The Skill We Are Losing Daily
Does this happen with you? Like you are doing math, you get stuck with a problem. And you instantly go to the answers page if available and search for the answer.
This behaviour is explained by the term Cognitive Offloading. Which means doing any physical work to reduce the cognitive need of any specific work. Let me make it simple with an example- When you have an important task or event to attend on a certain time or date, you put a reminder or alarm on your phone so that you don’t miss it. What happens here is you are removing the pressure that your mind had to take to remember about the event or task.
In this era this is very common for us, any problem we face we instantly go to [google.com](http://google.com) and search how to, what is, when is and get our results instantly without any cognitive action. Its not just for saying but a Harvard study results suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.
Now, it might seem like what is the issue with using technology to solve our problems, because it was created for this. But it is an issue when it effects our ability for critical thinking. Let’s talk about a story by a teacher named Terry Heick asked his students a question to test their critical thinking- “HOW DO MODERN NOVELS REPRESENT THE HUMANITY?” And guess what? The student went for their phone.
Its a natural human behaviour unless we are doing something consciously, we tend to choose the easy path to perform it. But what is the problem if we get our problem solved by the internet? It is not a problem until the day when internet won’t be able to solve our problems and we will be sitting blank loosing our ability for critical thinking. Personally when I came across this whole concept I could relate to my life. Being in Cadet College a bit distant from technology in our daily life helped us practice our critical thinking and I clearly see the difference of both the states staying at my home for about one year. So what do you think? Is technology effecting our potentials?