Verizon at Home

[#1]

OK, I’ll admit it.  My memory’s not as good as it used to be.  Typically I’ll blame my forgetfulness on my advancing age.  But now there’s an even better excuse.  I’ll blame it on Google.

A study of Columbia University students (who I’m sure are utterly brilliant) released this week suggests that our increasing dependence on Internet searches is changing the nature of human memory – specifically “transactive memory.”  Think of transactive memory as a kind of external hard drive for your brain.  It’s your mom, your co-worker, your trivia-loving best friend – the people you’d ask Meredith to call if you got stumped on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”  It’s all about the stuff you don’t have to remember because you know someone else will.

Online search evidently has vastly expanded our ability to default to transactive memory.  Why memorize when you can Google?  (Now, I don’t think search is entirely to blame.  I don’t remember anyone’s phone number anymore … sometimes not even my own … since those digits are all in my cell phone.)  Are there things you don’t bother to remember anymore simply because you know the information is online or on a digital device?

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If we’re going to blame memory loss on Google, let’s also give them some acclaim, just to be balanced.   Google recently sponsored a pretty nifty science fair that garnered 7,500 entries from some 10,000 students in 91 countries around the world.  While the most popular category for entries was earth and environmental sciences, the three top winners (all girls, by the way) submitted bioscience projects.  Grand prize winner, 17-year-old Shree Bose from Fort Worth, Texas, demonstrated how to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients whose bodies resist chemotherapy.  What a great project!  As a cancer survivor myself, it gives me great hope that young people are focused on this health scourge.  Who knows, maybe contests like this, and the creative thinking of the young, could someday play a role in finding a cure.

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Sometimes it really is better to be second than first.

A study that measured stress hormones of 125 adult male baboons in Amboseli, Kenya, over a period of nine years reveals that “low rankers” in a baboon community experience more stress than “high rankers.”  That’s likely because low rankers have to expend much more time and energy to find food and mating opportunities.  The higher ranking baboons get better access to food, and more attention from female baboons. 

This all makes sense.  The really interesting finding, however, is that the best position of all in the community is “Number Two.” It seems the “Beta Male” has it all over the “Alpha Male,” enjoying all the perks of a relatively high position in the community without all the stress of maintaining a number-one status.  The second-ranking baboon also consistently had better health than the Alpha male. 

I see some parallels in this study to life in the workplace, when it comes to status and stress.  Do you?

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Have a great weekend, everyone!