Speak,memory

We had sensed it: our memory becoming dodgy when we had to recall a name,a date,a cricket score,a political factoid that we were familiar with,and in all probability should have remembered. In the end,in absolute despair and capitulation,we googled for that elusive information. What was happening to our memory — was our Internet dependence playing with the nodes of our remembrances? Our quiet fears were followed by a raft of experiments and books on the many ways the Net tinkered with and then fundamentally changed the way our brain worked. The latest study,“Google Effects on Memory”,by Columbia University’s Betsy Sparrow and others,in Science,comes up with a different,encouraging,inference: with our reliance on computers and search engines,our memory isn’t putrefying,we are just better at remembering where to access information than we are at remembering the information itself.

The Net,they say,is acting like a vast external storage space of memory. It is a collective source of information that we can tap into at will and,therefore,our brains have dispensed with the memory workout that they did with astonishing rigour and regularity earlier. In a crucial experiment,participants were asked to key in a list of trivia into the computer. Those who were told the information would be erased did a better job of remembering than those who were told the details would be stored in several folders. But the latter,significantly,remembered where exactly the information was stored.

Our cultural evolution has been marked by what and how much we have to remember. And a change in that has often been facilitated by technological advancements. Once,people memorised entire texts,aided by mnemonic codes like rhymes and metre. Printing liberated us from the pain of such rote-learning. Now the Internet is taking it further than we ever imagined,becoming an exterior memory palace for all of us.