My friend remembers an article about the issue we’re discussing, but he doesn’t recall where he found it, who the author is, or even the website. He doesn’t remember the article well either, just an important part that was mentioned in it. He immediately goes to Google Search on his phone, looks for the article, and then shows it to me.

This happens to me too, and to all of us. We forget the name of the album, the song, and the singer, but we remember a snippet of the lyrics, so we search for it and find it again. We have lists that help us get what we want immediately: links stored in the browser, videos we’ve liked. And in the best-case scenario, there’s also a digital notebook containing some very important links.

In one of the first lectures of my software engineering studies, I learned that computer memory works via pointers—lots of addresses and pointers to other addresses, and then to more addresses, until the computer reaches the required data at high speed. But gradually, we’ve started to feel that we work in the same way, and that to know something sometimes, we don’t need to know it completely; we just need a pointer to its location on the internet so we can share it with whoever we want.

Personally, I belonged to a generation that transitioned from using computers normally without the internet, then with a very slow internet connection, and then towards the revolution of fast internet and mobile phones. During that time, my work and studies changed, and I went through many different life circumstances, but I felt that my memory was getting worse. It was time to pose the question to available scientific research: Does internet search, in particular, and the information revolution, in general, contribute to changing our memory patterns?

Researcher Betsy Sparrow’s study from Columbia University contains the ideal answer to our question. The study is titled “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” referring to the possession of information through quick online searches.

The study consists of four experiments on patterns of remembering information and the effect of search on it. In the second experiment of the study, one group of participants was presented with information and told they could search for it later, while a second group was not given that option. It was observed that information recall was worse in the group told they could search for it later. The scary part, as the researcher mentioned in the study, is that participants would not be able to recall the information as effectively regardless of whether they knew they would be tested on it later! This could significantly impact study patterns for exams.

In her interview with PBS, Sparrow says: “When people don’t know something, they think of the computer first as a place to find information. And when people believe they will have access to information later, they do not remember the information as well as if they imagine they won’t have access to it. In the first case, they assign the location of the information externally instead of internally.” Sparrow adds, “People tend to prioritize knowing where to find something over knowing the thing itself.”

In the same interview, Sparrow defines what she calls “transactive memory,” saying that we tend to store information externally for things we don’t believe we are experts in or that aren’t essential to us. She compares it historically to humans relying on information from other people around them—people at work or home whom we ask about things when we don’t know them, except we aren’t interested in encoding the information internally in our minds.

Does this mean we are less intelligent now? Not necessarily, as Sparrow answers in another interview with her university, saying that it isn’t necessarily related to our intelligence.

To add to that, greater reliance on search results may indicate another distinct ability in our working memory, a point concluded by researcher Jacek Gwizdka from the University of Texas in his 2017 published research. He concludes that people with a higher working memory capacity tend to perform online searches more intensively. Perhaps we are substituting the internal assignment of information with more external assignment of information—as Sparrow indicates—allowing us to cover a broader range of information.

Elizabeth Marsh sees transactive memory as a feature and calls it the digital expansion of the mind, delving into many examples of memory expansion by relying on coworkers and the resulting efficiency from specialists working together. In this case, the internet has much greater benefits than coworkers. However, she simultaneously draws attention to some concerning aspects; for example, how will our way of dealing with information in general change? Reading newspapers, for instance, differs from reading articles online. Also, will our reading of information become more superficial? And with all the misinformation on the internet, how will that affect us?

In the end, we cannot definitively judge whether this expansion of our memory to external links is negative or whether transactive memory is generally negative. Nor can we describe it as a weakness in memory, as it has its positives, and it seems we are adapting to the information revolution by expanding the scope of our information in this way. However, studies are still in their infancy to cover all aspects of cognition affected by the information revolution, as the impact is not limited to memory alone.