The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

In a 2011 study, now considered a landmark in the field, a team of researchers led by Columbia psychology professor Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner had people read forty brief, factual statements—“the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003” was a typical one—then type the statements into a computer. Half the participants were told that the machine would save what they typed, and the rest were told that the statements would be erased immediately. Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than did those who assumed the facts would not be stored. Anticipating that information will be readily available in digital form, the researchers concluded, appears to reduce the mental effort people make to remember it. Digital recording encourages neurological erasing. They dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect,” and in an article in the journal Science they noted its broad implications: “Since search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”24 People were able to look up facts long before the Internet came along—there were books, there were libraries—but it required much more time and effort. Now that it’s easy to shift re...