Daniel Wegner How The Internet Affects Memory
Search Engines
A few days ago, my partner Ashley and I were assigned to compose an essay with a central idea and a compelling thesis statement. Instantly we start our research on Google to find a great topic and we came to the idea of “search engines” affecting the human brain particularly the memory. The first article we find reads “ How the Web Affects Memory” by Daniel Wegner. Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard University whom did research on how search engine affect us today. I promptly turned to ashley, “ We should copy and paste all the link of the article because most likely I will forget where I found the article, and we will struggle to find it again.” she replied, “ Good idea Lorena! It will make our research easier and faster.”
The article was very engaging from the beginning, but …show more content…
People are no longer able to remember simple facts because they are relying on the search engines and internet to store that information for them; therefore, there is no need to remember. It is easy to just get answers and sources from the internet but that does not help the remembrance.Memorization is a thing of the past, no one seems to care anymore since there seems to be little or no need for it. The internet contains it all and everything happens to be a simple click away from the information needed. It seems as if the internet has given the world a privilege but also a curse due to the internet not encouraging people to memorize information any longer. Betsy Sparrow, a psychologist from Columbia University, led researchers to conduct a series of experiments, similar to those of Professor Wegner. The results of the experiment suggested that when people are faced with a difficult questions they tend to search it up online resulting in the fact not being stored in the memory. "It's different in the sense that information is much more available than it was," she says. "In the past you would have to go through the
A few days ago, my partner Ashley and I were assigned to compose an essay with a central idea and a compelling thesis statement. Instantly we start our research on Google to find a great topic and we came to the idea of “search engines” affecting the human brain particularly the memory. The first article we find reads “ How the Web Affects Memory” by Daniel Wegner. Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard University whom did research on how search engine affect us today. I promptly turned to ashley, “ We should copy and paste all the link of the article because most likely I will forget where I found the article, and we will struggle to find it again.” she replied, “ Good idea Lorena! It will make our research easier and faster.”
The article was very engaging from the beginning, but …show more content…
People are no longer able to remember simple facts because they are relying on the search engines and internet to store that information for them; therefore, there is no need to remember. It is easy to just get answers and sources from the internet but that does not help the remembrance.Memorization is a thing of the past, no one seems to care anymore since there seems to be little or no need for it. The internet contains it all and everything happens to be a simple click away from the information needed. It seems as if the internet has given the world a privilege but also a curse due to the internet not encouraging people to memorize information any longer. Betsy Sparrow, a psychologist from Columbia University, led researchers to conduct a series of experiments, similar to those of Professor Wegner. The results of the experiment suggested that when people are faced with a difficult questions they tend to search it up online resulting in the fact not being stored in the memory. "It's different in the sense that information is much more available than it was," she says. "In the past you would have to go through the