How does the human memory work? Twenty years ago you might have found your answer in a book, or by asking a friend. But today, you'll Google it. There were 3.5 million searches in 1998, now, there are 4.7 trillion search queries everyday.1 When something changes our lifestyle so monumentally, you can bet it's changing us as well.
Google has become our external hard drive. In a recent experiment, college students remembered less information when they thought they could easily access it later. We used to rely on friends and family members for this method of memory outsourcing, remembering who knew what rather than the information itself.2 But now, Google is the friend with all of the expertise. If the sum of all knowledge is constantly available in our pockets, is it any wonder that we've stopped bothering to keep it in our heads?
"Neurons that fire together, wire together.” And the same goes for those that fire apart. Neuroimaging of frequent Internet users shows twice as much activity in the prefrontal cortex as sporadic users.3 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. The problem is, the brain does what we train it to do. And every time we open a browser, we prepare for skimming instead of learning. So even if we really want to remember something from Google, our brains are predisposed to forget. Everything we ever wanted to know is available to us, and we have conditioned ourselves to ignore it.
What do we actually know? If the goal is to forge a creative mind through critical thinking, our Google amnesia may be problematic. The information and experience that gets encoded into our long-term memory is the basis of our unique intelligence.4 Still, we may be able to mitigate the impact to our long-term memory by adapting our response to this new reality. After all, we can't stop the sea change of the information age. In recent years, American schools have focused less on fact memorization and more on teaching students how to make innovative connections between the curriculum and real life.5 This way, it's less about the knowledge you have, and more about how you use the information at hand.