Interesting stuff – some good some not so good. I can remember
that my parents wouldn’t let me use a hand-held calculator
(afraid I wouldn’t remember – now look at us! lol) A recent
psychological study in Science suggests we may be changing the
way we store memory. Instead of remembering facts and
information, we have started to remember where we can find the
information online. Researchers in the study say the internet
acts as “transactive memory,” meaning we recognize it as an
external memory source. The idea isn’t new, throughout history
we have associated certain people with an expertise or a skill
set and who have answers to our questions, but in this case,
we’re doing the same thing with the internet. One of the
experiments in this study provided a set of facts to two groups
of participants and asked them to remember them. Half of the
group was told these facts would remain in folders on a
computer, the other half were told they would be deleted.
Participants who knew the files would be erased performed