by Rachel Hill, Fall 2013 Intern
How are ever-prominent search tools affecting our brains? Clive Thompson set out to answer this and related technology questions in his recent book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. In an excerpt published by Slate, Thompson asks if modern dependence on search engines is causing our memories to retain information less efficiently: “The short answer is: No. Machines aren’t ruining our memory. The longer answer: It’s much, much weirder than that!” The longer answer begins with a discussion of transactive memory, an evolved tool for collective recall that humans are now adapting due to their use of machines. The concept of transactive memory was developed in the 1980s by Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, who was inspired by the way married couples tend to divvy up the work of remembering important facts or dates. In this way, we store collective knowledge in a kind of joint memory folder that we can access by asking questions of the person who knows the answers or who can help us recall them. According to Wegner, transactive memory represents an indication of strong metamemory, or the ability to conceive the mental strengths and limitations of ourselves and others.
These concepts have been evidenced recently in research studies, including one by a team of Australian researchers who worked with couples married a minimum of 26 years to examine collaborative remembering. This particular study tested how well they could recall simple words as well as autobiographical events and names of acquaintances, both as individuals and as pairs. The researchers found that couples remembered names and events more effectively as pairs, especially when they engaged in cross-cuing, or prompting each other with memory fragments and facts, to aid each other’s recall. Other studies have demonstrated that people who work together to learn a task or recall information can do so much more efficiently and accurately than those who attempt it alone. According to Thompson, “Transactive groups don’t just remember better: They also analyze problems more deeply, too, developing a better grasp of underlying principles.”
He argues that we currently interact with search engines in basically the same way that the married couples played their memories off each other in the Australian study. Columbia University researcher Betsy Sparrow, a student of Wegner’s, recently conducted a computer-based study of transactive memory—essentially testing how much our brains rely on computers to store our information. Sparrow discovered that when subjects knew a piece of trivia that they typed would be saved to a generically labeled folder on the computer, they were less likely to remember the fact itself, but more likely to recall where it was stored. In a paper for Science, she concludes: “Just as we learn through transactive memory who knows what in our families and offices, we are learning what the computer ‘knows’ and when we should attend to where we have stored information in our computer-based memories.”
Thompson maintains that this is not exactly a change from the way human brains have always worked, but it does force us to think about our minds in a different way, because our minds and the computers aren’t nearly as separate as we may think. While it’s harder for humans to use machines the same way we cross-cue each other, because the programming is fundamentally different, we are more attracted to the wealth of information offered by search engines for our perusal than to a human peer who might be able to (verbosely) offer us similar facts.
The bottom line, short-short answer is: “you can stop worrying about your iPhone moving your memory outside your head. It moved out a long time ago—yet it’s still all around you.”
Did You Know?
Although our memories aren’t deteriorating just because we’re more accustomed to search engines and smartphones, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to exercise our minds. There are many different ways to strengthen your mind, from diet and life choices, to memory games. Here are a few tips:
1. Be active, not just with your mind. By participating in physical exercise, the oxygen flow to your brain increases, reducing health risks related to memory loss. Avoiding obesity and other health problems associated with a lack of exercise can also give you a better chance of avoiding memory-related diseases like Alzheimer’s.
2. Catch some Zs. Sleep helps “knit” your memories together and can also make them last longer. Getting enough rest also decreases your stress level, which can diminish your ability to understand facts and retrieve them from your memory.
3. It’s the same thing health magazines profess all the time, but eating the right diet really can help not only your physical body, but also your brain. Certain foods with omega-3s and other nutrients can reduce the risk of dementia and improve the connectivity of your brain.
4. Practice makes perfect. Play certain memory games like repeating facts or names, chunking together facts (It’s easier to remember your social security number in pieces rather than individual numbers.), associating new information with the environment around you, and creating triggers to remind yourself of something. (My watch is on the wrong arm; what am I forgetting today? The dry-cleaning!) These tricks and more can allow you to reel in the memories you know you stored—you just need to remember where they are. (DYK by Emeli Warren)
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