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As Internet users become more dependent on the Internet to store information, do people remember less? if you know your computer will store information, why do you store it in your own personal memory, your brain? Experts are wondering if the Internet is changing what we remember and how.
In a recent study, Professor Betsy Sparrow made some experiments(实验). She and her research team wanted to know how the Internet is changing memory.
In the first experiment, they asked two groups of people to put 40 unimportant facts into a computer. The first group of people understood that the computer would store the information. The second group understood that the computer would not store it. Later, the second group remembered the information better. People in the first group knew they could find the information again, so they did not try to remember it.
In the second experiment, the researchers gave people facts to remember, and told them where to find the information on the Internet. The information was in an exact in an exact computer folder(文件夹). Surprisingly, people later remember where the folder is better than the facts. When people use the Internet, they do not remember the information. However, they remember how to find it. This is called “transitive memory (交互记忆)”.
According to Sparrow, we are not becoming people with poor memories as a result of the Internet. Instead, computer users are developing stronger transitive memories; that is, people are learning how to organize a lot of information so that they are able to get it at a later date. This doesn't mean we are becoming either more or less clever, but there is no doubt that the way we use memory is changing.