Betsy Sparrow, Columbia U. Confirms: MyLifeBits thesis e-memory effectively offloads personal bio-memories

The major thesis of MyLifeBits is that by the e-Memory is ground truth, and that a person's bio-memory is indeed just a URL plus some meta-data to aid human memory search of the e-memory. While the paper addresses finding and recalling web information-- finding and recalling information on personal stores is similarly applicable.

Prof. Sparrow's work is described in an article in Science Magazineon 14 June 2011, and a summary of this is described in the http://news.columbia.edu/research/2490 press release.

A report by John Bohannon in ScienceMag on 15 June stated:

...in four cleverly designed experiments, Sparrow and her colleagues do explore how the Internet may be changing the way people handle such information now. The results, she says, support a growing belief that people are using the Internet as a personal memory bank: the so-called Google effect. What surprised Sparrow most was not people’s reliance on nonmemorized information but their ability to find it. “We’re remarkably effi cient,” she says.

The study is “convincing,” and “there is no doubt that our strategies are shifting in learning,”says Roddy Roediger, a psychologist atWashington University in St. Louis, Missouri “Why remember something if I know I can look it up again? ... we can off load some of our memory demands onto machines.”