Bad news, the internet might be making us more stupid
Nobody panic, but the internet is taking over from human memory and is basically making us all a lot more stupid.Psychologists have discovered that looking up facts online makes us more reliant on doing so again in the future.Effectively, our supreme computer overlords are so intimidatingly intelligent that there’s no point in humans being clever any more.It explains why we are so quick to ‘Google it’ when moderate thought is required, and why you’re reading this article instead of conducting your own research into the human brain (or something like that).Writing in a study, Dr Benjamin Storm said our brains ‘don’t bother’ to try to recall facts from memory when we can use the web.Memory is changing.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.Writing in the journal Memory, Dr Storm and his colleagues explained that they asked two groups of people challenging trivia questions.
One team was allowed to cheat Google it, while the others had to use their brains to actually think of what the answer might be.Later on, the two groups were given an easier set of questions and given the option to use the web if they fancied it.  The study found that those who used the internet earlier were more likely to do so again.But those who relied on their memory before, though, were more likely to do the same.