There was a time when, if you wanted to know something, you had to remember it, look it up in a book, ask somebody, visit a library or perhaps simply accept that you didn’t know.

Today, the answer is usually less than ten seconds away.

We can ask Google a question while making breakfast. We can check a fact halfway through a conversation. We can use GPS without knowing where we are going. We can photograph something rather than remember it. We can save a phone number rather than learn it. We can bookmark an article rather than remember what it said. And increasingly, we can ask artificial intelligence to find, summarise or explain information for us.

The internet hasn’t simply given us access to more information.

It may be changing how we think about information, how we pay attention to it, how we remember it and even what we consider worth remembering.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the internet is “making us stupid”. The reality is considerably more interesting.

Our brains are remarkably adaptable. They change in response to the environments in which we live and the things we repeatedly do. The internet has created an environment unlike anything humans have experienced before: enormous quantities of information, available almost instantly, constantly competing for our attention.

Research increasingly suggests that this environment is influencing our cognitive habits.

But the story isn’t simply one of decline.

Some things may be becoming harder while other abilities are being enhanced.

Perhaps the biggest change is that we are no longer expected to carry everything inside our own heads.

The internet as an external memory

Think about how you remember a telephone number.

Thirty years ago, you might have memorised the numbers of your family, close friends and workplace.

Today, your phone remembers them for you.

You probably don’t even know your partner’s phone number.

This isn’t necessarily because your memory has deteriorated.

You’ve simply stopped needing to use your memory for that particular task.

Psychologists call this cognitive offloading — using something outside the brain to reduce the amount of information that needs to be processed or remembered internally.

We have always done this.

People have used diaries, notebooks, calendars, shopping lists, maps and other people as external memory aids for centuries.

The internet has simply taken cognitive offloading to an extraordinary level.

We now have access to an enormous external memory system that can store practically anything.

Research into cognitive offloading shows that people routinely use external tools to support memory, including digital devices, calendars, reminders and internet searches.

And this changes an important question.

Instead of asking:

“Do I know this?”

we increasingly ask:

“Do I know where I can find this?”

That is a profound cognitive shift.

The “Google effect”

One of the most famous areas of research into internet use and memory is sometimes called the Google effect.

In a landmark study, researchers found that when people expected information to be readily available later, they were less likely to remember the information itself.

Instead, they were more likely to remember where the information could be found.

In other words, the brain appeared to be adapting to the availability of an external information source.

Why waste precious mental resources memorising something if you know you can retrieve it immediately?

This has subsequently become an important area of research, although the findings are more complicated than the popular claim that “Google is destroying our memory”.

A later review of the research found evidence that frequent internet searching can alter aspects of memory and information-seeking behaviour, including a tendency to remember where information is stored rather than the information itself.

That actually makes evolutionary sense.

The brain is economical.

It doesn’t simply try to remember everything.

It continually makes decisions about what information is useful, what can be ignored and what can be retrieved when necessary.

If information is permanently available externally, there may be less incentive to store the details internally.

We may be remembering the pathway rather than the information

Imagine reading an article about sleep.

You might not remember its exact findings a week later.

But you might remember:

“I read something about that on the NHS website.”

Or:

“There was an interesting article about that on Psychology Today.”

You haven’t necessarily forgotten everything.

Your memory has encoded something different.

Instead of storing the complete information, you may have stored a retrieval route.

The internet effectively becomes part of your memory system.

This fits with the idea of transactive memory — the concept that information can be distributed between individuals and external systems rather than existing entirely within one person’s mind.

The internet takes this to an extraordinary scale.

We don’t have to know everything.

We need to know how to find things.

Is that actually a problem?

Not necessarily.

Consider a surgeon.

A surgeon doesn’t need to memorise every possible medical paper ever published.

A lawyer doesn’t need to remember every piece of legislation.

A scientist doesn’t need to memorise every research finding.

A therapist doesn’t need to remember every article they have ever read.

Having access to external information can actually free the brain to do more sophisticated things.

Instead of spending mental energy remembering facts, we can spend it connecting ideas, evaluating information, solving problems and creating new things.

One review of internet cognition research suggests that cognitive offloading can free cognitive resources for higher-level processing.

The problem comes when we become so dependent upon external information that we stop developing the underlying knowledge required to think deeply.

Because there is a difference between:

knowing how to find information

and

understanding information.

Information is not the same as knowledge

This may be one of the most important distinctions of the digital age.

We have never had so much information.

But information isn’t automatically knowledge.

Imagine reading twenty articles about depression.

You may feel that you know a great deal about depression.

But if you haven’t had time to think about what you’ve read, connect the different ideas, compare conflicting explanations and place the information into a broader framework, you may simply have accumulated fragments.

Knowledge requires integration.

The brain needs time to process information, connect it with existing knowledge and consolidate it.

The internet can make information incredibly easy to obtain.

It doesn’t necessarily make it easy to understand.

Our attention is being pulled in different directions

Perhaps the most obvious way the internet has changed our cognitive environment is through attention.

A book generally asks you to do one thing:

Read.

The internet asks you to do everything.

Read the article.

Notice the notification.

Check the email.

Look at the advert.

Open the link.

Read the comment.

Watch the video.

Return to the article.

Check the message.

Open another tab.

This creates an environment of constant attentional competition.

A major review of the effects of internet use on cognition identified attentional switching and media multitasking as important areas of concern. The authors suggested that the internet’s stream of information may encourage switching between tasks rather than sustained attention.

And there is an important psychological point here.

Attention is not infinite.

Every time we switch from one task to another, the brain has to reorient itself.

We may feel that we are multitasking effectively, but frequently we are actually performing a series of rapid switches.

Why scrolling feels so different from reading a book

Think about the difference between reading a novel and scrolling through social media.

When reading a novel, the brain settles into a relatively stable attentional state.

You follow characters.

You build a mental representation of the story.

You anticipate what might happen.

You remember what happened earlier.

You make connections.

You become immersed.

Scrolling is different.

Each swipe provides something new.

A photograph.

A headline.

A video.

A joke.

A political argument.

A news story.

An advertisement.

A celebrity.

A shocking event.

The brain is repeatedly presented with the possibility that the next piece of information might be more interesting than the current one.

That creates a powerful environment for attentional switching.

The problem isn’t that our brains are incapable of concentrating anymore.

It is that we are increasingly practising something else.

We are practising switching.

And what we practise repeatedly tends to become easier and more automatic.

The internet has changed how we read

There is also evidence that digital environments can change reading behaviour.

Online, we rarely encounter a long piece of text without interruptions.

There may be hyperlinks, adverts, images, videos, notifications and recommended articles.

Research comparing digital and paper reading has found mixed results rather than one simple “screens are bad” conclusion. Outcomes depend upon factors such as the reader, the material, the device and the reading conditions.

But distraction is important.

A recent meta-analysis of research into digital reading found that attentional distractions within networked environments can impair reading comprehension.

That makes intuitive sense.

If you read a paragraph while simultaneously checking your phone, your brain isn’t giving the paragraph the same uninterrupted processing time.

And deep comprehension often requires exactly that.

We may be becoming better at scanning

There is another side to this.

Internet use has probably made many of us extremely good at rapid information scanning.

We can identify keywords.

We can search for relevant sections.

We can compare multiple sources.

We can quickly decide whether an article is useful.

We can navigate enormous quantities of information.

Those are valuable cognitive skills.

The problem arises if scanning becomes our default mode for everything.

A brain trained to look for the next interesting piece of information may find slow, difficult or complex material increasingly uncomfortable.

A difficult book doesn’t give you a dopamine-producing novelty hit every few seconds.

Neither does learning a complicated mathematical concept.

Nor does sitting quietly and thinking.

What happens to memory when attention is fragmented?

Memory begins with attention.

If you don’t properly attend to something, there is less opportunity for it to be encoded into memory.

This is one reason why multitasking can be so problematic.

You might listen to a lecture while simultaneously checking messages.

Later, you may think:

“I was there. Why can’t I remember any of it?”

The answer may not be that your memory is poor.

You may simply never have given the information enough sustained attention to encode it effectively.

Research reviewed by memory scientist Daniel Schacter suggests that media multitasking is associated with poorer memory for the task being performed, largely because of attentional lapses. At the same time, the evidence does not support the sweeping claim that technology simply causes a general deterioration in memory.

That distinction matters.

The internet may not be destroying our memory.

It may be changing which memories we create and how we create them.

We outsource more and more

Consider what we now outsource to technology:

Memory:
Phone contacts, calendars, reminders and notes.

Navigation:
Google Maps and GPS.

Arithmetic:
Calculators.

Spelling:
Autocorrect.

Fact retrieval:
Search engines.

Directions:
Voice assistants.

Entertainment:
Streaming services.

Photography:
Smartphones.

Research:
Search engines and databases.

Writing:
Spellcheckers, grammar tools and now AI.

None of these is inherently bad.

In fact, many make life considerably easier.

But the cumulative effect is fascinating.

We are increasingly living in an environment in which the brain can delegate cognitive work to machines.

The question is whether this frees us to think better — or gradually reduces our willingness to think for ourselves.

The GPS example

Navigation provides a useful illustration.

If you use GPS everywhere, you don’t necessarily develop the same internal spatial representation of an environment that you might develop by navigating without assistance.

You arrive at your destination.

The immediate task is successfully completed.

But you may have learned less about the route.

This is another form of cognitive offloading.

Technology does the difficult work.

The benefit is convenience.

The potential cost is that the brain gets less practice performing the underlying task.

The same principle could apply to remembering information.

If Google always retrieves the answer, there may be less practice retrieving information from memory.

If AI always writes the first draft, there may be less practice organising thoughts.

If autocorrect always fixes spelling, there may be less practice remembering spelling.

The important word here is practice.

The brain adapts to what we repeatedly ask it to do.

But our brains aren’t being permanently “rewired” every time we go online

This is where some popular discussions about technology go too far.

You may have read claims that smartphones or the internet are literally “rewiring our brains”.

Neuroplasticity is real.

The brain changes in response to experience, learning and behaviour.

But that doesn’t mean that every new technology causes dramatic structural changes in the brain.

Research into internet use and cognition is still developing, and scientists have repeatedly emphasised that effects depend on the type, intensity and context of internet use, as well as factors such as age and individual differences.

The internet isn’t one single activity.

Watching a documentary for an hour isn’t the same as scrolling social media for an hour.

Doing an online university course isn’t the same as playing an online game.

Researching a medical condition isn’t the same as doomscrolling.

Video calling your grandchildren isn’t the same as repeatedly checking notifications.

What we do online matters.

The internet can also make us cognitively stronger

It would be a mistake to portray this as a story of technological decline.

The internet has produced extraordinary cognitive benefits.

We can learn almost anything.

A person in a remote village can access lectures from world-leading universities.

Someone learning a language can practise with native speakers.

A student can access research that would once have required a trip to a university library.

People can find communities that don’t exist locally.

We can compare competing explanations.

We can access primary sources.

We can learn new skills throughout our lives.

And the internet allows us to distribute cognitive work between humans and machines.

The issue isn’t whether we should use these abilities.

It’s whether we can use them without losing the ability to think independently when the technology isn’t there.

What about misinformation and false memories?

There is another major cognitive change: we now encounter an enormous amount of information from sources of wildly varying quality.

Before the internet, information certainly wasn’t always accurate.

Newspapers could be wrong.

Books could contain errors.

People could spread rumours.

But the internet has dramatically increased the speed and scale at which information can circulate.

This matters because memory isn’t a recording device.

We reconstruct memories.

Repeatedly encountering a claim can make it feel familiar.

And familiarity can sometimes be mistaken for truth.

Research into technology and memory has found that misleading digital material can contribute to memory distortions under some circumstances, although there isn’t evidence that internet use simply makes people universally more susceptible to false memories.

This creates another cognitive skill that is increasingly important:

epistemic vigilance — being able to ask whether the information we’re consuming is actually trustworthy.

We are becoming dependent upon retrieval

Perhaps one of the most interesting changes is that we may be shifting from a culture of knowledge storage to a culture of knowledge retrieval.

Previous generations needed to remember facts because retrieving them was difficult.

We can retrieve facts almost instantly.

That changes what “being knowledgeable” means.

A knowledgeable person today might not necessarily be the person who can recite the most facts.

They might be the person who can:

• identify a good question;
• find reliable information;
• recognise poor information;
• compare different sources;
• understand context;
• make connections;
• spot contradictions;
• and apply information appropriately.

Those are higher-order cognitive skills.

But they depend upon having some underlying knowledge.

You cannot critically evaluate information about climate science, psychology, economics or medicine if you know absolutely nothing about the subject.

Critical thinking needs something to think with.

That is why outsourcing too much knowledge can potentially become problematic.

The danger of shallow understanding

Imagine that you ask Google a question and read the first three search results.

You now have an answer.

But have you learned?

Maybe.

Or perhaps you have simply encountered information.

Learning requires more than exposure.

It involves attention, processing, retrieval and consolidation.

This is why actively trying to remember information can be so useful.

If you read something and then close the page and try to explain it from memory, you are doing something cognitively different from simply reading it again.

The brain has to retrieve and reconstruct the information.

That process strengthens learning.

So one simple response to the internet age is to deliberately retrieve rather than repeatedly re-read.

What should we do differently?

We don’t need to abandon technology.

That isn’t realistic — nor would it necessarily be desirable.

Instead, we can become more deliberate about how we use it.

Protect periods of uninterrupted attention

Read a book without your phone beside you.

Have a conversation without checking notifications.

Work on one task for a sustained period.

Your brain needs opportunities to practise concentration.

Don’t Google everything immediately

If you can’t remember something, pause.

Try to retrieve it first.

Even if you get it wrong, the attempt itself is cognitively useful.

Then look it up.

Take notes in your own words

Copying information isn’t the same as processing it.

Writing an idea in your own words requires you to understand it.

Practise remembering

After reading something important, close the screen.

Ask yourself:

What were the three main points?

What surprised me?

How does this connect to something I already know?

Read long-form material

Books and long articles give the brain opportunities to practise sustained attention and complex comprehension.

Create technology-free spaces

Not every moment needs to be filled with information.

Walking without a podcast.

Sitting in the garden.

Driving without constant stimulation.

Having a shower without your phone.

These apparently empty moments can give the brain something increasingly rare:

space to think.

Perhaps the biggest change is not in our brains — but in our relationship with our brains

The internet has made something possible that would have seemed extraordinary to previous generations.

We can access almost unlimited information without storing all of it ourselves.

That is an incredible achievement.

But it changes our relationship with memory.

We don’t necessarily need to remember the answer.

We need to remember where to find the answer.

We don’t necessarily need to navigate.

We need to know how to use GPS.

We don’t necessarily need to calculate.

We have calculators.

We don’t necessarily need to draft everything ourselves.

We increasingly have AI.

The question for the future is whether these technologies will act as cognitive partners that extend our abilities or become cognitive substitutes that gradually reduce the amount of thinking we do ourselves.

The answer may be both.

Technology can free the brain from mundane tasks and allow us to concentrate on creativity, reasoning and problem-solving.

But technology can also fragment attention, encourage constant switching and make us less willing to tolerate the slow, effortful process involved in learning.

The research therefore doesn’t support the simple conclusion that “the internet is making us stupid.”

Nor does it support the opposite idea that technology is simply making us smarter.

The reality is much more interesting.

The internet is changing what our brains practise.

We practise finding.

We practise switching.

We practise scanning.

We practise filtering.

We practise navigating enormous quantities of information.

We practise outsourcing memory.

And we increasingly practise moving between the internal world of our own thoughts and an enormous external digital world that is always available.

The challenge isn’t to turn back the clock.

It is to make sure that, while we have the world’s information at our fingertips, we don’t forget how to think when the screen is turned off.

The evidence in perspective

Research into the internet and cognition is still evolving. Reviews consistently suggest that effects are mixed and depend heavily on how technology is used, rather than supporting a simple claim that internet use causes global cognitive decline.

The strongest concerns currently relate to areas such as attention, media multitasking, cognitive offloading and the way we encode and retrieve information. At the same time, technology can reduce cognitive load, provide valuable memory aids and give us access to extraordinary educational resources.

Perhaps the healthiest approach is therefore not less technology, but more conscious technology use.

Use Google — but sometimes try to remember first.

Use GPS — but occasionally learn the route.

Use your phone’s reminders — but don’t outsource every intention.

Use the internet to learn — but read deeply rather than endlessly scrolling.

Use AI — but continue to formulate your own ideas.

And, perhaps most importantly, give your brain regular periods in which it isn’t being asked to consume anything at all.

Because in an age of unlimited information, one of the most valuable cognitive skills may turn out to be something surprisingly old-fashioned:

being able to sit with a thought long enough to really think it through.