Technology and human memory

Research by psychologist Betsy Sparrow and her colleagues, recently published in Science, has been causing quite a stir about how technology, specifically internet search engines, might be changing our relation to information.

The basic finding is that when people were faced with difficult trivia questions, internet-related concepts, such as the word “Google,” were more salient. In a subsequent experiment, people who expected information to be continuously available tended to remember where information was stored, rather than the information itself.

Very interesting stuff. Yet this freaks people out a little bit. Should it?

As Alva Noë articulates in his commentary, these findings should not be taken as evidence that internet search engines and other forms of technology are “ruining” human memory. (By the way, detrimental effects of technology have been a concern throughout history.)

Rather, this research, like much other work in cognitive science, helps us understand how our mental machinery works. Though it often feels like we do, we don’t actually store all that much of the world “in our heads.” We don’t have to, because the world itself is right there, its own best model. Creating and storing a mental representation of it would be inefficient.

The sparseness of mental representation seems particularly relevant to UI/UX designers.