This article is a continuation from a previous article: Is the Internet Changing our Brains?, as a part of a Technology-based series.

The Internet has changed our ability to process information. Even if we go back 10-20 years, knowledge was spread differently. Yes, there was television, newspapers and thousands of books, but we had to make the effort to find the book or the newspaper or the TV channel to learn the information. It was a little more “difficult.” We couldn’t just Google the name of the main actor in a movie or the score of the latest Cubs game and get the answer in a second. When students were writing essays, they had to go through the library encyclopedias and books to find everything that they needed. They needed to research.

Now this “research” is a couple of clicks and a press of “enter.”

Modern society has catered to making things more effortless- more facile, more superficial. The expanding technology searches for task and for a means to simplify that task. Evidently, when it comes to certain issues such as physical disabilities or discomforts, such technology is not only beneficial, but crucial.

However, the general focus here is the influence of such technology on not only the physical (the brain), but the mind.

Sparrow, Liu & Wegner (2011) state: “It has become so commonplace to look up the answer to any question the moment it occurs that it can feel like going through withdrawal when we can’t find out something immediately.” (The use of the word “withdrawal” is noteworthy.”)

The result? These researchers consider the Internet with all of its databases to have become an external memory source. External memory sources are not a new phenomenon, but rather ones usually allocated for group work or family memories. They relate to a capability to recall who knows the information, i.e. who to ask when you need to remember it, but not wasting your own memory space. More clearly, external memory sources require an awareness of the location of a piece of information. So when it comes to the Internet, Sparrow, Liu & Wegner (2011) found that individuals are more likely to recall what website to find information on.

Instruction indicated implicitly whether or not to remember certain information by telling them whether or not the information would be available to them later on in time. This priming was important regardless of whether they were told to remember the information or whether future testing would occur.

Subjects were presented with a series of entries and following these statements were told that the item would be 1) saved, 2) would be saved in a specific folder or 3) would be erased. Within the recall task, it was found that the entries in the “erase condition” were recalled the best. Subjects were also asked which statements had been in the different conditions. It was found overall that when presented with an external memory source such as a specific folder that the information would be saved into, subjects created what is termed a transactive memory and did not remember the entry itself, but rather the folder of where to find it.

What influence does this new type of memory have on our minds? Why do individuals feel like they are going through withdrawal when they can’t easily Google something or find an entry for it on Wikipedia?

Transactive Memory and External Memory Sources

Fundamentally, that’s what the Internet is. There is no fear of memory loss outside of personal experiences because we expect everything to be found online. I’ve probably read the Sparrow, Liu & Wegner (2011) article at least 5-6 times in my life, but I turned back to it when I didn’t remember the specifics of how they ran their study. I’ve didn’t find it necessary to put to memory their specific methodology, but I remembered their conclusions and that’s all I needed to return to it later on. That bookmarked pdf of the paper was my external memory source.

But, what I’ve really started to wonder is what biological change this implies. As in, what neuronal and synaptic differences have arisen from these changes. Is the reason we’ve started to rely so much on these external memory sources because the new technology age has provided so much stimulus for our brains that they cannot physically keep up with it?

Evolutionarily speaking, the brain is able to create, strengthen and destroy memories based off of whether or not they are used. The term used is synaptic pruning, which is generally associated with early childhood development. During this time, the child is exposed to so much stimuli within a short period of time, that the brain is constantly remodeling synapses.

We’re all similar to newborns navigating a much larger world on a screen in our laps, as opposed to the comfort of our strollers and playpens.

In 1999, David Schacter published an article entitled The Seven Sins of Memory. Taking an evolutionary perspective, he introduced memory omissions. According to his analysis, there are sins that deal with forgetting (1) transience, (2) absentmindedness, and (3) blocking, sins that deal with distortions ( (4) misattribution, (5) suggestibility, (6) bias) and sins that deal with intrusive memories ((7) persistence.) When it comes to forgetting, these are memories that are lost with time or memories that are intentionally blocked such as in the cases of PTSD. For these, the evolutionary benefit is simple: certain memories are either not used or better lost. Thus, the concept of synaptic pruning can be viewed as an adaptation.

This was taken from the American Psychology Association

For the context of external memory sources and the influence of Internet on the brain, Schacter’s forgetting is of relevance. Short-term memory is the mind’s capability to hold onto small amounts of information that can easily be manipulated for short periods of time, while long-term memory reflects our more extended knowledge. Short-term memory is the information we keep in our minds before forgetting it or transferring it to long-term memory. So in the context of Sparrow, Liu & Wegner (2011), external memories are not kept in our long-term memory, but their location is. Or in the modern sense: the Internet just stores all information. The issue is that we forget certain things in order to remember others, but now the brain is overloaded.

Perhaps, we go into a “withdrawal” when we can’t find something online (as Sparrow, Liu & Wegner (2011) noted) because we have become reliant on these external memory sources as the only solution to an overload of stimuli. Perhaps, this can explain the advent of Internet addictions.

Our brains are incapable of keeping up by themselves. Therefore, there is an interdependence between the Internet and our own brains.

Future articles:

Using this evidence, how can we perceive memory as failing? An elaboration on Schacter: what are the evolutionary benefits of our memory systems?

The image for this article comes from: http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/11/how-the-web-affects-memory