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In the past decade, we have retrained our minds to google just about everything we want to know, according to new research by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner. “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” the researchers, who are based at Columbia University, University of Wisconsin, and Harvard respectively, write in the July issue of Science.

When posed a question, people are primed to think of computers, and when they expect to have access to future information, they have lower rates of recall about the actual information and enhanced recall of where they can find the information.

Whether or not participants had been instructed to remember the information had no impact on recall. However, whether or not they believed the information would be available to them later had a negative impact.

Facebook posts are generated by regular people, because of that they are closer to tapping into the basic language capacities of our minds than professionally crafted sentences.  If you use thoughts expressed through microblogs as an example, the natural pattern of human thinking is similar to gossip. The study claims, “The relatively unfiltered and spontaneous production of one person’s mind is just the sort of thing that is readily stored in another’s mind.” Adding that while published text may be beautifully written or carefully edited, it doesn’t resonate as easily with our memory as naturally-generated information. 

Dr. Laura Mickes, a senior research fellow at the University of Warwick and a lead researcher on the project. “I am not sure if microblogging is necessarily changing the way we think," she says via email, "but I do think that the way we microblog taps into the way we have always colloquially communicated with one another.”

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

64% of smartphone users expect websites to load in 4 seconds or less, while the average website takes more than twice that amount, at 9 seconds.

H.G. Wells describing the “world brain” as a  “complete planetary memory for all mankind.”

As a Google engineer told author Nicholas Carr, “We’re not scanning all those books to be read by people. We’re scanning them to be read by our AI.”

studies suggest, if you're asked to recall a specific piece of information in a text, you'll remember where on the page you were when you read it.

Holding a book grants you a tactile sense of textual topography

the so-called "long-read" could be seen as a nutritious, well-balanced meal, while snackable content is the fast food of the content world.

So "snackable content" is short-form data — be it text, imagery or video — that consumers can quickly engage with, possibly on-the-go, possibly on a smaller screen, that will hopefully leave them hungry for more, similar content in the future.

The most memorable visualizations, by far, contained elements that fell under the category of "human recognizable objects." These were images with photographs, body parts, icons--things that people regularly encounter in their daily lives. "Human recognizable objects will instantly make it more memorable," says Borkin. All but one of the 12 most memorable images in the study had a recognizable component.

Color was key; visualizations with more than six colors were much more memorable than those with only a few colors or a black-and-white gradient. Visual density--what some of us might call "clutter"--wasn't a bad thing either. In fact, images with a lot going on were significantly more memorable than minimalist approaches. Roundness was another hallmark of memorability (after all, our brains do love curves).

Then again, the researchers emphasize that this study only scratches the surface of what makes a visualization effective. Borkin and the others didn't study how well people retained the information in the images, just that they retained the image itself. An image that's memorable without being comprehensible may not be worth much. Borkin has already moved on to a similar study of visual comprehension, and she suspects in this case that "chart junk" and extraneous design elements will have a negative impact.