The "external hard drive" of the head

Kaspersky Lab, together with the "Opinion Matters" institute, has conducted a Study found that the use of an Internet that is ubiquitous thanks to smartphones and tablets appears to have a significant impact on people's cognitive behavior. According to the study, the overwhelming majority of Germans surveyed (83.5%) already use the Internet as a kind of external memory expansion of their own memory. And one in ten Germans (10.1%) even relies entirely on the ability to always look up certain facts online. Kaspersky describes the tendency of people to forget information stored on a digital device as "digital amnesia" and points out the increasing need to protect Internet-enabled devices.

It may be reassuring that a majority of the Europeans surveyed (57%) still turn on their heads first and not their computers when looking for the answer to a question. But it is also a fact that in Germany more than one in four (28.4%) immediately goes online in search of answers, even before any other problem solution is considered.

You don't have to remember what's on the Internet. This view is also held by around one in four (23.3%) of the users surveyed in Germany. According to the study, it is primarily people over the age of 45 who increasingly rely on the Internet. "There is evidence that people have problems retrieving facts in memory as they get older because so much information is stored there as they get older that the search process simply takes longer," explains Kathryn Mills from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London (UCL). "In theory, therefore, offloading certain information to digital storage makes it easier to retrieve information from memory."

The fast way to knowledge is via the web

What kind of information do we still remember? Here, too, the Kaspersky study indicates a change. Almost two-thirds (65%) of the German respondents believe that information that can be researched online no longer needs to be memorized. Instead, they memorize the way they get the facts they are looking for. The growing importance of the Internet is probably also due to the fact that many people want to have their knowledge at hand more and more quickly. 59.4% of respondents in Germany said they no longer have time to search in books and libraries. They find the facts they want faster and easier on the Internet.

"It's often said that researching information online rather than holding it in memory makes our thinking more shallow," says Maria Wimber, a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. "Studies have shown that actively recalling facts from memory leads to permanent retention there. In contrast, if the same facts are passively searched for again and again on the Internet, we do not memorize them with comparable depth. We can therefore say that the trend toward searching the Internet is not exactly conducive to the development of our long-term memory. In this respect, information is actually processed by us in a more superficial and fleeting way."

Protect all Internet-enabled devices

"Kaspersky Lab wants to use the study to examine the effects of digital amnesia. It is important to identify and limit IT security risks," says Holger Suhl, General Manager DACH at Kaspersky. "With increasing use of the Internet, users should also increasingly think about protection against cyber dangers - regardless of the device through which they use the Web. That's because our IT security experts are finding that the vast majority of all digital attacks today occur over the Internet."