memory

Human Mind Vs Google Searcher

Brad Williams, no not the Brad of Strangework.com but a different Brad Williams is known for having a superior memory. Brad can somehow recall events in uncanny detail. In fact, he can recall any event or anything he has experienced to the point of knowing what the weather was like that day.

Williams’ type of detailed, exhaustive memory is called hyperthymesia and few known cases exist. Brad’s brain scans are now being studied by neuroscientists at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the Univeristy of California, Irvine.

Wow. That hyperthysmesia is something I wouldn’t MIND being diagnosed with. An incredible gift if you ask me. In a future film that has yet to be released, Brad goes up against a Google search user in a challenge to answer 20 questions. Brad ended up answering 18 of them correctly and turned out to be 11 minutes faster than the Googler.

There is still hope for us yet! Check out the video interview done by ABC.

I Don’t Know – Google It

Google Memory

Nowadays, thats typically the response I hear when I ask someone a question. Why is that? Neuroscientist Ian Robertson recently polled 3,000 people and discovered younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal information. 87% of his respondents over age 50 couldn’t recite a relatives birth date, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. When Ian asked those under 30 their own phone number, at least one third of them had to take out their handset to remember.

The moral of the story here is that, humans are reaching a point where they no longer need to remember information but rather, machines are the ones who are storing the information that can be retrieved within a few keystrokes. I know I have asked a number of people some interesting questions and instead of providing what they thought was the answer, they merely tell me to Google it. Does this happen to you as well? Leo Laporte likes to coin this term as (GAM) or Google Assisted Memory. As long as he can remember how to type into Google, he will seemingly never forget anything.

Although typing into Google and receiving those results is a very fast way of obtaining information, sometimes I just want to hear the answer from a human rather than a search engine.

I’d be very interested to hear your feedback regarding this subject as I think it is fascinating. In retrospect, it sounds like the beginning of the cyborg era, wouldn’t you say?

I Don’t Know – Google It

Google Memory

Nowadays, thats typically the response I hear when I ask someone a question. Why is that? Neuroscientist Ian Robertson recently polled 3,000 people and discovered younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal information. 87% of his respondents over age 50 couldn’t recite a relatives birth date, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. When Ian asked those under 30 their own phone number, at least one third of them had to take out their handset to remember.

The moral of the story here is that, humans are reaching a point where they no longer need to remember information but rather, machines are the ones who are storing the information that can be retrieved within a few keystrokes. I know I have asked a number of people some interesting questions and instead of providing what they thought was the answer, they merely tell me to Google it. Does this happen to you as well? Leo Laporte likes to coin this term as (GAM) or Google Assisted Memory. As long as he can remember how to type into Google, he will seemingly never forget anything.

Although typing into Google and receiving those results is a very fast way of obtaining information, sometimes I just want to hear the answer from a human rather than a search engine.

I’d be very interested to hear your feedback regarding this subject as I think it is fascinating. In retrospect, it sounds like the beginning of the cyborg era, wouldn’t you say?