Each time I come across a vocabulary or a tricky principle Google always gives me the right and detailed answer so going to the library or going through a dictionary is rare. Most people don’t like thinking because most of their daily activities and names are saved in the phone so the brain acts like a helmet. Scientists have proved that over reliance in smartphones and Google causes Digital Amnesia.
A study from Kaspersky Lab has established that most adults who have smartphones and can access the internet cannot recall their partner’s phone number and parents can’t remember their children’s name. Over half of 16-24 year-olds surveyed said their smartphone held almost everything they need to know or remember, as people increasingly store contact information and important details only in their digital devices.
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“We need to understand the long term implications of this for how we remember and how we protect those memories,” said David Emm, principal security research at Kaspersky Lab. “The phone numbers of those who matter most to us are now just a click away – so we no longer bother to memorize the details.”
Dr Kathryn Mills, from UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, likened internet access to equivalent to electricity and running water across many societies. “The act of forgetting is not inherently a bad thing. We are beautifully adaptive creatures and we don’t remember everything because it is not to our advantage to do so,” she said. “Forgetting becomes unhelpful when it involves losing information that we need to remember.” Dr Mills believes that deep trust in our connected devices is what has helped to trigger the placing of less importance on retaining information.
“The average human attention span has fallen since the year 2000, or around the time the mobile revolution began.” Microsoft study said reports The Telegraph.
In schools its even worse because students prefer the internet than studying. Teachers are worried because anything they teach is not taken seriously because Google is the new the new teacher in town. Research conducted by Barney McCoy, associate professor in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska came to a finding that digital devices are not suitable for classrooms. Lincoln found out that students spend nearly 21% of class time using a digital device for an unrelated activity like email or social media.
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