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memory
You have stopped remembering things because the internet does.
The Google effect, or digital amnesia, is the tendency to forget information that can be easily accessed via search engines.
Studies show that your brain is now more likely to remember where to find information than the actual facts themselves. You are offloading your memory to external storage, treating your smartphone as an extension of your own mind.
You are losing your knowledge, but you are becoming an expert at retrieval.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner, 2011
- What the check found
- The definition aligns with the original 2011 study by Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner, which found that people better recall the location of information when they believe it will be stored externally.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.