It's an all too familiar sight: you are at dinner with your best friends, a group of colleagues, perhaps even your family, and everyone has their face in their phones. In the Information Age, with the advent of widespread access to the internet through 3G, 4G, LTE, and who knows what next, it seems that in connecting to the world at large, we are disconnecting from our own. I won't claim to be immune, as it is all too easy to avoid a conversation by refreshing my email constantly, despite being acutely aware that I am not expecting any impending correspondence. Worse yet is the allure of the constant tide of apps that washes over us, providing easy time-killers and space-fillers for those awkward in-between moments, like waiting for the bus, or for aunt Susan's story that you've heard five times this week to be over. Perhaps most disturbing are the implications that the attachment to our phones could hold for our memory and general intelligence.
There's no doubt that there exists a growing dependency on smartphones and other internet-capable devices. The impact of this dependence, however, is only recently receiving attention. Kaspersky Lab, an international software security company out of Moscow, published a study in 2015 with regard to this impact. Within the sample of 6,000 Europeans, it was found that "the vast majority (79.5%)... admit that they use the internet as an extension of their brain." This is a striking notion and one that probably doesn't sound too unfamiliar, at that. The urge to immediately "Google it" when you don't know something is commonplace in the Information Age. The Kaspersky Lab's study addresses this too, noting that "one in three European consumers is happy to risk forgetting information they can easily find." This willingness to lose track of information is potentially indicative of a widespread cultural shift toward intellectual complacency. Indeed, why would you ever need to remember something that is only a few keystrokes away?
As for memory, itself, the dependency on internet information results in an interesting effect. Nicholas Carr describes the interaction between human memory and the internet through the metaphor of a bathtub, thimble, and faucets. If our working memory represents a thimble, then our long-term memory would represent the bath tub. Carr describes the process of transferring information from the working memory into the long-term memory as taking thimblefuls of water and dumping them into the bath tub. As you can imagine, this a slow process. Indeed, the transfer from the working memory to the long-term memory must be focused and deliberate. This is where the internet comes in. With the myriad of distractions that lurk on any given web page, from advertisements to seductively interesting hyperlinks, the internet provides a lot of faucets. Carr explains that without "a continuous, coherent stream... [we] can’t translate the new material into conceptual knowledge." This suggests that even if those "one in three European consumers" described in the Kaspersky Lab study wanted to remember the information they had looked up on the internet, they would likely have some difficulty with it.
None of this is to say that things like smartphones, LTE, and the internet, in general, are inherently bad for you and your brain. However, it's important to realize that these things are not necessarily the penultimate solution to intellectual advancement or your dinner-table conversational apathy for that matter. "Everything in moderation" has, generally speaking, been a good rule of thumb and I don't see why it wouldn't apply here as well.
