Memory offload

In James Burke's brilliant series The Day the Universe Changed, there's a line that never fails to shock me when I think about it, but which goes by so quickly you might miss it if you're not paying attention.  (This is typical of Burke -- I've heard his deservedly famous series Connections as being like "watching a pinball game on fast-forward.")

The line comes up at the beginning of the last episode, "Worlds Without End," in which he's giving a quick summary of humankind's progression through technology.  He says, "In the fifteenth century, the invention of the printing press took our memories away."

Recording our knowledge in some kind of semi-permanent fashion is at odds with our need to keep anything important in memory.  I'm riffing on that concept in my current work-in-progress, The Scattering Winds, which is about a post-apocalyptic world in which some parts of society in what is now the United States have gone back to being non-literate.  All of the knowledge of the culture is entrusted to the mind of one person -- the Keeper of the Word -- whose sacred task it is to remember all lore, language, music, and history.

Then... because of a refugee from another place -- the apprentice to the Keeper learns about written language, and acquires the rudiments of reading, then goes in search of any books that might have survived the disasters and plagues that ended the world as we know it.  He realizes that this (re)discovery will end the vocation he's studied his whole life for, but the lure of lost knowledge is too powerful to resist even so.

He knows that in a very real sense, the rediscovery of written language will take his memory away.

The internet, of course, has only deepened the scope of the problem.  A few years ago, I had a student who had what seemed to me a weird approach to figuring things out.  When presented with a question he didn't know the answer to, his immediate response was to pull out his school-issued iPad and Google it.  Often, he didn't even give his brain a chance to wrestle with the question; if the answer wasn't immediately obvious, out came the electronics.

"What have you learned by doing that?" I recall asking him, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.

"I got the right answer," he said.

"But the answer isn't the point!"  Okay, at that point my frustration was pretty clear.

I think the issue I had with this student comes from two sources.  One is the education system's unfortunate emphasis on Getting The Right Answer -- that if you have The Right Answer on your paper, it doesn't matter how you got it, or whether you really understand how to get there.  But the other is our increasing reliance on what amounts to external memory.  When we don't know something, the ease and accessibility of answers online makes us default to that, rather than taking the time to search our own memories for the answer.

The loss of our own facility for recall because of the external storage of information was the subject of a study in the journal Memory.  Called "Cognitive Offloading: How the Internet is Increasingly Taking Over Human Memory," the study, by cognitive psychologists Benjamin Storm, Sean Stone, and Aaron Benjamin, looked at how people approach the recall of information, and found that once someone has started relying on the internet, it becomes the go-to source, superseding one's own memory:

The results revealed that participants who previously used the Internet to gain information were significantly more likely to revert to Google for subsequent questions than those who relied on memory.  Participants also spent less time consulting their own memory before reaching for the Internet; they were not only more likely to do it again, they were likely to do it much more quickly.  Remarkably, 30% of participants who previously consulted the Internet failed to even attempt to answer a single simple question from memory.

This certainly mirrors my experience with my students.  Not all of them were as hooked to their electronics as the young man in my earlier anecdote, but it is more and more common for students to bypass thinking altogether and jump straight to Google.

"Memory is changing," lead author Storm said.  "Our research shows that as we use the Internet to support and extend our memory we become more reliant on it.  Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don't bother.  As more information becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives."

What concerns me is something that the researchers say was outside the scope of their research; what effect this might have on our own cognitive processes.  It's one thing if the internet becomes our default, but that our memories are still there, unaltered, should the Almighty Google not be available.  It's entirely another if our continual reliance on external "offloaded" memory ultimately weakens our own ability to process, store, and recall.  It's not as far-fetched as it sounds; there have been studies that suggest that mental activity can stave off or slow down dementia, so the "if you don't use it, you lose it" aphorism may work just as much for our brains as it does for our muscles.

In any case, maybe it'd be a good idea for all of us to put away the electronics.  No one questions the benefits of weightlifting if you're trying to gain strength; maybe we should push ourselves into the mental weightlifting of processing and recalling without leaning on the crutch of the internet.  And as Kallian discovers in The Scattering Winds, the bounty of information that comes from the external storage of information -- be it online or in print -- comes at a significant cost to our own reverence for knowledge and depth of understanding.

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The google trap

The eminent physicist Stephen Hawking said, "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge."

Somewhat more prosaically, my dad once said, "Ignorance can be cured.  We're all ignorant about some things.  Stupid, on the other hand, goes all the way to the bone."

Both of these sayings capture an unsettling idea; that often it's more dangerous to think you understand something than it is to admit you don't.  This idea was illustrated -- albeit using an innocuous example -- in a 2002 paper called "The Illusion of Explanatory Depth" by Leo Rozenblit and Frank Keil, of Yale University.  What they did is to ask people to rate their level of understanding of a simple, everyday object (for example, how a zipper works), on a scale of zero to ten.  Then, they asked each participant to write down an explanation of how zippers work in as much detail as they could.  Afterward, they asked the volunteers to re-rate their level of understanding.

Across the board, people rated themselves lower the second time, after a single question -- "Okay, then explain it to me" -- shone a spotlight on how little they actually knew.

The problem is, unless you're in school, usually no one asks the question.  You can claim you understand something, you can even have a firmly-held opinion about it, and there's no guarantee that your stance is even within hailing distance of reality.

And very rarely does anyone challenge you to explain yourself in detail.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

If that's not bad enough, a recent paper by Adrian Ward (of the University of Texas - Austin) showed that not only do we understand way less than we think we do, we fold what we learn from other sources into our own experiential knowledge, regardless of the source of that information.  Worse still, that incorporation is so rapid and smooth that afterward, we aren't even aware of where our information (right or wrong) comes from.

Ward writes:

People frequently search the internet for information.  Eight experiments provide evidence that when people “Google” for online information, they fail to accurately distinguish between knowledge stored internally—in their own memories—and knowledge stored externally—on the internet.  Relative to those using only their own knowledge, people who use Google to answer general knowledge questions are not only more confident in their ability to access external information; they are also more confident in their own ability to think and remember.  Moreover, those who use Google predict that they will know more in the future without the help of the internet, an erroneous belief that both indicates misattribution of prior knowledge and highlights a practically important consequence of this misattribution: overconfidence when the internet is no longer available.  Although humans have long relied on external knowledge, the misattribution of online knowledge to the self may be facilitated by the swift and seamless interface between internal thought and external information that characterizes online search.  Online search is often faster than internal memory search, preventing people from fully recognizing the limitations of their own knowledge.  The internet delivers information seamlessly, dovetailing with internal cognitive processes and offering minimal physical cues that might draw attention to its contributions.  As a result, people may lose sight of where their own knowledge ends and where the internet’s knowledge begins.  Thinking with Google may cause people to mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own.

I recall vividly trying, with minimal success, to fight this in the classroom.  Presented with a question, many students don't stop to try to work it out themselves, they immediately jump to looking it up on their phones.  (One of many reasons I had a rule against having phones out during class, another exercise in frustration given how clever teenagers are at hiding what they're doing.)  I tried to make the point over and over that there's a huge difference between looking up a fact (such as the average number of cells in the human body) and looking up an explanation (such as how RNA works).  I use Google and/or Wikipedia for the former all the time.  The latter, on the other hand, makes it all too easy simply to copy down what you find online, allowing you to have an answer to fill in the blank irrespective of whether you have the least idea what any of it means.

Even Albert Einstein, pre-internet though he was, saw the difference, and the potential problem therein.  Once asked how many feet were in a mile, the great physicist replied, "I don't know.  Why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?”

In the decades since Einstein's said this, that two minutes has shrunk to about ten seconds, as long as you have internet access.  And unlike the standard reference books he mentioned, you have little assurance that the information you found online is even close to right.

Don't get me wrong; I think that our rapid, and virtually unlimited, access to human knowledge is a good thing.  But like most good things, it comes at a cost, and that cost is that we have to be doubly cautious to keep our brains engaged.  Not only is there information out there that is simply wrong, there are people who are (for various reasons) very eager to convince you they're telling the truth when they're not.  This has always been true, of course; it's just that now, there are few barriers to having that erroneous information bombard us all day long -- and Ward's paper shows just how quickly we can fall for it.

The cure is to keep our rational faculties online.  Find out if the information is coming from somewhere reputable and reliable.  Compare what you're being told with what you know to be true from your own experience.  Listen to or read multiple sources of information -- not only the ones you're inclined to agree with automatically.  It might be reassuring to live in the echo chamber of people and media which always concur with our own preconceived notions, but it also means that if something is wrong, you probably won't realize it.

Like I said in Saturday's post, finding out you're wrong is no fun.  More than once I've posted stuff here at Skeptophilia and gotten pulled up by the short hairs when someone who knows better tells me I've gotten it dead wrong.  Embarrassing as it is, I've always posted retractions, and often taken the original post down.  (There's enough bullshit out on the internet without my adding to it.)

So we all need to be on our guard whenever we're surfing the web or listening to the news or reading a magazine.  Our tendency to absorb information without question, regardless of its provenance -- especially when it seems to confirm what we want to believe -- is a trap we can all fall into, and Ward's paper shows that once inside, it can be remarkably difficult to extricate ourselves.

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Memory offload

A couple of years ago, I had a student who had what seemed to me a weird approach to figuring things out.  When presented with a question he didn't know the answer to, his immediate response was to pull out his school-issued iPad and Google it.  Often, he didn't even give his brain a chance to wrestle with the question; if the answer wasn't immediately obvious, out came the electronics.

This became an even bigger obstacle when we were studying genetics.  Genetics is, more than anything else at the introductory-biology level, about learning a process.  There are a few important terms -- recessive, dominant, phenotype, allele, and so on -- but the point is to learn a systematic way of thinking about how genes work.

But given a problem -- a set of data that (for example) would allow you to determine whether the gene for Huntington's disease is recessive or dominant -- he would simply look it up.

"What have you learned by doing that?" I asked him, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.

"I got the right answer," he said.

"But the answer isn't the point!"  Okay, at that point my frustration was pretty clear.

I think the issue I had with this student comes from two sources.  One is the education system's unfortunate emphasis on Getting The Right Answer -- that if you have The Right Answer on your paper, it doesn't matter how you got it, or whether you really understand how to get there.  But the other is our increasing reliance on what amounts to external memory -- usually in the form of the internet.  When we don't know something, the ease and accessibility of answers online makes us default to that, rather than taking the time to search our own memories for the answer.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That latter phenomenon was the subject of a study that was published this week in the journal Memory.  Called "Cognitive Offloading: How the Internet is Increasingly Taking Over Human Memory," the study, by cognitive psychologists Benjamin Storm, Sean Stone, and Aaron Benjamin, looked at how people approach the recall of information, and found that once someone has started relying on the internet, it becomes the go-to source, superseding one's own memory:

The results revealed that participants who previously used the Internet to gain information were significantly more likely to revert to Google for subsequent questions than those who relied on memory.  Participants also spent less time consulting their own memory before reaching for the Internet; they were not only more likely to do it again, they were likely to do it much more quickly.  Remarkably, 30% of participants who previously consulted the Internet failed to even attempt to answer a single simple question from memory.

This certainly mirrors my experience with my students.  Not all of them are as hooked to their electronics as the young man in my earlier anecdote, but it is becoming more and more common for students to bypass thinking altogether and jump straight to Google.

"Memory is changing," lead author Storm said.  "Our research shows that as we use the Internet to support and extend our memory we become more reliant on it.  Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don't bother.  As more information becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives."

What concerns me is something that the researchers say was outside the scope of their research; what effect this might have on our own cognitive processes.  It's one thing if the internet becomes our default, but that our memories are still there, unaltered, should the Almighty Google not be available. It's entirely another if our continual reliance on external "offloaded" memory ultimately weakens our own ability to process, store, and recall.  It's not as far-fetched as it sounds; there have been studies that suggest that mental activity can stave off or slow down dementia, so the "if you don't use it, you lose it" aphorism may work just as much for our brains as it does for our muscles.

In any case, I'm becoming more and more adamant about students putting away the electronics.  They don't question the benefits of doing calisthenics in P.E. (although they complain about it); it's equally important to do the mental calisthenics of processing and recalling without leaning on the crutch of the internet.  And from the research of Storm et al., it's sounding like the automatic jump to "let's Google it" is a habit a lot of us need to break.