How Google Affects Our Memory [Infographic]

I remember back towards the beginning of the year when Chris Pirillo and Danny Brown both wrote articles about how social media is, in a sense, making us lazy. They started a whole online conversation about it, and many other blogs weighed in with their opinions on the subject.

The story kind of goes like this… Back in the old days, we used libraries and encyclopedias to find information, we memorized facts, and we creatively found ways to get the answers to our questions. Our brains had to work for it so to speak. The skills we used to obtain the information we needed kept us sharp and intelligent.

Then, along came Google, and everything changed. Now, instead of memorizing facts, we memorize where to go for the information we need. Almost everything we could ever want to know about everything can be found online with only a few clicks. Our laziness began. Then, along came social media. Now we don’t even waste our precious time looking up the information on Google ourselves. Instead, we simply ask the question on Twitter, Facebook or Quora, and we let other people type it into Google and report back to us with the answer.

Have you noticed this trend? Have you done it yourself? I have, but I’d like to think I’ve done it with questions that I wanted other people’s opinion on, and not with questions that could simply be looked up on Google, but I’m not sure. How does all this affect our brain, and specifically our memory? We all know the Internet is filled with incorrect information, so what if we are making big decisions (i.e. health) based on false facts? Muhammad at Online Colleges sent us this infographic which they recently put together on the topic. I found the sentence in this that reads, “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools. We relate to them like they’re close friends in whom we can rely” to be the most interesting. I wonder how this will all progress in the future.