Minnesota, USA - July 21, 2011 - Perhaps you noticed in the past years that your memory is not as efficient as it used to be; specifically, it was not the same since you started using computers and search engines such as 'Google'. At least this is what the researchers, Jenny Liu, Betsy Sparrow, and Daniel Wegner discovered and published in Sciencexpress, "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips". In a way, these researchers suggest that our electronic devices that contain information are an extension of our brains; we rely on them just as our brains rely on the 'memory' portion of our brains.

These researchers conducted this study by instructing Harvard Students - 60 - to do a few tasks with specific information in mind as they do them; they formed two groups which were told that either the information they typed would be saved or erased forever. Unsurprisingly, the group who believed the information would be saved had a difficult time remembering the 40 pieces of trivia they previously typed; this is truly an indication that we indeed forget what we write if we have no reason to remember it otherwise.

In addition to this experiment, the researchers told some participants to remember the multiple computer folders that contained the saved file. As much as we use files and folders these days, it is no surprise that participants could remember where this file was saved. We exercise this ability more than people did in the past. Could this be an indication that our brains are re-wired Now we do not remember what we do or say, but we remember where to go to get that information. Perhaps we need to start backing up our lives on a hard drive or digital cloud; we put enough up in our digital worlds, so maybe this process already started.

The researchers detailed their findings, "the results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves."

With as much information circulating as there is, it is not surprising that we cannot rely on only our brains anymore; we are expected to recall too much information, which would overload our brains. Nowadays, all information would be like remembering 100 random numbers that appear on a sheet of paper and knowing the order of them. Undoubtedly our brains were never capable of doing this, so it makes sense that other information like this would be 'saved' to a file rather than the inside of our brains; basically, the information that we store changed.

Almost all information can be found with a few clicks of a keyboard and a mouse; we do not need to exercise our memory when we know that somehow this information will become available to us. What would we do if suddenly our computer crashed or even worse the information on the web is not backed up and somehow erased We would be lost, confused, and overwhelmed by the demands of the information that we should have known. Goodbye, brain memory. Hello, digital memory!