The Google effect: interference with human intellectual functionality

How does the possibility of constantly accessing information from the Internet affect our minds?

Reflection on the effect that the assiduous use of technology has on the higher cognitive capacities of human beings is not a new development. is not a new development. Already in the 1960s, after the appearance of the first communication tools such as the telephone, television or radio, some experts began to relate the two concepts.

One of the pioneers in trying to understand the impact of technology on human beings and society as a whole was Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a Canadian professor specializing in communication theory who introduced the concept of the "global village" to refer to this phenomenon.

Access to information: benefit or drawback?

As is the case today with major social networks and information search engines on the Internet, the emergence of such information tools hasthe emergence of such information tools of yesteryear played a very relevant and revolutionary role in the access to information by society, occurring in a faster and more universal way. Also then, as it could happen nowadays, the first controversies about this phenomenon were born.

Thus, while one part of society seemed to emphasize the benefits and advances that such technological discoveries could imply in the process of global information transmission, another collective portion expressed the fear that, paradoxically, greater ease of access to information could lead to cultural impoverishment.

Almost two decades into the 21st century, we find ourselves at the same crossroads: such a volume of information can either be linked to the idea of belonging to a more democratic or "more informed" social system, or it can be associated with malicious practices by means of biased, manipulated or manipulated dissemination. biased, manipulated or partial dissemination of information..

New technologies in human cognitive functionality

This first debate was the starting point on the basis of which other related dilemmas were subsequently developed. One issue that has become increasingly relevant in research in this area of knowledge over the years refers to the analysis of the communication medium itself (among others, Internet search engines, such as Google) and the implications that its continuous use could have on the way in which the human intellect is configured. the way in which the functionality of the human intellect is configured..

Starting from the idea that the constant use of this type of knowledge tools can modulate, modify and influence significantly the way of perceiving, encoding, memorizing and retrieving the information received, we could hypothesize how these modifications could end up playing a relevant role in the activity of the intellectual functions of the human intellect. in the activity of human higher intellectual functions.The first step in the process is the decision making process, where these lower cognitive processes converge.

From sequential processing to simultaneous processing

The explanation for this hypothesis would be based on a change in the way in which the human nervous system receives a certain type of stimulation. In times prior to the revolution of new technologies, mental processes such as those indicated above used to take place in the mind in a sequential and linear manner, since the reception of information lacked the immediacy it has today.

However, after the massive rise of the Internet (in combination with other existing media), information has come to be obtained in a sequential and linear fashion. information has come to be obtained quickly and simultaneously. Nowadays, it has become common practice to have different tabs open in the PC browser, while listening to the news on the television and attending to notifications on the cell phone.

All this leads to internalize as habitual the fact of being exposed to a "constant bombardment" of information, whose final consequence seems to lead to a decrease in the ability to analyze each set of data received individually and deeply. The time dedicated to reflect and evaluate each new piece of information received is reduced, if it is sufficiently maintained over time.If this is maintained sufficiently over time, it produces a pernicious interference in one's own critical capacity, in the elaboration of a criterion based on one's own conclusions, and in short, in effective decision making.

To this phenomenon must be added the consideration of the discrepancy between the unlimited data storage capacity of technological tools and the limited capacity intrinsic to human memory. and the limited capacity intrinsic to human memory.. The former causes an interference in the latter by an information overload effect. This consequence seems to point to the origin of the very common problems related to the attentional difficulties that many children, young people and adults present nowadays. Internet surfing involves intensive multi-tasking processes over time.

Such an abrupt change from one micro-task to another prevents sustained attentional capacity from developing competently, since it is constantly being interrupted. Despite this major drawback, this type of operation presents a secondary gain that hinders the rejection or ignorance on the part of the individual towards technology: blocking alerts, notifications and other notices and information coming from the Internet, social networks, etc., would imply for the subject a sense of social isolation, would imply for the subject a feeling of social isolation that is difficult to accept. difficult to accept.

The Google effect

In 2011, the team of Sparrow, Liu and Wegner published a paper exposing the effects of using the Internet search engine Google on memory, the so-called "Google effect", and the consequences that the immediate availability of information could have on cognitive processes. The findings showed that easy access to an Internet search engine leads to a decrease in the mental effort that the human brain has to put into storing and encoding the data obtained.

Thus, the Internet has become a kind of external hard disk attached to and without limits of one's own memory, which has an advantage over the latter. and has an advantage over the latter, as indicated above.

More specifically, one of the various experiments that served as a basis for the conclusions drawn by Sparrow, Liu and Wegner (2011) compared the level of recall of three groups of students who were asked to read information in leisure magazines and to try to retain it in their memory.

The first group was guaranteed that they would be able to consult the information stored in a file on an accessible PC. A second group was told that the information would be deleted once it was stored. The last group was told that they would be able to access the information but in a file that was difficult to find on the PC. in a file that was difficult to find on the PC.

The results showed that the subjects who were able to recall the data easily (group 1) showed very low levels of effort to recall the data. The probands who recalled the most data were the individuals who were instructed that the data would be deleted once stored (group 2). The third group was in the middle ground in terms of the amount of information retained in memory. In addition, another surprising finding for the research team was the high capacity of the experimental subjects to recall information. the high ability of the experimental subjects to remember how to access information stored on the PC, which had not been retained.which had not been retained in their own memory.

Transactive memory

One of the authors of the research, Wegner, in the 1980s, proposed the concept of transactive memory. proposed the concept of transactive memorya concept that attempts to define the "unconcern" at the mental level for the retention of data that someone else already possesses. In other words, it would be equivalent to the tendency to economize cognitive efforts by delegating to an external figure a certain volume of data in order to be more efficient in problem solving and decision making.

This phenomenon has been a fundamental element that has allowed the development and cognitive-intellectual specialization of the human species. This fact implicitly entails some pros and cons: the fact of specializing in more specific areas of knowledge implicitly entails a quantitative loss in the volume of general knowledge available to an individual, although, on the other hand, this has allowed him to a qualitative increase in efficiency when performing a specific task..

Another of the key points to reflect on in relation to the transactive memory construct consists precisely in assessing the difference between delegating certain memory capacity to another person (a natural living being) and doing so in an artificial entity such as the Internet, since artificial memory has very different characteristics from Biological and personal memory. In computerized memory, the information arrives, is stored in its entirety and immediately and is retrieved in the same way, just as it is stored in the Internet. in the same way, just as it was originally stored. Human memory, on the other hand, is subject to processes of reconstruction and re-elaboration of the memory.

This is due to the relevant influence that personal experiences have on the form and content of one's memories. Thus, several scientific studies have shown that when a memory is retrieved from the long-term memory store, new neuronal connections are established that were not present at the time when the experience occurred and was stored in the mind: the brain that remembers (information retrieval) is not the same brain that once generated the memory (information storage).

By way of conclusion

Although neuroscience has not yet has not yet determined exactly whether new technologies are modifying our brains, it has been possible to conclude that the brain that remembers (information retrieval) is not the same brain that once generated the memory (information archiving).it has been clearly concluded that the brain of a reader is significantly different from that of an illiterate person, for example. This has been possible because reading and writing appeared about 6000 years ago, a sufficiently long period of time to evaluate such anatomical differences in depth. To evaluate the impact of new technologies on our brains, we would have to wait a little longer.

What does seem certain is that these types of information tools present both gains and losses for general cognitive ability. In terms of multi-tasking performance, localization, information classification, perception and imagination, and visuospatial skills, we can speak of gains.

In addition, new technologies can be very useful in research on memory-related pathologies.. As for losses we find mainly the ability of focused and sustained attention or argumentative or critical and reflective thinking.

Bibliographical references:

• Garcia, E. (2018). We are our memory. Remembering and forgetting. Ed: Bonalletra Alcompas S.L.: Spain.
• McLuhan, M. (2001). Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. Ed. Routledge: New York.
• Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 476-478.
• Wegner, D.M. (1986). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of of the group mind. En B. Mullen y G.R. Goethals (eds.): Theories of group behavior (185-208). New York: Springer-Verlag.