Asia Bizz: In this world of technology and search engines, the database has affected the way the human brain remembers information. Some researchers have noticed that online databases influence the mind of the users, which directly affects the remembering power of the humans.
The scientists in the psychology department in Columbia have wondered if people took pains to remember the information that could be easily retrieved by the computer. This is similar to students who remember the facts as if they are on a test.
Dr. Betsy Sparrow along with her colleagues, Daniel M Wegner and Jenny Liu had conducted four different memory experiments. In one of the experiments, the participants had typed 40 bits of trivia- for instance, ‘an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain’.
More than half of the participants had believed that the data would be saved in the computer, while the others had thought that it would be erased from the computer. This has shown that the subjects tend to remember the information only if they are made to believe that the data would be erased. The experiments thus show an aspect of the transactive memory. It is the factor that we rely on our family, friends as well as co-workers for reference material.
