“Our memories are changing,’’ said Daniel Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard and the senior author of the study. “So we remember fewer facts and we remember more sources, which website you saw it on or whose e-mail to look in to find that… . It’s like having information at our fingertips makes us always go to our fingertips.’’
The findings, published online by the journal Science, will feel familiar to anyone who has lost Internet access for a matter of hours and felt suddenly helpless or gone through connectivity withdrawal on vacation. But the findings also have broader implications for how we learn, both in the classroom and in old age.
“In my area, in Alzheimer’s disease, I can see how this application could be very helpful,’’ said Dr. Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Because Alzheimer’s patients lose short-term memory, he said, it might be useful for them to have a strategy in their long-term memory that helps them retrieve information they cannot remember.
“We’re doing it’’ already, Small said, “using the World Wide Web as an external hard drive to augment our biological memory stores.’’
The experiments were led by Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia who was inspired while watching an old black and white movie one night. Sparrow knew she had seen one of the actresses in something else. But what? She reached for her laptop, eventually recalling, with the help of the Web, that she had seen the actress, Angela Lansbury, when watching “Murder, She Wrote,’’ with her grandparents.
Then she began to wonder: How did people figure stuff like this out before they had Wi-Fi, iPhones, and search engines? She decided to rigorously test whether people were truly outsourcing their memory to technology.
