The Memory Map: Is it Possible to Chart All the Territory in the World? - Cities - GOOD | Science News | Scoop.it

The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” writes Betsy Sparrow, a psychologist at Columbia University, in a paper published earlier this year in Science. Sparrow argues, based on a series of experiments with human subjects, that if we think data will be available on the internet, we feel freer to forget it. Instead of remembering information, we remember how to find it. In the age of the search engine, the contents of our brains are becoming more abstract, like maps, swept clean of the crumbs of detail that make up the world.