All hail the Cybermind! - "It feels as though I know something just because I can find it with Google."

If you're anything like me, the last thing you'll take your phone out of your pocket for is to make a phone call.

It's far more likely that you'll be using it to tweet about what you had for lunch and your subsequent trip to the bathroom. The second most likely thing you'll be doing, is using it to find out the answer to something.

The question might be "what's the quickest way across town?", "what year did that happen in?" or "who was that guy, in that film, with the ears?". The question itself isn't what's important, it's that we're starting to instinctively turn to the internet for the answers, effectively outsourcing our memory requirements.

Daniel M. Wegner, professor of psychology at Harvard, discusses this effect and his recent studies into it, in a piece for The New York Times. What do you think?

Is having the collected sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips a good thing, or are we dumbing ourselves down knowing that the computers will remember everything for us?

Via: Susan Zhuang