Imagine if there was no internet. Not that the internet had never existed, but imagine that it was suddenly turned off, never to return. We have become so reliant on it that the consequences would be almost catastrophic. Working from home would become impractical, shopping from home would have to be done by phone or by post, and social media would disappear. On the plus side, there would be no more tweets from Donald Trump, no more invitations on Facebook to play Candy Crush, and no more dubious emails from strangely benevolent Nigerians offering riches beyond compare in exchange for your bank details. But, while the internet has brought us untold benefits, and has enriched our lives in many ways, our increasing reliance on it comes at a cost, a cost to our memories and our cognitive powers.
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| Imagine if this was all there ever was, for all eternity, when you tried to connect? |
I have always enjoyed quizzes; I think it stems back to my days at junior school, where we had a teacher - Mr Harris (he drove a green Rover car and had a finger missing; those two facts are not connected, he lost his finger during the war) - who would set us questions to go home and find the answers for. Armed with nothing more than a basic encyclopaedia, I would seek the answers to puzzles such as, Who designed the Suez Canal?[1] Or, the dates of the First World War, the sort of things that were rarely taught, but which are useful to know. In later years I regularly competed in quizzes, playing for a team that took part in a league (the questions were exclusively about football), and then a monthly quiz in which about twenty teams took part, and in which my team had its fair share of success. And that enjoyment of quizzes has been in part responsible for, and a result of the pleasure I get from gaining and retaining information, facts and trivia, purely for its own sake. Having a retentive memory was something that I found useful and important at work, and both at work and at home, I've frequently had people ask, "How did you know that?" when I wheel out some useful (or sometimes not very useful) information. And the answer is that it is simply ingrained in me to learn and retain stuff, as well as being something that I get pleasure from. It might be more pertinent for me to ask people who don't retain information in a similar manner, "Why don't you know that?"
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| The man responsible for the Suez Canal. |
These days, the answer to that question would increasingly be along the lines of what's the point, that's what Google is for. And that worries me, as it seems to me that we are creating a culture in which knowing things is becoming less important and that we are increasingly relying on technology to do the work our brains should be doing. I am not alone in thinking this; more eminent minds than mine have concluded the same thing. Professor Frank Gunn-Moore, director of research for the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews, is quoted as saying that people 'outsource [their] brain to the internet' rather than using their memory to recall facts. The professor - who is an Executive Member of the Scottish Dementia Research Consortium - considers our use of the internet as "an experiment the human race is running and we will have to wait and see if this outsourcing affects dementia prevalence."
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| Professor Frank Gunn-Moore |
There has been a lot of focus in the medical profession about obesity in recent years. According to a study in The Lancet, as many as 2.1 billion people - that's almost 30% of the global population - is obese or overweight[2] and we are urged by governments - local and national - and by our doctors to eat more healthily and exercise more, yet while we understand that our bodies need exercise, we seem progressively more likely to neglect exercising our brains. Back in my primary school days, when Mr Harris asked us to find out the longest river in the world[3], we would scurry home to our reference books and look up the answer, and then we would retain it and retrieve it when relevant, such as while playing Trivial Pursuit, or watching some TV quiz show when the question came up. Nowadays a classroom of children asked that question would whip out their smartphones and Google it. It does seem that the internet has changed school lessons - and especially homework - out of all recognition. When my younger daughter was still at school - she left a couple of years back - it seemed that no piece of homework could be completed without reference to the internet, and while in my day, I struggled back and forth from home to school laden down with textbooks, they seemed to be conspicuous by their absence during my daughter's education.
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| In hardback, this textbook was the heaviest known to man when I was at school. |
Google Maps means never having to leave the house with an A-Z in your pocket when visiting somewhere new, nor having a road atlas in the glove box of your car. Technology means not having to remember phone numbers anymore as they are all on your smartphone. Google means never having to retain anything; look that fact up, use it and forget it - until the next time you need it when you have to look it up again.
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| In millions, the number of internet users globally - it comes to about 40% of the world's population. |
There will be people who will pour scorn on this; there will be people who think that because it is easier to Google something than use an encyclopaedia - or heaven forbid - our brains, it must be better, or that using Google stimulates the brain rather than weakening it (sounds counter-intuitive to me, but some people believe it). Those ideas are way off the mark in my view, and smack of denial. I know that as I get older, my memory is slowly deteriorating. Facts slip away (especially names; for some reason TV and radio presenter Clive Anderson's name seems particularly difficult for me to recall), and my recollection of events from yesteryear get jumbled or lost completely, so I know that if I exercised my brain less, it would atrophy at a rate of knots.
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| Who's this again? |
A major reason why I started writing this blog back in 2012 was to exercise my mind, so it is ironic that having railed against our over-reliance on the internet, I am using the internet in order to get that mental exercise. But then, the internet is not an entirely bad thing; just as the consumption of salt, sugars and fats is important to our diet, so too can the internet be important to us. As with many things, moderation is the key.
