Let me ask you something. How many of your friend's phone number can you remember? I guess it might be less than 5 or 6.
Let us go a few years back when we were able to remember at least 5-10 phone numbers, we had diaries to write them down. And before that, if we ask our parents they tend to remember it all in their head. I know people who could remember more than 20 phone numbers.
Well, with the advent of technology, we are conveniently living in a society where everything is getting readily available. But, we are becoming more and more passive, right? Isn't it affecting our brains too?
Remember the film WALL-E? The movie actually depicts a not so optimistic future. We are forced to leave Earth because of what we have done to it that made it uninhabitable. We are forced to live in a space station where the conditions of Earth is simulated.
Well, in that movie we can see how we have become boneless bodies. We are fed with everything at the tip of our fingers. It was kind of a light-hearted -machine overtaking humans- plot.
I think what was shown in this 2008 released movie is already happening. If you just look around us, we will get an insight into how our comfort is exploited (Also, how we are abusing our home planet).
Technology has made us lazy. We don't have to walk out to buy food, to watch movies or do shopping, and basically, everything is getting so comfortable that we don't have to get out of our house or even the room.
Well, I guess time is not far when we will be having our own robot maids.
So, coming back to how Googling affects our memory, let us look at some stats.
In 1998 there were 3.5 million searches and now there are almost 4.7 trillion search queries every day.
You can check the count of searches live as you read here: Internet Live Statistics
People are searching and searching and searching...
We need things spontaneously. We rarely use reasoning. Or its how our habits are manipulated.
From what I have read,
Neuroimaging of frequent Internet users shows twice as much activity in the prefrontal cortex as sporadic users. This part of the brain is reserved for short-term memory and quick decision-making. Essentially, our brains recognize that most of the flood of online information is trivial, and doesn’t deserve our full attention.
Also, from my experience, I am an avid Googler. My profession also wants me to be there online, updated about the things that are happening on social media, news, and so on... Google has become my go-to guy. I started to realise its not actually a good trend.
If you are stuck somewhere, you Google; you need the best of something, you Google; you are bored at home, you Google and the list goes on.
We are getting subconsciously trained to consume information in small bits and just be happy with it. We don't actually need to memorise anything. We have smartphones to bookmark any information.
I guess our brains have become a short term memory disk.
Also, the technology around voice recognition is getting better day by day. And guess what we don't even have to type anything to get things done. We will have virtual talking assistants to do everything for you.
What I have learned is that there's this information bombardment. We are always hit with it. And mostly you can only grasp a little bit from here and there. It kind of makes you pseudo-intelligent to an extend, which I am always afraid of. Because it happens without even us being unaware of it.
But, I think this what is happening around us all. Your attention is grabbed by byte-sized information, you skim over the TLDR paragraphs. You are getting lazy day by day. You are not thinking much. If this continues, researches show that our brain might get rewired to just skim and ignore the facts. (Just like how we do with the Privacy Policy)
We are mostly lazy enough to read further. By doing this we pave way for fake information to propagate. You share things in excitement.
Also, you can be easily manipulated by the Internet. You can search for the absurdest of things and you will get enough statements to 'validate' your opinion even if that is total bullcrap.
I guess at times like this, it is necessary to choose an authoritative source rather than passively watching YouTube videos, Tweets or WhatsApp texts. Train your brain to be sceptical about the information you are looking at. Validate it with more data from different trustable resources.
It is high time that we are aware of the technology around us.
I know it is hard, not to Google things. But, give your brain some work. Train it to remember things. Start with remembering 10 of your friend's phone numbers.
Resources: How the Internet is Changing Your Brain
The Google Effect on Memory: Is It a Form of Brain Damage?
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