Forgetting information that can easily be found online using internet search engines is a modern memory phenomenon known as the Google effect or digital amnesia.

A closer look

Forgetting information that can easily be found online using internet search engines is a modern memory phenomenon known as the Google effect or digital amnesia. Since the widespread adoption of smartphones, human brains have naturally shifted away from storing actual facts and instead simply remember where to find those facts. You probably cannot remember the phone numbers of your closest friends or the basic historical dates you learned in high school, but you definitely know the exact search terms required to pull them up in three seconds. We have essentially outsourced our biological hard drives to servers in Silicon Valley, making us collectively dumber but vastly more efficient at data retrieval. It is a brilliant evolutionary adaptation for surviving the information age, though it does mean that if the global internet ever permanently goes down, the vast majority of modern humanity will functionally lose ninety percent of their intelligence overnight