Memory is, well, so 1990s. Who needs it when we have Google, Siri and any number of services to help answer and recall everything we’ve ever perceived and wished to remember or wanted to know. Will our personal memories become another shared service served up from the “cloud”?

[div class=attrib]From the Wilson Quarterly:[end-div]

In an age when most information is just a few keystrokes away, it’s natural to wonder: Is Google weakening our powers of memory? According to psychologists Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University, Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard, the Internet has not so much diminished intelligent recall as tweaked it.

The trio’s research shows what most computer users can tell you anecdotally: When you know you have the Internet at hand, your memory relaxes. In one of their experiments, 46 Harvard undergraduates were asked to answer 32 trivia questions on computers. After each one, they took a quick Stroop test, in which they were shown words printed in different colors and then asked to name the color of each word. They took more time to name the colors of Internet-related words, such as modem and browser. According to Stroop test conventions, this is because the words were related to something else that they were already thinking about—yes, they wanted to fire up Google to answer those tricky trivia questions.

In another experiment, the authors uncovered evidence suggesting that access to computers plays a fundamental role in what people choose to commit to their God-given hard drive. Subjects were instructed to type 40 trivia-like statements into a dialog box. Half were told that the computer would erase the information and half that it would be saved. Afterward, when asked to recall the statements, the students who were told their typing would be erased remembered much more. Lacking a computer backup, they apparently committed more to memory.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]