THERE WILL have been not a few grumpy old technophobes who saw the headlines, and with some glee cheered: "Vindicated. I was right all along!" The internet, it appeared from a piece of research in Science, is bad for our memories. Those "senior" moments can now be laid at the door of the monster that has taken over our lives, Google. The children must forthwith be prised from their computers.
But hasten softly. All may not be as it appears. In truth the research, led by Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University, demonstrates not so much the destruction of mental capacity, but the remarkable ability of the memory to prioritise and to use the new tools of the internet as an external memory to extend its own capacity.
The research involved four tests of groups of students. In one, participants typed 40 items of trivia, like “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain”, into a computer. Half were told the computer would save the information, the other half, that it would be deleted. The latter were far more likely to remember the data later, while the minds of the former seem to have registered subconsiously that the internet would do their remembering for them and didn’t bother doing so themselves.
If provided with file names for the data the participants were more likely to remember the file names than the data. The brain, without instruction, decided that what mattered was being able to access the information easily rather than taking up space unnecessarily.
Sparrow describes the internet as a form of what scientists call “transactive memory”. “I love watching baseball,”she says. “But I know my husband knows baseball facts, so when I want to know something I ask him, and I don’t bother to remember it.” In effect the internet mirrors social man’s own memory networking.
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He argued that, as people came to rely on it as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry in their heads, they would, in the words of one of the book's characters, "cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful".
The same fears were expressed by some on the advent of the printing press. But the truth is that the new technologies have been great engines of enlightenment, spreading ideas and enriching not just civilisations but the human brain. They, like the internet, have brought new ways of thinking, reading, and remembering, stretching not diminishing the human mind.