The Google Effect: Interference In Human Intellectual Functionality
The reflection on the effect that the frequent use of technology has on higher cognitive abilities of the human being is not a new event. Already in the sixties, after the appearance of the first communication tools such as the telephone, television or radio, some experts began to relate both concepts.
One of the pioneering figures in trying to understand the impact of technology on human beings and on society as a whole was Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a Canadian professor specialized in communication theory who introduced the concept of “global village.” to refer to said phenomenon.
Just as it happens today with the main social networks and information search engines on the Internet, the appearance of such informative instruments of yesteryear had a very relevant and revolutionary role in society’s access to information, producing it in a faster and more universal way. Also then, as could happen in the current era, the first controversies about this phenomenon arose.
Thus, while a part of society seemed to emphasize the benefits and advances that such technological discoveries could imply in the process of information transmission at a global level, another collective portion expressed the fear that, paradoxically, greater ease of access to information information could lead to cultural impoverishment.
Almost two decades after the beginning of 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 through a biased, manipulated or partial dissemination of information.
New technologies in human cognitive functionality
This first debate was the starting point based on which other related dilemmas were subsequently developed. An issue that over the years has become more relevant in research on this area of knowledge refers to the analysis of the media itself (among others, Internet search engines, such as Google) and the implications that Its continued use could lead to 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 significantly influence the way of perceiving, encoding, memorizing, and recovering the information received, one could hypothesize how these modifications could end up playing a relevant role in the activity of human higher intellectual functions such as decision making 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 before the revolution of new technologies, mental processes such as those indicated used to occur in the mind in a sequential and linear way, since the reception of information lacked the immediacy that it has today.
However, after the massive rise of the Internet (in combination with other existing media) Information has become available quickly and simultaneously through various sources; Nowadays it is common practice to have different tabs open in the PC browser, while listening to the news on the television and attending to notifications from the mobile phone.
All of this leads to internalizing as habitual the fact of being exposed to a “constant bombardment” of information, the final consequence of which seems to lead to a decrease in the ability to analyze each set of data received individually and in depth. Decreasing the time dedicated to reflecting and evaluating each new information received If this is maintained long enough, a harmful interference occurs in one’s own critical capacity, in the development of a criterion based on one’s own conclusions, and ultimately, in effective decision-making.
To this phenomenon must be added the consideration of the discrepancy between the unlimited data storage capacity that technological tools present and the limited capacity intrinsic to human memory. The first causes interference in the second due to an information overload effect. This consequence seems to point to the origin of the very common problems in relation to attention difficulties that many children, young people and adults present today. Internet browsing involves intensive multi-tasking processes sustained over time.
Such an abrupt change from one micro-task to another prevents the sustained attentional capacity from developing competently, since it is constantly being interrupted. Despite this great inconvenience, this type of operation presents a secondary gain that makes it difficult for the individual to reject or ignore technology: blocking alerts, notifications and other notices and information from the Internet, social networks, etc., would imply a feeling of social isolation for the subject difficult to accept.
The Google effect
In 2011, the team of Sparrow, Liu and Wegner published a work that exposed the effects of using the Internet search engine Google on memory, the so-called “Google effect”, and the consequences that having access to it could have on cognitive processes. information immediately. The conclusions showed that easy access to an Internet search engine causes a decrease in the mental effort that the human brain has to put into action to store and encode the data obtained.
Thus, the Internet has become a kind of external hard drive attached and without limits of its own memory which has an advantage over the latter, as indicated above.
More specifically, one of the various experiments that served as the basis for the conclusions drawn by Sparrow, Liu and Wegner (2011) compared the level of recall of three groups of students who had been asked to read information in magazines. of leisure and that they tried to retain them in their memory.
A first group was guaranteed that they could consult the information subsequently saved in a file on an accessible PC. A second group was told that the information would be deleted once memorized. The last group was told that they could access the information but in a hard-to-find file on your PC.
The results showed that the subjects who could later consult the data easily (group 1) showed very low levels of effort to remember the data. The probands who remembered the most data were the individuals who were told that the data would be deleted once memorized (group 2). The third group was in the middle in terms of the amount of information retained in memory. Furthermore, another surprising finding for the team of researchers was to verify the high capacity of experimental subjects to remember how to access the information stored on the PC which had not been retained in one’s own memory.
transactive memory
One of the authors of the research, Wegner, in the 80s proposed the concept of transactive memory, a concept that aims to define “carelessness” on a mental level regarding the retention of data that another person already possesses. That is to say, it would be equivalent to the tendency to economize cognitive efforts by delegating a certain volume of data to an external figure in order to be more effective in solving problems and making decisions.
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 the quantitative loss in the volume of general knowledge available to an individual although, on the other hand, this has allowed a qualitative increase in effectiveness when performing a specific task.
Another of the key points that should be reflected on in relation to the construct of transactive memory consists precisely in assessing the difference between the fact of delegating a certain memory capacity to another person (a natural living being) and doing so in an artificial entity such as the Internet. , since artificial memory presents very different characteristics with respect to biological and personal memory. In the computerized memory the information arrives, is stored entirely and immediately and is recovered in the same way, as it was archived at the origin. On the other hand, human memory 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 own memories. Thus, various scientific works have shown that when a memory is recovered from the long-term memory store, new neural connections are established that were not present at the time when such an experience occurred and was archived in the mind: the remembering brain ( information recovery) is not the same as the one that generated the memory (information file).
In conclusion
Although neuroscience has not yet exactly defined whether new technologies are modifying our brain, it has been possible to clearly conclude that the brain of a reading person is significantly different from that of an illiterate person, for example. This has been possible since reading and writing appeared about 6,000 years ago, a sufficiently long period of time to evaluate such anatomical differences in depth. To evaluate the impact of new technologies on our brain, we would need to wait a little longer.
What does seem true is that these types of information tools present both gains and losses for general cognitive ability. In relation to multi-task performance, localization, classification of information, perception and imagination, and visuospatial skills, we can talk about gains.
Furthermore, new technologies They can be very useful in research on pathologies associated with memory. Regarding losses, there is mainly the capacity for focused and sustained attention or reasoned or critical and reflective thinking.
