Cohesive Devices - Linking Adverbials

Here there is a pair of factors associated with poorer memory as people get older (isolation and loneliness). The phrase "In addition" adds another association; that between loneliness and decline in cognitive function. The reason why we don't simply have a list of three associations is because the first two are concerned with memory and the last is concerned with decline in cognitive function. Other addition adverbials include "Additionally", "Further", "Furthermore", "Also", "What is more", "Moreover".

Enumeration

The word "Hence" introduces the consequences of the fact that many things influence the growth of a plant shoot. Other adverbials which could be used here include "Therefore" , “Thus”, "Consequently" , "As a result" , "Because of this", "So".

The word “Intriguingly" is a stance adverbial. This adverbial is not cohesive. It merely signals the writer's opinion about another aspect of patients with semantic dementia - the fact that they "show early degeneration of another part of the brain..."

Concession is similar to contrast and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two, or to decide whether contrast or concession is what's on offer. But some adverbials are pretty clear that they introduce concession (e.g. even so, after all, anyhow). In this case we have "After all". In this example the writers concede that the explanation (people simply gave incorrect estimates of their age) is the only plausible one. They also give a reason for this concession; "guesswork is all we have ...." in the absence of "confirmatory evidence". Other concession adverbials are "However", "Yet", "Besides", "Nevertheless", "At any rate", "In spite of", "In any case", "All the same", "That said". Some of these (e.g. "However" and "Yet") may also be used to signal contrast.

Addition

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It must not be thought that the telescopes mentioned were the only ones completed. On the contrary, they were but the best ones selected out of many. (Holden 1881)

Concession

Other possible adverbials for signalling contrast are: "In contrast", "On the other hand", "Conversely", "Alternatively", "Instead", "In comparison".

A Note on the Use of Linking Adverbials  Linking adverbials are very useful for pointing out the relations between ideas in a text. They create cohesion and give the text a logical flow and a coherence it might not otherwise have. Academic text, because it contains argument, tends to contain more of these devices than, for example, fiction. However, not every connection needs to be signalled. Students, especially students of English as a second language, tend to pepper their essays with these devices unnecessarily. Perhaps this is because they have been explicitly taught how to use them and feel that they are an important feature of every paragraph. There may also be a backwash effect from exams such as IELTS whose marking rubrics include a section on coherence and cohesion. Authentic texts do not normally contain a lot of these devices. The best advice for students of English is to read widely and to read authentic texts in their field of study.

The word "sum" introduces a conclusion, often in the form of a summary. If it comes at the end of the whole text, as in this case, it usually offers a (very brief) summary of the whole text or the main idea or thesis statement of the text. Other summation adverbials are "In conclusion", "To conclude", "To summarize", "In the end", "In the final analysis", "In essence", "To sum up". There is often no need for these adverbials, and they may be omittted, as the final paragraph is obviously the conclusion and may even be titled as such.

The following is an excerpt from an article entitled "How we discovered that brain connections shape memories" in "The Conversation” by Carl Hodgetts, a research fellow in cognitive neuroscience at Cardiff University, and you can access the full article here. The article shows how adverbials can be used to good effect. You can also view the whole article by clicking in the top right hand corner of the box below. 

According to Herschel, the sun consisted of three essentially different parts. First, there was a solid nucleus, non-luminous, cool, and even capable of being inhabited. Second, above this was an atmosphere proper; and, lastly, outside of this was a layer in which floated the clouds, or bodies which gave to the solar surface its intense brilliancy. (Holden 1881)

Linking Adverbials Linking adverbials create a different type of cohesion in a text. Whereas reference, substitution and ellipsis require us to find ties to specific element (usually) earlier in a text, adverbials tell us about logical relations between the ideas in a text. Adverbials are cohesive because logical relations (addition, contrast, sequence, and so on) cannot exist without connected elements in the text. Apart from cohesion, adverbials help with coherence. Adverbials provide coherence by pointing out the logical flow of ideas; for example, whether we are about to read another item in a list, or something which contrasts with what we have read before. The following are the main categories of linking adverbials in English. Addition (e.g. In addition, Also, Furthermore). Enumeration (e.g. First, Second, Lastly). Result/Inference (e.g. Therefore, Consequently, So). Contrast (e.g. In contrast, On the other hand, Alternatively). Concession (e.g. However, Besides, Anyway). Apposition (e.g. In other words, For example, For instance).Summation (e.g. In conclusion, In sum, To summarise). There are two other important categories of adverbials besides linking adverbials. They are circumstance adverbials and stance adverbials but neither of these is cohesive in the same way as linking adverbials.

Contrast

Although 40% of participants in our study retrieved these fictitious memories, they are not altogether surprising. Contemporary theories of memory highlight the constructive nature of memory; memories are not “records” of events, but rather psychological representations of the self in the past. In other words, all of our memories contain some degree of fiction – indeed, this is the sign of a healthy memory system in action. But perhaps, for reasons not yet known, we have a psychological need to fictionalise memories from times of our lives that we are unable to remember. (Justice, Conway, and Akhtar 2018)

Apposition is restatement of something just said, but not merely a repetition. The writer does this to clarify, or to give some aspect of the previous statement more emphasis. The phrase "In other words" is a typical introduction to an appositive statement. Other apposition adverbials are "Which is to say", "That is", "i.e.". Some apposition adverbials introduce examples: "e.g.", "For example", "For instance".

Summation

The words our, us, we, us, us in the previous two sentences ("our personal past", "what make us human" etc.) gives a sense of how we are all similar. This is why the writer uses the word "But" to start the third sentence; we may be similar but "we don't all remember out past in the same way". But signals this contrast. However, "but" is a coordinating conjunction, not a linking adverbial. It still has a cohesive function but it doesn't belong in the category of linking adverbials.

Mouse over the highlighted words to see how the adverbials are used. Reliving and sharing our personal past is part of what makes us human. It creates a sense of who we are, allows us to plan for the future and helps us form relationships. But we don’t all remember our past in the same way. In fact, the nature and quality of memory differs considerably between people. For instance, when asked to remember something about a party, one person might describe vividly their sixth birthday: how the gifts were laid out, the sweet, chocolatey taste of the hedgehog cake and going to bed really late. Another person might not recall this precise detail, but remember that their aunt despised parties and that hedgehog cakes were massive in the 80s. So, our personal memories contain different types of information. Some of this is very specific about when and where things happened – and what it felt like. This collection of personal experiences is known as “episodic memory”. Other bits are general facts about the world, ourselves and the people we know. This is called “semantic memory”. A big question in neuroscience is whether these two memory types involve distinct parts of the brain. Individuals who have suffered damage to a region called the hippocampus (involved in memory, learning and emotion) have been found to remember facts about their lives but lack the high-resolution, episodic detail. On the other hand, patients with a rare form of dementia, known as semantic dementia, can remember episodic information, but not the facts that glue it all together. Intriguingly, these individuals show early degeneration of another part of the brain called the anterior temporal lobe (thought to be critical for semantic memory). (Hodgetts 2017)

So how can I remember being a baby? And why did 2,487 people from our study remember events that they dated from the age of two years and younger? One explanation is that people simply gave incorrect estimates of their age in the memory. After all, unless confirmatory evidence is present, guesswork is all we have when it comes to dating memories from across our lives, including the very earliest. (Justice, Conway, and Akhtar 2018)

Apposition

The words "In fact" is a stance adverbial, not a linking adverbial. A stance adverbial makes a comment on the current topic of discussion in the text. The words “in fact” show the writer’s stance on the the topic of how different people remember their past in different ways. “In fact" signals that something is real or true and is often followed by further comment or evidence which reinforces the previous statement. This is exactly what happens in this text; having said that “we don’t all remember our past in the same way”, the writer reinforces this idea by stating that the differences are considerable in two ways. The nature of memory and the quality of memory are both different. This is a typical use of the stance adverbial “In fact”. It does have a cohesive function linking the two sentences and therefore could be considered as linking adverbial in this case.

The word “So" is a linking adverbial. It is a linking adverbial in the result/inference category. In this case the meaning is: as a result of what we have just said we can conclude that …. or even: to summarise …. “So" is a very common linking word and often a very general one, not being much more than a filler or transition.

The experiment revealed that the participants recalled significantly more information from the second file if they had saved the previous file. This suggests that by saving or “offloading” information on to a computer, we are freeing up cognitive resources that enable us to memorise and recall new information instead. In sum, anyone worrying that technology is wrecking one of our most important abilities should take some reassurance from these findings. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no cause for concern: for instance McCartney said in the same interview that the songs in the 1960s that did make it to the recording studio were the most memorable ones. So it is possible that the lack of technology made The Beatles better songwriters. (Noreen 2015)

Result/Inference

Other Examples The following examples are taken from various different texts.

The words "First", "Second" and "lastly" are all typical enumeration adverbials. They are cohesive because, in this case, they list each of the "three essentially different parts" mentioned in the first sentence. Other adverbials of this type include "firstly", "secondly (etc.)", "to begin with", "initially", "to start with", "first of all", "in the first (second ...) place", "next", "for one thing ..... (and) for another thing", "eventually", "finally".

"For instance" is a linking adverbial. It is a linking adverbial in the apposition category. Apposition means giving more information about a previous statement, either as a restatement with more information or as an example. In this case we have a whole paragraph about how different people may remember an event. So the whole of this paragraph is an example in support of the claim that “the nature and quality of memory differs considerably between people". "For instance" is very often used to introduce examples like this.

One major study on ageing – which collects data from more than 18,000 UK over-50s about physical and mental health, well-being, finances and attitudes towards ageing – found that isolation and loneliness were associated with poorer memory, especially among those with lower levels of education. In addition, loneliness in older age was associated with a steeper decline in cognitive function. This included worse memory and verbal fluency. (Carrino and Pabon 2019)

The phrase “On the other hand" is a linking adverbial. It is a linking adverbial in the contrast category. The contrast here is between people with damage to the hippocampus amd people with semantic dementia. People with hippocampus damage remember facts but not episodic detail, whereas people with semantic dementia retain episodic detail but not "the facts that glue it all together". This paragraph would be clear without this linking adverbial but its presence makes the contrast much clearer and improves the readability of the text.

The amount that the shoot grows in one year depends on very many things, on the light and warmth it gets, on its food and the growth of its neighbours. Hence, in the growth of different shoots in the same year, or the same shoot in different years, we find very great differences. (Stopes n.d.)

How we discovered that brain connections shape memories Brain connections determine whether you remember the wind in your hair or who was prime minister. Carl Hodgetts, Cardiff UniversityReliving and sharing our personal past is part of what makes us human. It creates a sense of who we are, allows us to plan for the future and helps us form relationships. But we don’t all remember our past in the same way. In fact, the nature and quality of memory differs considerably between people. For instance, when asked to remember something about a party, one person might describe vividly their sixth birthday: how the gifts were laid out, the sweet, chocolatey taste of the hedgehog cake and going to bed really late. Another person might not recall this precise detail, but remember that their aunt despised parties and that hedgehog cakes were massive in the 80s. So, our personal memories contain different types of information. Some of this is very specific about when and where things happened – and what it felt like. This collection of personal experiences is known as “episodic memory”. Other bits are general facts about the world, ourselves and the people we know. This is called “semantic memory”. A big question in neuroscience is whether these two memory types involve distinct parts of the brain. Individuals who have suffered damage to a region called the hippocampus (involved in memory, learning and emotion) have been found to remember facts about their lives but lack the high-resolution, episodic detail. On the other hand, patients with a rare form of dementia, known as semantic dementia, can remember episodic information, but not the facts that glue it all together. Intriguingly, these individuals show early degeneration of another part of the brain called the anterior temporal lobe (thought to be critical for semantic memory). Networks versus areas But can we see a similar distinction in the healthy brain? As reflecting on our past is highly complex, it seems likely that different brain regions must work together to achieve it. And studies using functional MRI have shown that personal memories activate large networks in the brain. So it appears that memory cannot be boiled down to one or two particular brain areas. We have to think more widely than that. The brain itself is made up of both grey and white tissue. The white part, known as “white matter”, contains fibres that allow information to travel between different areas of the brain. So could these connections themselves predict how we remember? In our latest study, published in the journal Cortex, we explored this question by using a brain scanning technique known as diffusion MRI. This method uses the movement of water molecules to map out the brain’s white matter pathways. We asked 27 college-aged volunteers to lie still in the scanner as we collected images of their brains. Using these images we could identify specific pathways and pull out measures their structure – indicating how efficiently information can travel between connected regions. Virtually dissecting white matter connections. Carl Hodgetts/Cardiff UniversityOutside the scanner, each volunteer was asked to describe memories from their past in response to cue words, such as “party” or “holiday”. By going through and painstakingly coding each memory, we could work out how “episodic” and “semantic” each person’s memory was. For instance, precise spatial statements would count toward the episodic score (“The Eiffel Tower was directly behind us”), and facts would count toward the semantic score (“Paris is my sister’s favourite city”). We found that the amount of rich, episodic detail that volunteers remembered was related to the connectivity of an arch-shaped white matter pathway called the fornix, which links to the hippocampus. So, the more efficiently the fornix can relay information from the hippocampus to surrounding regions, the more episodic someone’s memory is. Pathways to personal memory. Carl Hodgetts/Cardiff UniversityA different white matter pathway – catchily named the inferior longitudinal fasciculus  – strongly predicted how semantic people’s memories were. Interestingly, this long bundle of white matter is the major route from visual parts of the brain to the anterior temporal lobe  – the same region that is affected in cases of semantic dementia. Wired for memory These findings suggest that differences in how we each remember our past are reflected in how our brains are wired. Historically, neuroscience has tended to see brain regions as singletons, working alone. These results suggest the alternative: that links between regions – and the networks they form – are critical for how we think and behave. Our finding also supports the idea that there are separate memory “systems” in the brain. One for reliving time and place and another for pulling in general knowledge and personal facts. People with dementia may one day be able to benefit from the findings. Bojan Milinkov/ShutterstockCould these findings help people with memory problems? Not yet, but working out how memory works in healthy people may eventually help us understand exactly what goes wrong in the brain when we get diseases like Alzheimer’s – and help us treat it. For instance, people with damage to the “episodic” network, such as those with early Alzheimer’s disease, may benefit from semantic memory strategies to compensate. A recent study found that cuing memories with physical objects led to better episodic memory in people with Alzheimer’s. There’s plenty we still don’t know about the brain’s white matter. A number of properties can affect how information travels along it, such as the density of fibres. In the future, we can use new and powerful scanning techniques to uncover the parts of white matter that drive these fascinating effects. Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: http://theconversation.com/republishing-guidelines Carl Hodgetts, Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience, Cardiff UniversityThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How simple policy changes can help us age better and prevent cognitive decline Ensuring older people can continue to socialise is important for preventing loneliness and cognitive decline. Pressmaster/ Shutterstock Mauricio Avendano Pabon, King's College London and Ludovico Carrino, King's College LondonMany people experience a decline in cognitive function with age, such as a worsening memory and trouble processing information. In most cases, this is perfectly normal. In some cases, however, age-related cognitive decline may affect a person’s ability to carry out complex tasks, such as managing finances or preparing a meal. At times, it may even make it difficult for a person to perform daily tasks, such as dressing and feeding. Around 18% of the UK’s population is aged 65 and older. By 2030, it’s estimated that one in five UK people will be aged over 65. But this doesn’t account for the number of people who will experience cognitive decline and dementia as they age. Incidence of dementia sharply rises at the age of 75 – and it is expected that the number of people in the UK living with dementia could triple by 2050. Cognitive function is very important to older people’s well-being. It influences everything they do, including working and socialising, and has a huge social and economic impact on families. Finding ways to prevent cognitive decline is increasingly important. We’re often told that the solution to cognitive decline lies in new medicines or therapies that can reduce symptoms, or by following a healthy lifestyle. But recent research by our team found that social and emotional well-being – meaning our feelings of being connected to family and the community, and our subjective experience of positive or negative emotions – may be just as important as therapy and lifestyle for maintaining good cognitive function in older age. Numerous studies from around the world have found that social connectedness and loneliness influence older people’s cognitive function, including their memory. Loneliness affects approximately 9% of people over 65 in the UK. It’s a complex emotional state where people perceive their social interactions and individual relationships to be inadequate. One major study on ageing – which collects data from more than 18,000 UK over-50s about physical and mental health, well-being, finances and attitudes towards ageing – found that isolation and loneliness were associated with poorer memory, especially among those with lower levels of education. In addition, loneliness in older age was associated with a target="_blank"steeper decline in cognitive function. This included worse memory and verbal fluency. Cognitive decline and loneliness Although these findings are staggering, they also show us how difficult it is to establish if loneliness causes cognitive decline, or if cognitive decline causes loneliness. One way to find out is by looking at whether interventions to reduce loneliness also inadvertently affect older people’s cognitive health too. We addressed this question in a series of studies looking at the impact that free bus travel had on over-60s. When the UK government gave free bus travel to people over 60 in 2006, it was thought that the measure may reduce loneliness and increase social engagement as it enables older people to remain connected to their social environments. We found that free bus travel significantly increased public transportation use but, in addition, it led to improvements in cognitive function – particularly, improved memory. In another study, we found that increased public transportation use also reduced depression and feelings of loneliness. It increased participation in volunteering activities and contact with older people’s adult children and friends. These findings show how a simple policy has had unintended positive consequences. It led to significant improvements in older people’s cognitive function and mental health – potentially by influencing social well-being. Public transport increased community participation, which improved cognitive function and well-being. Simon Annable/ ShutterstockThis isn’t the first time we’ve found how social policy changes can help protecting older people against cognitive decline. For example, we examined the impact of a French law that increased the minimum legal school leaving age by 2 years in 1959, from 14 to 16 years of age. This law effectively increased the years of schooling for French adults presently reaching old age. We found that even decades after leaving school, a longer period in education helped older adults maintain cognitive function – particularly memory – and postponed cognitive decline. Even policies that affect the whole economy have been found to be an important factor in health and memory. We found that older people exposed to an economic recession in the years leading up to their retirement experience faster cognitive decline in their post-retirement years. This suggests that policies that protect older people from the impact of economic decline might help them to maintain good cognitive function in older age. Long-term care policies that enable older people to maintain independence and continue to socialise may also be important. “Ageing in place”, an approach that emphasises the importance of supporting older people to continue living in their home and community, has led many governments to offer care for older people with limitations in their own home. Our research suggests that only a small fraction of older Europeans that have difficulty performing daily activities (such as dressing, walking or washing) are actually eligible to receive home care through the government. But we also found that an increase in the amount of care that people receive at home through government-sponsored programmes, paradoxically, increases the amount of assistance they receive from friends and family. This suggests that a long-term policy that expands access to home care may help older people maintain social ties, mental well-being, and cognitive function well into older age. While prospects such as new drugs that protect against cognitive ageing are exciting, research shows that many simple policy changes can also promote social and emotional well-being – which may be just as important for maintaining brain function in later life. Even in the face of declining physical ability, programmes that provide long-term care at home may be critical for maintaining cognitive function and leading a meaningful life at older age. Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: http://theconversation.com/republishing-guidelines Mauricio Avendano Pabon, Professor of Public Policy and Global Health, King's College London and Ludovico Carrino, Research fellow, King's College LondonThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What is your first memory – and did it ever really happen? ‘Will I remember this?’ Shutterstock Lucy V Justice, Nottingham Trent University; Martin Conway, City, University of London, and Shazia Akhtar, University of BradfordI can remember being a baby. I recall being in a vast room inside a doctor’s surgery. I was passed to a nurse and then placed in cold metal scales to be weighed. I was always aware that this memory was unusual because it was from so early in my life, but I thought that perhaps I just had a really good memory, or that perhaps other people could remember being so young, too. What is the earliest event that you can remember? How old do you think you are in this memory? How do you experience the memory? Is it vivid or vague? Positive or negative? Are you re-experiencing the memory as it originally happened, through your own eyes, or are you watching yourself “acting” in the memory? In our recent study, we asked more than 6,000 people of all ages to do the same, to tell us what their first autobiographical memory was, how old they were when the event happened, to rate how emotional and vivid it was and to report what perspective the memory was “seen” from. We found that on average people reported their first memory occurring during the first half of the third year of their lives (3.24 years to be precise). This matches well with other studies that have investigated the age of early memories. Read more: Why can't we remember our early childhood? What does this mean for my memory of being a baby then? Perhaps I do just have a really good memory and can remember those early months of life. Indeed, in our study, we found that around 40% of participants reported remembering events from the age of two or below – and 14% of people recalled memories from age one and below. However, psychological research suggests that memories occurring below the age of three are highly unusual – and indeed, highly improbable. The origin of memory Researchers who have investigated memory development suggest that the neurological processes needed to form autobiographical memories are not fully developed until between the ages of three and four years. Other research has suggested that memories are linked to language development. Language allows children to share and discuss the past with others, enabling memories to be organised in a personal autobiography. So how can I remember being a baby? And why did 2,487 people from our study remember events that they dated from the age of two years and younger? One explanation is that people simply gave incorrect estimates of their age in the memory. After all, unless confirmatory evidence is present, guesswork is all we have when it comes to dating memories from across our lives, including the very earliest. Was that really what your teddy looked like? ShutterstockBut if incorrect dating explained the presence of these memories, we would expect that they would be about similar events to those memories from ages three and above. But this was not the case – we found that very early reported memories were of events and objects from infancy (pram, cot, learning to walk) whereas older memories were of things typical of childhood (toys, school, holidays). This finding meant that these two groups of memories were qualitatively different and ruled out the misdating explanation. If research tells us that these very early memories are highly unlikely, and we have ruled out a misdating explanation, then why do people, including me, have them? Pure fiction? We concluded that these memories are likely to be fictional – that is, that they never in fact occurred. Perhaps, rather than recalling an experienced event, we recall imagery derived from photographs, home movies, shared family stories or events and activities that frequently happen in infancy. These facts are then, we suggest, linked with some fragmentary visual imagery and are combined together to form the basis of these fictitious early memories. Over time, this combination of imagery and fact begins to be experienced as a memory. Read more: Serial: your memory can play tricks on you – here’s how Although 40% of participants in our study retrieved these fictitious memories, they are not altogether surprising. Contemporary theories of memory highlight the constructive nature of memory; memories are not “records” of events, but rather psychological representations of the self in the past. In other words, all of our memories contain some degree of fiction – indeed, this is the sign of a healthy memory system in action. But perhaps, for reasons not yet known, we have a psychological need to fictionalise memories from times of our lives that we are unable to remember. For now, these “stories” remain a mystery. Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: http://theconversation.com/republishing-guidelines Lucy V Justice, Lecturer in Psychology, Nottingham Trent University; Martin Conway, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, City, University of London, and Shazia Akhtar, Postdoctoral researcher, University of BradfordThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The internet is eating your memory, but something better is taking its place Computer memory goes up; ours comes down. Lightspring Saima Noreen, Goldsmiths, University of LondonIn the years since the world started going digital, one of the big changes has been that we don’t need to remember very much. Why risk forgetting a partner’s birthday or a dinner date with a close friend when you can commit the details to your computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet and get a reminder at the appropriate time? Paul McCartney gave a useful insight into this in an interview. He claimed that back in the 1960s The Beatles may have written dozens of songs that were never released because he and John Lennon would forget the songs the following morning. We would write a song and just have to remember it. And there was always the risk that we’d just forget it. If the next morning you couldn’t remember it – it was gone. How different to the way he records now then, when he can “form the thing, have it all finished, remember it all, go in pretty quickly and record it”. With technology now well ingratiated into our everyday life, researchers have been investigating the lasting impact that it is having on the way that we learn and remember information. Some research has suggested that our reliance on technology and the internet is leading to “digital amnesia”, where individuals are no longer able to retain information as a result of storing information on a digital device. In one study, for example, 1000 consumers aged 16 and over were asked about their use of technology. It found that 91% of them depended on the internet and digital devices as a tool for remembering. In another survey of 6000 people, the same study found that 71% of people could not remember their children’s phone numbers and 57% could not remember their work phone number. This suggests that relying on digital devices to remember information is impairing our own memory systems. The upgrade But before we mourn this apparent loss of memory, more recent studies suggest that we may be adapting. One such study from 2011 conducted a series of experiments looking at how our memories rely on computers. In one of them, participants were asked to type a series of statements, such as “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain”. Half of them were told that their documents would be saved, and half were told that they would not. Everyone was then tested to see if they could remember what they had typed. Those who had been told their work would be saved were significantly poorer at remembering the information. In another experiment, participants were asked to type a series of statements that would be saved in specific folders. They were then asked to recall the statements and the folders in which the files were located. Overall, they were better at recalling the file locations than the statements. The conclusion from the two experiments? Technology has changed the way we organise information so that we only remember details which are no longer available, and prioritise the location of information over the content itself. Group mind This idea that individuals prioritise where information is located has led some researchers to propose that digital devices and the internet have become a form of transactive memory. This idea, which dates back to the 1980s, refers to a group memory that is superior to that of any individual. According to this account, individuals can collectively store and distribute information using a shared store of knowledge. This store of knowledge means that individuals can access details that they may not know themselves by knowing that another individual remembers it, thus enhancing what information is available to them by communicating with other people. In the same way, individuals develop a transactive memory with the internet and rely on it for information by focusing on where details are located rather than the details themselves. More recent research has extended this line of work and found that saving information on a computer not only changes how our brains interact with it, but also makes it easier to learn new information. In a study published last year, the participants were presented with two files that each contained a list of words. They were asked to memorise both lists. Half of the participants were asked to save the first file before moving on to the next list, while the others had to close it without saving. The experiment revealed that the participants recalled significantly more information from the second file if they had saved the previous file. This suggests that by saving or “offloading” information on to a computer, we are freeing up cognitive resources that enable us to memorise and recall new information instead. In sum, anyone worrying that technology is wrecking one of our most important abilities should take some reassurance from these findings. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no cause for concern: for instance McCartney said in the same interview that the songs in the 1960s that did make it to the recording studio were the most memorable ones. So it is possible that the lack of technology made The Beatles better songwriters. But it may be that just as oral storytelling was usurped by the written word, having digital devices to outsource our memories means that it is no longer necessary for us to try to remember everything. And if we can now remember more with a little help from our technology friends, that is arguably a great step forward. Rather than worrying about what we have lost, perhaps we need to focus on what we have gained. Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: http://theconversation.com/republishing-guidelines Saima Noreen, Lecturer in Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of LondonThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.