Slashdot Mirror
Internet Use Found To Affect Memory
An anonymous reader writes "The rise of Internet search engines has changed the way our brain remembers information, according to a new study out of Columbia University (abstract). 'We are reorganizing the way we remember things,' said the study's lead researcher. Because search engines like Google and Bing are so easily at hand, we feel less need to remember details that can be easily looked up. One possible upside: 'Perhaps those who teach in any context, be they college professors, doctors or business leaders, will become increasingly focused on imparting greater understanding of ideas and ways of thinking, and less focused on memorization. And perhaps those who learn will become less occupied with facts and more engaged in larger questions of understanding.'"
explaining the gory details of what we already know? Ok maybe for a general audience this is news, but for any tech minded person, I imagine this was already well understood.
I learnt to program before I had access to the internet, on a Dragon32 (TRS-80 clone), from one source of information: a single book. I remember re-reading a paragraph many many times over to squeeze a little more understanding out of it). I can _still_ remember the specific memory address you had to poke to squeeze a little extra performance out of the processor.
Now days (and I think we all know this or at least relate to it), I have the stuff I use frequently memorized, and anything else I relegate to “stuff I can just look up”.
Would also note that it isn’t just the internet (at least for programming). Auto-complete and intuitive naming also plays a big part in the lack of need to memorize stuff.
Structure of Scientific Revolutions and whatnot.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Never memorize what you can look up in books. --Albert_Einstein
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Perhaps the Internet doesn't make stupid
sigh. Die Zeit is a respected weekly paper here in Germany, but headlines like this are not really helpful...
Seems to me that the internet just encourages selective memory development, and dependence on software and the internet (with a a bit of magic sprinkled in) for everything. This era is leaning more towards effective tool development, from what I've seen. This is not necessarily a bad thing; good tools usually lead to better products, and more use of the tools leads to further tool development. Some of us don't seem to need feedback to make changes to tools though (I'm looking at you, Mozilla).
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
This same argument has been made time and again, but the only thing I find myself forgetting is trivia. As for facts, I used to know a lot of methods, words, etc by rote, or I my recollection would be derived from things I had heard, but now it's so easy to satisfy my curiosity from multiple sources. I know more and it is better reinforced. I do use the internet for reference, but it is not on hand every moment of the day, nor is it always opportune when it is available. Maybe if you need to look up a detail for one time and you never use it again, you'll forget that, but I don't really find myself running to a search box every five minutes because I can't remember anything anymore. Now when I don't know something, I write it down, and when I am bored I look these things up. I watch videos with closed captioning on because I can easily look up the words I am unsure about. I've been able to volunteer information more often than before, and if others can't remember something, I've been able to fill in the gaps. But I really can't say I find myself forgetting anything.
Twinstiq, game news
For now we can blame Google for any unremembered anniversary.
I know there are a bunch of things that I should remember, but I don't because I know they are a quick google away... It's similar to GPS. I have one and love it, but if you were to take it away I would have no idea how to get anywhere. My dad travels a lot, and knows a good portion of canada like the back of his hand. I ask how he remembers it all, and he said, "Easy, I don't rely on maps/gps" He says he can't believe how stupid people are these days, and cant do "basic" math in their head and always have to use a calculator... I know I am a shining example of that.
And we had to learn certain protocols of experimentation and manipulation and what not.
I know that this kind of knowledge isn't a waste, but honestly. The first time I entered an analysis lab, I found those exact protocols printed on a paper and posted on the walls, and the chief researcher advised us to use the lab's computer to look up the protocols in case we have a doubt.
When I think of the insistence of certain professors about learning these by heart and their numerous occurrences in exams, I can't hep but feel cheated.
They could have invested that time explaining other things or just delving deeper into the logics behind them.
Brb.. Let me google up my response.
perhaps those who learn will become less occupied with facts and more engaged in larger questions of understanding.
I'm a college teacher and sadly the short-term effects of the internet have been exactly the opposite. Most students see the internet as a quick and effortless source of information, and seem unable to distinguish information gathering from actual understanding. Worse, because they don't actually process the information to build a consistent model of the subject they're studying, they're unable to filter out misinformation, so I keep getting papers where one paragraph completely contradicts the previous one, since they were "inspired" by (i.e., copied from) different sources, which were either wrong or talking about different contexts.
Easy access to search engines does have a lot of potential for education reform and progress, but not as long as teachers allow students to pass off their "googling skills" as proof of understanding.
Except, of course, for journalism students, but those have clearly come to terms with the fact that they can't actually understand anything, or they wouldn't have chosen a career in "repeating someone else's words". ;-)
I'm old enough that I was out of school before the Internet became available to most people, but I've always learned this way. I learn concepts, memorize the most important details and note the exceptions. All the other stuff, I'll learn if I use it regularly, and look it up if I don't.
As one of my high school teachers said, "Half the information in the world is knowing where to find the other half". That was before anyone had heard of a search engine and the internet didn't exist as such (it was ARPAnet and very few had heard of it).
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
People still use Bing? I guess IE must point there by default....
Last summer I found a little herb shop in Phoenix, Arizona. One of their custom loose-leaf tea blends was called An Elephant Never Forgets. My memory had been rather fickle, ever since I lost it entirely for a 2-week period after I nearly drowned at the lake, some 12 years before. The lack of consistency was rather annoying, but only when I realized that there was something I couldn't quite remember.
I bought an ounce of said tea, and immediately noticed a dramatic improvement in my ability to remember. I don't take it all the time, or even regularly, but I did happen to see the bag this morning. Funny how that works.
Here are the ingredients from the above link, to save you all a click:
Huperzine-A, from the moss, also has potent memory-improving properties.
There are a lot of other important factors to memory improvement... I should look for a publisher. :)
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
You can't "understand" things if you don't have the "facts"
The brain is also far superior than Google in combining facts into new understandings. Google cannot relate Moby Dick and Treasure Island together. You have to actually read the books to know what each are saying so that your brain can extrapolate the common themes.
The idea that having "stubs" of knowledge in the most powerful computer on the planet and leaving the real meat of facts in the dumbest computers on the planet is somehow a good thing is just idiotic. Google is not going to link information together for you. You have to put the real meat of information into your head and then only your brain is capable of making connections to create real understanding.
Work Safe Porn
Literacy changed the way how we remember things. Before that, we had to rely on oral tradition.
If you think that external tools weaken your brain and are bad for you, I suggest you try giving up reading and writing for a week. Not forever, just a week. No newspapers, just word of mouth. No jotting things down on post-it. No Sacred Shopping List for your Fallout Shelter.
--
BMO
In Plato's Pheadrus volume Socrates complains that writing weakens memory and the mind. It causes them to become dependent on written words and books. "Rhetoric" was one of the four liberal arts in classical education. It not only covered how to compose good speeches but tricks to memorizing them too. The Internet may just be the next stage in the process.
For example, if you want to get statistics on sex, it is pretty much impossible to do so without going through a ton of inappropriate links. This is just the most obvious case of a standard problem of "overshadowing". Often the thing you want is over-shadowed by many other people looking for a similar issue. If you want to get reviews of a website that is optimizing search engines, often you get sent directly to various pages on that website.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Facts are indeed helpful; they provide a framework with which to better understand the concepts that drive what we do from day to day. While I have never felt that rote memorization was the most important thing in learning a process, it's my strong feeling that without some concrete facts to act as cornerstones to more abstract concepts, those concepts could go greatly awry. And as is evidenced by the likes of Palin and Bachman, people who don't memorize facts tend to make up new ones to justify their actions ("Paul Revere's mission was to warn the British!" and "There is not one single study that indicates that CO2 is dangerous!", respectively) rather than look them up.
The CB App. What's your 20?
My memory has always been poor on details but I remember pointers and key words.
Having access to the internet has been a significant boon.
But my memory has been this way since before the internet.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The Keys to understanding something involve some of the following... (feel free to add other examples)
Knowing what question to ask:
The right answer may be buried in the results if you don't ask the question in the right way.
Being able to apply the solution to the problem you have:
If the person who solved the same type of problem you had used materials or methods you don't have
access to then can you work around and get the same results?
Using the results that you get to restate your question for a finer focus:
The perfect is the enemy of the good, you need to know how much effort needs to go into the answer you are seeking.
Took me some time to google how I should respond, sorry about the delay.
Funny you should use the term "just at hand" ...
The thing is about Bing, I don't really feel the need to remember details about porn sites or fabulous marketing "But Wait, There's More!" sites.
And I remember the details of sex, as it relates to me, without any assistance at all.
Maybe next year, when I'm older and more decrepit...
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
I suppose that you didn't hear about the recent studies that found Big Pharma's anti-depressants are no better than placebo.
If it's not sold by MegaCorp Pharmaceuticals it's no good, right?
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Before we all had cellphones with contact lists in which you select the name "bob" and the phone automatically dialed the number, we had manually enter the phone number. This triggered both muscle memory and seeing the number over and over.
Go try and dial all your friend's phone numbers without using the contact list, just dial them manually. This can be quite a shock...
ONE OF Einstein's colleagues asked him for his telephone number one day. Einstein reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. "You don't remember your own number?" the man asked, startled. "No," Einstein answered. "Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?" Einstein was waay ahead of his time.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
From my experience the internet does indeed create greater access to knowledge and facts, therefore making things like research much easier and making it unnecessary to remember trivial details that can easily be re-found. I think there is, though, a negative side to this abundance of information: a false equivalence among the different sources of information. How many times do you hear internet-users - and particularly, I would say, those who have grown up with the internet - stating as fact things they read in a blog, or an article from some unheard-of digital publication, and using that information to attempt to refute statements from a far more authoritative source? How often - here on Slashdot, for example - have you seen people refuse to believe something where another poster has cited a credible offline source, but accepting any link, no matter where from, as proof? How often do you see Wikipedia articles with footnotes that reference a page with no citations and no reputation as though the mere existence of a link somehow confirmed the point's veracity?
It's very easy, and in my experience very common, to treat the internet as a single source of knowledge, every fact that flows from which is equally credible and deserving of equal respect; this is perhaps helped by the anti-hierarchical bent of many internet users and online communities. This, I think, is something very strongly to be resisted. Hierarchy should be welcomed, provided it is won on merit. As an example, the authors who write the works of reference (offline) on a subject are selected because of their eminence and learning, and their writing is criticised by other respected experts in journals and other books. When we pretend that that filter is without value and that everyone's contribution is equally informative we put ourselves in the paradoxical position of having our learning hampered by an overabundance of information.
I was going to continue and give further examples and explanation but I don't want this to become overly lengthy and obscure my point: we should embrace the value of the internet - but we need also to be honest about its limitations. The online community is at present hostile to the idea of expert editorial control on online resources. They should not be (within reason). The internet can remove hierarchy and equalise everyone - but is that always desirable?
Wouldn't encyclopedias and dictionaries have had the same effect before people used the Internet?
Maybe the phenomena would be proportionality bigger now, but it's not specific to the Internet.
Never memorize what you can look up in books. --Albert_Einstein http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
I disliked history until I had a class in high school where a teacher went off curriculum and taught the class like a college class. No memorizing dates and such, they can be looked up in a reference, what we focused our time on was *why* that historic person made that particular decision at that time and place. What influenced or led to that decision? This is when history became interesting to me.
FWIW this was all pre-internet.
I remember back in college, they said "today's generation was losing focus ability for task-switching ability", much like the very computers creating the change. Now, we're ADD. Now, according to this, we won't remember a thing! So that's how computers come to take over. Not because they want to, but because they have to.
What really did my attention in though was my DVR. If I go distracted, I could just hit back and re-watch something. Except you can't do that in conversation. The ability to focus less often has I think changed my mind the most for the worse.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
in school we were taught to know how to find answers rather than risking remembering it wrong.
btw, that was pre-google.
the Internet is NOT responsible for our memories being stored differently, it's our brains that have done that on their own. the human brain is incredible at organizing and optimizing itself which is a trait machines are far from achieving. giving an altered environment and without intervention, a new memory storage schema was implemented. how awesome is that?! :D
the Internet does nothing but provide access to information. how we utilize that information is determined by our brains.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The facts that can be remembered can be forgotten;
The facts that are remembered are not the eternal facts.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
This quote from his book "Refactoring" comes to mind:
"I deliberately try not remember anything I can look up, because I'm afraid my brain will get full"
Not coincidentally, I couldn't remember this quote verbatim...Or in which book Fowler wrote it....So I used Google to find the exact quote.
The way teachers teach by and large has less to do with what works pedagogically and more to do with educational policy in America, which is regrettably focused on "results" and "standards" and not on things like critical thinking skills and higher level mental processing. There needs to be a shift away from what is testable and quantifiable toward what is useful and productive, however, it's not going to come from Google, Apple, Microsoft, or really anyone else who has an interest in keeping people from making informed decisions about the technology they consume.
Depression is one of the most elusive complicated states.
Without scrutinizing those studies for the sake of a simple slashdot post, those studies are not the same as "anti-depressants do nothing at all". The slippery word here is "better".
Part of the horrific downside to Big Pharma anti-depressants SSRI-class is they are not "modular", aka you can't just take take some for a week to get past a slump. They take some two weeks to properly kick in past initial gyro-ing, and another 2 weeks on the back end if you want to quit.
So a placebo may actually win out by being less intrusive.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm one of those people who had good memory and cognitive skills before the internet, and post-internet as well. I don't understand what the article is referring to. I just generally see the populations around me growing more retarded every day, but I assuming it's because of other factors:
1. bad parenting worsening over generations without correction
2. economic bubbles making entertainment more valuable than productivity
3. despite bad economy, we can still afford the bleeding-heart resource of forking tax monies over to the mentally retarded despite their inability to aid either of the above points OR any other point you might think of besides "we don't have enough retards in this macdonalds, Billy!" In states that don't have laws against those with hereditary mental disability procreating, they do so. And though it's sad that they often do so with their peers, thus creating generations worse off than they were, I've also seen many viable women who were simply lazy and pathetic decide to wed and breed men who any intelligent person would agree had something wrong with them dating from gestation (and it's politically incorrect to point this out for some *coughreligiousscumbagcough* reason, so... and the beat goes on -- even in the midst of economic turmoil, predictably, even if we went into full-on "depression").
4. Nobody is doing anything about the Mid-West. It's branching out and normalizing everything it touches. If there's no differentiation between one thing and another, they appear to be the same. Well as you graduate through degrees of separation, pinpointing a coordinate of one specific person, you pass by many others who -- if they decline by intelligence only so much one to the next -- mark no major difference to the pinpointing observer, who finally reaches the person (a retarded CEO let's say) and who fails to recognize that they've happened across a retard. Gradual changes in environment go unnoticed, things get sublimated, etc.
Anyways, you get the picture. It's this way because it was allowed to slip in a little a time, like anyone understands. We were cuckolded into this dismal future by the laziness, indifference and neglect brought to our table by excess, hoarding and over-competition. The symptoms of those pressures were corpulence, ignorance, and anti-social behaviour, and look how those trends are faring; they rule. Look at Michigan, crazy-crown-King of the Midwest. It's frequently holding positions both at the bottom of education and the top of percentage of body-fat.
I think blaming the internet is something done, frankly, ONLY by people suffering from problems like autism or Asperger's, who have no fucking real grip on reality whatsoever, and who are jacking off on the face of slashdot and contributing to the fucking stupid mess of nonsense and idiocy it's slowly become over the years.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
If you "know where to look something up" then you know it provided you've Bookmarked it.
Not necessarily. A web publisher might poorly maintain the URLs where documents can be found, or it might consider a document no longer worthy of publication. I've discovered that knowing the title and/or author of a document is sometimes more reliable than knowing a URL.
I read some info on art of memory and the method of loci.....which are ways to help you remember things, of which was used back in the days of the early greek, where many historians and librarians, would have to remember full texts at a time, in order to propagate its content to other villages and cities in their travels.....
when you consider the importance of this feat and its complex nature....which many volumes were memorized....is astounding.
Now when we consider most teens cant calculate worth a sh*t and sit there in front of a cash till looking blankly at the screen wondering how much to give back....waiting for them to figure it out is torture as they have lost the skills of calculations.....but now we seem to be heading down the same road with penmanship...(due to overuse of keyboards and not enough writing skills) , and now with retention of content due to its instant availability for when we ask it.
And I think that where the study is implying is that we're developing ways of not remembering every little insignificant detail but where it's stored
Unless you know in advance that you're not sure to have access to "where it's stored" when you need the information. For example, explicitly copying a document to local storage might be more cost-effective than subscribing to mobile broadband at 60 USD/mo plus taxes and UFM recovery fees.
I've been using the internet since ... since ... well, since a long time ago, and my mind is still as sharp as ... as something really sharp.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Sorry, mini whiney-rant coming!
I appear to be using the net in a 100% different way than everyone else on this entire thread.
Trying to be on topic, I'll start by replying to you.
My GPS taught me to navigate. Yes, *without it*. Here's why. I have a memory black hole for visual-spatial road info. I simply cannot visualize where roads go if they curve. So if I had to go somewhere new, sure, I start with the printed net map. Then I'd miss a turn, then make a random panicked second turn, and it would be all over. I'd lose an hour grinding my way back to a First Principle. (Freeway). The reason is that the roads "just sit there". They're just roads. You turn down on one, "yay, you're on a road." But it's the wrong one, so I'd feebly try to fix it. "Look, another road! They're twisty and all alike!"
With a GPS, because it corrects the optimal route, it produces a new "turn here" *better than the random twisty roads next to it". My *Verbal* memory is pretty good - so I remember that if I missed one road, the way to fix it is "go there instead".
I have learned more about navigating with a GPS in 2 years than the 25 before that.
Meanwhile, for the "look it up" crowd, I for one can't look *all* of it up - I hit the limits of your short term inbound load really fast. So I try to judge the overall quality of the info vs how many times I'll use that whole set of knowledge, and do put some work into "almost knowing" it. "Yes, you do need to know your times tables" because you need your *intuition* to fire. I'm an accounting liaison. You have to know *roughly* what 358,945 times 15% is instantly so that when you're staring at a contract clause in a meeting with a Shark, you can fire back that you want the lump sum profit of $55,000, not Estimated Price plus 15%. You don't have time to go "look in a book".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
And perhaps those who learn will become less occupied with facts and more engaged in larger questions of understanding.
Makes an assertion that understanding can be gained without facts. This seems absurd to me. In order to understand e.g. History, you need to know what has happened when and what has influenced whom. I like to break facts up into two categories: Trivial and Conceptual. Trivial facts can be easily looked up and forgotten and are, in general, unimportant for good understanding (although they may be important in specific cases, in which event, you look it up). Conceptual facts, on the other hand are required to be known in order to generate understanding. They cannot easily be looked up in a reference because they aren't the kind of thing that is usually stated as such. An example might be in order: Two trivial facts: The Treaty of Versailles ended WWI on June 28, 1919. A Spanish Flu Epidemic in 1918 killed an large proportion of 20-40 year olds. Conceptual fact: The untimely deaths of fighting age people led to Germany being unable to continue the war. Knowing that there was a flu epidemic just before the end of WWI is an important thing to memorize. Knowing specific dates or casualty figures isn't.
The problem with education has always been that it is easier to teach and test trivia.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
I remember a time before the internet when people had to actually......oh, never mind...I forget what I am trying to say.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Decades before the internet existed, I had a physics professor who proclaimed "It's not what you know that matters, it's knowing where to find what you need when you need it." He emphasized understanding concepts and procedures, not memorizing every little detail.
in The Warlock in Spite of Himself. If not the precise methods, then at least the ideas behind them.
"Squawking by radio had proved singularly effective, due largely to an automatic record of the squawk. The problems of records and other bureaucratic red tape had been solved by red oxide audio recording tape, with tracks a single molecule in width, and the development of data-retrieval systems so efficient that the memorization of facts became obsolete. Education thus became exclusively a training in concepts, and the success of democracy was assured."
I don't remember 200+ 11-digit numbers, I have my phone remember them for me. My intelligence is limited, but my extelligence is growing all the time. I've noticed when I deliberately take holidays in the Highlands - no wi-fi, and only enough mobile signal for emergency calls, it takes a few days to acclimatise to the concept that I can't just Google/wiki any item that comes to mind, to settle an argument, or complete a crossword puzzle, or identify a bird species.
I like the idea that I don't have to remember anything I don't really want to, because I can always look it up if I need it.
Most students ... seem unable to distinguish information gathering from actual understanding.
Absolutely. As I've commented elsewhere, having free access to the world's ideas is great, except when you're trying to train students to generate new ideas. With information and ideas so freely available, it's now incredibly difficult to get students to study an issue and develop their own viewpoints -- they've been trained since childhood to "look it up on the web," and are now fact-rich but understanding-poor. Ask for a few paragraphs describing, say, why the Great Eastern was used to lay the first submarine telegraph cable, and one gets the same paragraphs from a dozen students, copied from a web site.
Copying others' work has been done since the second cuneiform stylus was made, so that's not the new problem. The new problem is, the students don't understand that they've done anything wrong. Since the information they've submitted is factually correct, they say, what's the problem? They equate the production of correct information with understanding.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/09/13/1342209/How-Good-Software-Makes-Us-Stupid
Did you Google that?
Or did you remember it?
As he said: "Oh herbal medicine has been around for thousands of years. Indeed it has and then we tested it all and the stuff that worked became 'medicine.' And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMvMb90hem8
I don't remember details well since I have bad memory. However, I am better with the Internet. Without it, I feel stupid/dumb. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Prior to writing humanity would have passed on all knowledge, from memory, verbally and through training...
Then writing was developed, and our memories have gone downhill from there. Or on the other hand, because we only need to remember where to find the -details- now, instead of remembering every detail ourselves, we can now learn and "remember" far more than ever in history. Yes there are things that are highly important to actually remember, but to act as if the Internet is having any different effect than books, or parchment, or whatever was the invention of the moment is probably just proving the researchers aren't well versed in history.
"Quick!. What's the number for 9-1-1?"
Have gnu, will travel.
I like to keep all my code documented and use tools and ticket systems to remember where I am at with a project, I don't want to remember that stuff, so I suppose this is anagolous to what the internet does.
I like to think I use this offset capacity for reasoning and problem solving. Sadly I think many people use it for nothing. Ultimately I see this being augmented right into the brain with some sort of mind interface. I think that technology is part of our collective evolution of the brain and this illustrates it.
I suspect that our brains are evolving faster than we realise towards being problem solvers as opposed to reciters of facts and, hopefully, more reasoned.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Haven't ANY of you taught a single course and noticed that nobody has a readily available fund of knowledge so they can answer questions without doing ten lookups?? My view is that people are getting dumber and one preeminent quality of that dumbness is a low knowledge base. So what're we gonna do ... have "conversations" between
know-nothings that take an hour for a five minute conversation because everybody's
busy looking up stuff on their Iphones because they know no history, music, science,
literature, economics, or world affairs??
I think the study in question merely points out prosaically what almost every teacher
knows.