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SYDNEY: Search engines and the Internet have made us better able to remember where to find information, but not what we're looking for, according to new U.S. research.
The study, published in the current issue of Science suggests that computers and online search engines are becoming an external memory and our brains are adapting to the change. We rely on computers and search engines to store and retrieve the information in the same way we access our memories.
"What I was attempting to show is that it really is not fundamentally different from how we have always used other people as external memory sources we can access; the scope is just greater," said lead author Betsy Sparrow from Columbia University in New York.
What was the question?
The researchers examined how students from Columbia and Harvard Universities used the Internet for memory storage and found that they relied on their computers when they didn't know or remember the answer to a question.
"We are seldom offline unless by choice and it is hard to remember how we found information before the Internet became a ubiquitous presence in our lives," the researchers said.
But when the students believed they couldn't access information, their recall of this information improved, the researchers found. "Just like not having access to your significant other when you have a baseball question, not having access to the Internet may leave you either forgetting about the question, or working a little harder to find the information," Sparrow said.
She added that prior to the age of the Internet, it paid people to remember who knew what kinds of information and hence who to go to. Now people prioritise where to find their answers. "People seemed to remember one or the other, either the info itself or where to find it," she said.
Mirror of society
Search engines reflect how people access information, said Mark Sanderson, a researcher in information retrieval at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). People know that sites like Wikipedia hold the answers they want, so they want this source returned to them in their search results, he said.
In Google searches, websites such as Wikipedia or The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) that are likely to hold the answers to such people's queries are shunted to the top, he said.
One result of this increasing reliance on computers is that we are losing the "serendipitous discoveries" that we used to find as a side effect of looking things up in a book or in a library, he added. "I'm not arguing that we all go back to using books in libraries; search engines are great to help us find what we want." But he suggested that in the future, search engines could also provide other information to enhance the possibility of these serendipitous discoveries being made.
