Consider: If you have immediate access to information (or the belief that you have immediate access to information), would you bother to engage in memory encoding of new information that would produce a durable memory trace/representation of that information?
The answer appears to be "No". The New York Times and other outlets are reporting on a new study by Sparrow, Liu and Wegner that was just printed in Science. The NY Times article can be accessed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/health/15memory.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26 Here is a blog on the PC World website that covers the story: http://www.pcworld.com/article/235757/google_is_changing_the_way_you_think_say_researchers.html One can access the Science magazine article here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1207745#aff-2 Betsy Sparrow of Columbia U. and Daniel Wegner have been doing research along these lines, using Wegner's construct of "Transactive Memory", that is, memories can be thought of as being distributed member of a group or a community and if specific members retain certain types of information (e.g., the history of the group), then others don't have to learn that information because of their access to those persons (however, if no one learns what those people know, then that knowledge will be lost, that is, lack of redundancy can result in loss of knowledge as well as confounding biases of the rememberer with the information). Of course, the problems associated with such "offline memory" are nothing new. I believe one argument against the use of books was that relying upon books was a sign of a lazy mind, that one was following a principle of least effort instead of "active learning" of material and forming durable knowledge structures. The only question I have about this alleged reliance on offline info is: What are you going to do when the Zombie Apocalypse (tm) comes, the internet and electricity gets shut down, and you'll be busy running from the undead who think that you'd make an excellent snack? -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=11455 or send a blank email to leave-11455-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
