HMN 2024: Want to Improve Your Memory? Spend More Time on the Internet

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In response to the growing popularity of writing in his day, Plato expressed concern that this newfangled form of information technology would be detrimental to the memory of those people who used it. “If men learn this,” he warned in one of Socrates’ dialogues, “it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”

I remember similar alarm bells ringing as the 1990s ushered in the “age of the internet.” If people could find answers to any question they had by simply typing it into a computer, the alarmist logic ran, why would anyone go to the trouble of actually learning anything so that they could remember it later?

As the centuries unfolded after Plato sounded his warning, his concerns about the detrimental effect of writing on human memory proved unfounded, with people by and large using writing to transmit and preserve information rather than as a substitute for remembering it. But what about the internet? Surely having all of the information ever generated in the history of human civilization perpetually available at the touch of a button “implants forgetfulness” by making us rely on our fingertips rather than our brains to retrieve the answers we seek.

According to a study recently published in Scientific Reports, the internet poses no more of a threat to our memory than the invention of writing did. As a matter of fact, instead of impairing it, frequent use of the internet may actually be beneficial to our memory.

Using information gathered from 36,542 participants as part of the UK Household Longitudinal Study, researchers explored connections between internet use and episodic memory, or our memory of past events (as opposed to our memory of facts, which is semantic memory). As important as our semantic memory unquestionably is, it is our episodic memory on which we rely to go about the daily business of living, since it provides us with a record of all the things we have experienced in the past hours, days, months, and years, which in turn serves as a reservoir of lived experience out of which we are able to create plans for, and simulations of, future experiences in the hours, days, months, and years that lie ahead of us.

In one part of the longitudinal study, participants reported the frequency of their internet use (“every day,” “several times a week,” “several times a month,” “once a month,” “less than once a month,” and “never use”). In another part of the study, they completed immediate and delayed recall word tasks in which they listened to a list of 10 words, and were told to remember as many of them as they could. Immediately afterward, they verbally recited all of the words that they could remember (immediate recall task). Then, after taking a numbers series test, the participants were once again asked to recite as many of the original ten words as they could remember (delayed recall task).

In both the immediate and delayed word recall tasks, participants who reported using the internet every day displayed better word recall than participants in all other groups. And even among the groups of non-daily internet users, more frequent internet use still made a difference, with people who used the internet several times a week outperforming those who used the internet several times a month or less, those who used the internet several times a month outperforming those who used it once a month or less, and so on. These results suggest that frequent internet use is positively associated with episodic memory.

The explanation for the finding, according to the researchers, lies in the “transactive” nature of internet use, with users being more likely to remember the way they retrieved a given bit of information than they are to remember the information itself, allowing them to retrace that path in the future when the information is needed again. Think, for example, of an easy but delicious recipe for cheese straws that you found on your phone a couple of weeks ago while you were waiting for a traffic light to turn green. When it comes time to make a batch for one of those upcoming holiday get-togethers, you don’t have to remember all of the ingredients and preparation steps required for making those cheese straws as long as you can retrace the steps of your original search to get back to the website where you found the recipe.

Episodic memory being integral to the sort of transactive memory processes routinely involved in surfing the web, the results of the study suggest that frequent internet use may strengthen our episodic memory. Regular engagement with tasks that exercise episodic memory, such as internet use, “strengthens the neural pathways associated with episodic memory, leading to improved cognitive function in this area over time.”

This is not to say that spending 16 hours a day online makes us smarter (that all depends on what we spend those hours searching for), but the act of searching itself, and remembering the steps involved in it, “may foster cognitive processes that are beneficial for both present functioning and future planning.” Whether we are looking for a cogent explanation of time dilation as a function of general relativity, or a hilarious video of a dog driving a golf cart, frequent use of the internet strengthens our episodic memory so that it can perform its adaptive function of helping us to make our way through the complex and perpetually changing landscape of the world we live in.