “internet” and “brain” on the Internet leads to a pretty concentrated array of results, most, if not all, alluding to the many cognitive functions such as memory and attention that are being utterly obliterated by the devastating abomination that we all know to be the Internet. Not something I want to be reading at three o’clock in the morning.
But for the sake of knowledge, and quite possibly for the sake of scaring myself into cutting down the unhealthy amount of Internet I consume each day, I think it’s important that I educate myself on this matter. Matthew Hennessey, author of “The Cost of Our Digital Addictions,” cites psychologists from Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin that review four studies testing people’s information recall with access to a computer, concluding that the test subjects performed poorly when they knew that the information was accessible on the computer. (Hennessey) This made enough sense. The Internet provides an abundance of quality information in a very convenient and easily accessible manner. It makes sense to rely on it because of that. The Internet makes it unnecessary for the brain to work so hard. And just like when you stop using your muscles and your muscles become weaker, the brain will perform poorly the less you use it.
Dean Burnett, author of “Is the Internet Killing Our Brains?,” offers some insight as well. His stance on how the Internet may affect our brain provides some relief but feels inconclusive. He declares that damage from information overload is “unlikely” and cites sources both supporting and opposing the notion that Google is destroying memory. For things like attention span deficiency and social media addictions, he shifts the blame to how humans are wired. It makes sense how we’re to blame for our own Internet usage, but it seems as if Burnett’s trying everything to make it seem as if the Internet is not to blame.
Being let down by the seemingly pro-Internet Dean Burnett, and my increasing interest in the connection between social media and memory, I checked out Andrew Gregory’s “How Social Media Is Hurting Your Memory”. He cites a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that shows how people who shared their experiences via social media often had “less precise” memories of those experiences. In addition, he describes three studies led by Diana Tamir from Princeton University that researched this phenomenon, testing how the memory of experiences are affected by recording them through various external formats such as taking pictures or notes, finding that “those who wrote down, recorded, or shared their experiences performed about 10% worse on memory tests across all experiments.” (Gregory) The researchers concluded that it was the act of “externalizing their experience” that led them to ultimately forget the details of those very same experiences. (Gregory) This also makes sense because when we’ve externalized something, it shouldn’t be necessary for us to keep storing that information in our memory when we can fill that space up with other more important things such as how Grimmsnarl can’t learn the move Snarl, despite being both dark type and having the word “snarl” in its name. Weird, huh?
Being devastated by the sudden realization that my precious cherished memories were being utterly obliterated by the devastating abomination that we all know to be the Internet, I needed some respite that could only be found by reading some reassuring articles on the Internet. As if it was some sort of magical coincidence, I just nearly stumbled across godsend “Good News: Using a Computer Does Not Rot Your Brain” by Alice G. Walton and was met with immediate gratification at just the very sight of the headline. Walton discusses a study by the Mayo Clinic alluding to computer usage having positive effects on the brain. Just as I was getting my hopes up however, I was met with the crushing detail that the test subjects were aged 70-93 and that the study only showed correlation between computer usage and the lack of brain deterioration. (Walton) Just as I should’ve expected from the devastating abomination that we all know to be the Internet.
This was quite honestly the last straw. Being let down by the seemingly exploitative Alice G. Walton and overall disappointed in my pursuit to understand why the Internet was hacking at my already meager cognitive functions, I needed to understand more. What is it about the Internet that makes my brain rot? How does social media factor into that? The only insight I was able to get was from Matthew Hennessy who explained that because the Internet provided reliable and accessible information, the brain would naturally rely on it to make less work for itself and Andrew Gregory who weighed in with how externalizing information is effective in not forgetting the more important things in life. But even so, I was still left with some questions. Why does the brain decide to take the lazy route and why does the brain externalize information?
When it seemed as if all hope was lost, I looked back at Hennessey’s article and did a little digging. I thought that the study he cited on information recall might give me some additional insight on my inquiries so I used my expert sleuthing skills to locate the study, eventually finding Psychology professor Betsy Sparrow and other’s “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Whilst reading through this study, I came across the term “transactive memory.” They explain this to be a “combination of memory stores held directly by individuals and the memory stores they can access because they know someone who knows that information” (Sparrow, 776). Or to put simply, transactive memory is a term used to describe a system of memory that relies on others to store and retrieve information from. Now how does this relate to Google? Sparrow and others go on to explain that search engines like Google have become our “primary transactive memory.” (Sparrow, 776) This concept could explain why it’s so difficult to remember things that can easily be found with the click of a few buttons. If we treat others as databases of information in which we can store and retrieve information from, then the Internet can be treated as just another one of those databases of information, but a lot more easily and readily accessible, and in a lot of cases, more expert. To create a central location where all information can easily be found through a search engine is much easier to use than the sometimes unreliable experts you may be acquainted with. This seems to be an automatic process and thus it makes perfect sense for the brain to choose the Internet, a place where you can find high-quality and easily accessible information, to rely on as its primary transactive memory.
This answers my question on why we externalize information. In short, it’s just a way for us to store information elsewhere to compensate for our limited memory capacity. But even still, it almost seems as if information received from the Internet is forgotten more than information received elsewhere. Is the Internet responsible for our brains becoming lazier and if so, how? From “Behavioural and brain responses related to Internet search and memory” by Dr. Guangheng Dong and Marc N. Potenza, they studied information recall with “Internet-based or book-based searches” finding that “Internet searching was associated with lower accuracy in recalling information” (Dong and Potenza, 2553). This means that information received from the Internet is in fact forgotten more and that the Internet is in fact responsible for our brains becoming lazier. But I still don’t understand why that’s the case.
To my rescue was mental health researcher Joseph Firth and other’s “The ‘Online Brain’: How the Internet May be Changing Our Cognition.” Whilst reading through this article, I came across “cognitive offloading” a term they describe to be people “implicitly reducing their allocation of cognitive resources towards remembering this information, since they know this will be available for future reference externally” (Firth, et al., 122). To put another way, cognitive offloading is a term used to describe an automatic (unconscious) process of recognizing where to find information for future reference that people use to lessen the “load” of remembering information. (Firth, et al., 122) This concept could explain why it’s so difficult to remember things that can easily be found with the click of a few buttons. If high-quality information is so easily and readily accessible, it doesn’t make sense for our mind to do more than is necessary. The Internet has made our memory so obsolete to the point where it makes more sense to forget something. To create a central location where all information can easily be found through a search engine is much easier to reference than notes you’d have to flip through to find something. And if it’s an automatic process then it makes perfect sense for the brain to take the lazy route. The brain was designed to be lazy and the Internet just puts the laziness on full blast. This is what explains why the Internet makes us forget information received from it. And there’s a cute interplay between cognitive offloading and transactive memory. They work in conjunction with each other. With the Internet being one’s primary transactive memory, people choose to offload their memory onto that primary transactive memory. This is how the act of externalizing information to the Internet creates a more lazier brain as a result of the Internet.
Through this exploration I’ve learned of two new concepts—cognitive offloading and transactive memory—and the cute interplay between them. This interplay helps me better understand why the Internet is eating away at my memory. Before this exploration, I had already kind of guessed that the Internet was responsible for my gradually deteriorating memory but I didn’t know how or what I could do to stop it. The answers I found through this inquiry would have never been found by a simple glossing of the first few articles that showed up on Google and I probably would’ve never remembered the contents of those articles anyway. Unfortunately, what I’m missing is how to utilize my research to prevent my memory’s deterioration. The Internet is an indispensable tool for information acquisition and to be rid of it is near impossible. Heck, all of that research—the information that I acquired in order to write this inquiry-driven essay—was through the aid of the Internet. My findings and my research was all possible because of the Internet; so to step away from that just isn’t practical. But I’m still reluctant to believe that there’s nothing that can be done or that there’s no cognitive function which can benefit from using the Internet. Ultimately, though the Internet is to blame for my lack of information recall, it is not practical for me to stop using it.
Works Cited
Burnett, Dean. “Is the Internet Killing Our Brains?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 8 Oct. 2016.
Dong, Guangheng, and Marc N. Potenza. “Behavioural and Brain Responses Related to Internet Search and Memory.” European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 42, no. 8, 6 Aug. 2015, pp. 2546–2554.
Firth, Joseph, et al. “The ‘Online Brain’: How the Internet May Be Changing Our Cognition.” World Psychiatry, vol. 18, no. 2, 5 June 2019, pp. 119–129.
Gregory, Andrew. “How Social Media Is Hurting Your Memory.” Time, 8 May 2018.
Hennessey, Matthew. “The Cost of Our Digital Addictions.” National Review, 4 Sept. 2018
Sparrow, Betsy, et al. “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Science, vol. 333, no. 6043, 5 Aug. 2011, pp. 776–778.
Walton, Alice G. “Good News: Using a Computer Does Not Rot Your Brain.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 12 June 2012.