Another personal obsession: Why Your Reminiscence Sucks: The Science of Remembering within the Web Age

Take a 2nd and take into consideration the three most essential folks on your lifestyles.

Received ’em? K, now this is a quiz: Have you learnt all three of their cellphone numbers off the highest of your head?

If you do not, you are now not by myself. Why waste mind area memorizing telephone numbers when that you can seem to be them up to your mobile phone each time you need, proper?

No longer too way back, we used to outsource data we did not understand to family and friends. As a substitute of remembering the ideas ourselves, we might take into account that who is aware of what. Dad is aware of learn how to trade a tire; Provide is aware of all the baseball stats; Julia is aware of how one can get to Grandma’s home.

Now, we outsource reminiscence to know-how and the web. The reply to any query on the earth is simplest a Google search away. Our smartphones, our emails, WikiHow — they’ve all change into part of our exterior onerous force.

However that reliance on the net and no more on our personal reminiscence is not just altering our existence. It can be in fact altering the construction of our brains.

We have modified the way in which we absorb new data. Our consideration spans have transform shorter. The large quantities of knowledge we expose ourselves to forces us to be extra environment friendly about what we convert to lengthy-time period reminiscences.

Has reminiscence turn out to be out of date due to the ubiquity of the web? Let’s have a look how our dependence on expertise and the web has affected our brains and the way we expect, study, and understand that.

How We Make Reminiscences

To take into account how know-how is altering how we make reminiscences, let’s take a fast have a look at how we make reminiscences within the first situation.

Each time you examine a reality or have an expertise, this data enters your working reminiscence, sometimes called your quick-time period reminiscence.

Your working reminiscence is a fragile situation. A brand new piece of knowledge lives in there for best about 60 milliseconds before it’s either forgotten, or it moves to your long-term memory system. What determines its survival? Sometimes, it’s your own decision, whether conscious or unconscious: You decide whether the information is noteworthy or relevant enough to warrant becoming a long-term memory. Other times, a simple break in your attention can make you forget it.

Only when facts and experiences enter your long-term memory can you weave them into more complex, big-picture ideas — a process that’s a trademark of our depth of intelligence, argues WIRED‘s Nicholas Carr.

It’s that jump from short-term to long-term memory that can be most profoundly affected by our digital lifestyle.

Why? For one, because our working memories can get overloaded with more information than our brains can handle. Secondly, we’ve trained ourselves to trivialize the information we learn online in the first place.

Information Overload

When we go online to learn things, we often end up exposing ourselves to more information than our brain can possibly process and store.

Ever found yourself in one of those Wikipedia black holes, where you go in looking up the name of a Russian prime minister and emerge, hours later, having read through the entire history of the Russian Revolution?

That’s called “cognitive overload.” It can also happen when you go online look up the name of that Russian prime minister and end up also reading your emails, scrolling through your Twitter feed, and skimming through a few articles within the same time frame.

All this activity online is an interactive process that requires a lot of quick decision-making. This is why neuroimaging studies have shown frequent internet users have extensive brain activity when actively surfing the internet.

But that’s not necessarily a good thing. All the skimming we do and the notifications we receive while spending time online can easily lead to cognitive overload. When the amount of information entering our working memory exceeds our ability to process and store it, we lose our ability to retain that information in our long-term memory or draw connections with other memories.

“Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains weak,” writes Carr.

A Different Type of Memory

The 2011 study “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” found that people who have access to search engines tend to remember fewer facts and less information overall because of the knowledge that they can find the answer easily using the internet.

In other words, when faced with a question we don’t know the answer to, we’ve conditioned ourselves not to recall the information itself, and not to stretch our memories to figure out the answer — but to know how to find the answer using a search engine.

It still means we have to remember things, it just means we’re remembering a different type of thing. We’re remembering how to find the information — best practices for online search queries, the websites that might have the best answers, clues for verifying a reputable source. It’s kind of like the use of calculators in the classroom: Students are expected to do less rote memorization, and are instead trained more on how to find the answers to complex questions.

“The internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” reads the study. 

However, that does mean we’ve trained our brains to treat online information as trivial and less worthy of our undivided attention. Each time we check email or Facebook or the news, we prepare ourselves for skimming, not for learning. In a way, we’ve conditioned ourselves to forget the information before we even read it. Our brains are less apt to focus, digest information, and convert it into long-term memory. Instead, we have an increasing appetite for more stimuli.

Adapting to Our New Reality

The folks at Academic Earth put it best: “If the goal is to forge a creative mind through critical thinking, our Google amnesia may be problematic.” Like Carr said, the human ability to translate memories into complex thinking and analysis is part of what makes us uniquely intelligent.

But it’s not like we’re losing the ability to think critically altogether. Frequent internet usage is our new reality, and the answer isn’t to turn it off or blame the kids — it’s to adapt so we can lessen any negative impacts on converting facts and experiences to long-term memory.

Put simply, we’ll need to teach ourselves how to consciously prioritize information so we can process — and I mean deeply process — the most important stuff. But how? Just as we’ve trained ourselves to trivialize online information, we can also train ourselves to consciously commit information to memory.

Repetition is one way to remember things more easily. When you do or read something once, a neurological pathway is created in your brain. When you repeat that action and experience the same reward again, that neurological pathway gets a little bit thicker; and the next time, even thicker. The thicker that pathway gets, the more implicit recalling it becomes. That’s why re-reading important articles, for instance, can be a helpful way to process and store the information in them.

Another tip? Removing the interruptions that can break your attention and make you forget things stored in your short-term memory to begin with. This means closing our email and turning off notifications when we’re working. (Or even when we’re reading our favorite newspaper.)

The ubiquity of the internet — and its effects on the way we think and how are brains are wired –can be overwhelming at times. Not to mention, a little creepy.

“We become part of the internet in a way. We become part of the system and we end up trusting it,” said Daniel Wegner, the UCLA psychology professor who headed the “Google Effects on Memory” study.

So, how will our brains continue to develop as a result of technology and the internet? I’m sure we’ll see much more research on our dependence on — and even interdependence with — technology in the years ahead.

from Could Be Better | Last Digital Marketing Updates http://could-be-better.esy.es/why-your-memory-sucks-the-science-of-remembering-in-the-internet-age.html
via IFTTT Barcelona-Home Accommodation

yearly rental

Где остановиться в Барселоне
Le magazine de l'immobilier d'entreprise
long term rental
Наеми в Барселона
Diversamente Agibile
Настройте эту страницу на свой вкус.
monthly rentals
Look At Me. Интернет-сайт
Restauración en Barcelona
Some news from Barcelona
Flats for Sale