How the internet is changing Your Brain?
Given the ubiquity of Google, is memory obsolete? We dare to ask, how is such easy access to data touching our brains as we tend to rely less and less on memory and more on technology?
How does human memory work? Twenty years ago you may have found your answer during a book, or by asking a friend. But today, you’ll Google it. there have been 3.5 million searches in 1998, now, there are 4.7 trillion search queries every day. When something changes our life-style so monumentally, you can bet it’s changing us as well. Google has become our external hard drive. In an exceedingly recent experiment, school students remembered less information when they thought they could easily access it later. We used to rely on friends and family members for this method of memory outsourcing, remembering who knew what instead of the knowledge itself.2 But now, Google is the friend with all the expertise. If the sum of all knowledge is constantly available in our pockets, is it any wonder that we’ve stopped bothering to keep it in our heads? “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” and the same goes for those that fire apart. Neuroimaging of frequent internet users shows twice as much activity within the prefrontal cortex as infrequent users. This part of the brain is reserved for short-term memory and quick decision-making. Essentially, our brains recognize that most of the floods of online data is trivial, and doesn’t merit our full attention. The problem is, the brain does what we do tend to train it to try to. and each time we to tend to open a browser, we do tend to brace oneself for skimming instead of learning. So even if we really wish to recollect something from Google, our brains are predisposed to forget. Everything we ever wanted to know is available to us, and we have conditioned ourselves to ignore it. What do we truly know? If the goal is to forge an original mind through critical thinking, our Google amnesia is also problematic. The knowledge and skill that gets encoded into our long-term memory is the basis of our unique intelligence. Still, we also ready to mitigate the impact on our long-term memory by adapting our response to this new reality. After all, we can’t stop the ocean amendment of the knowledge age. In recent years, American colleges have focused less on fact memorization and more on teaching students how to make innovative connections between curricula and real life. This way, it’s less about the knowledge you have, and more regarding how you use the knowledge at hand.
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