How Does Transactive Memory Work In Close Relationships

819 Words4 Pages

How does transactive memory work in close relationships:

Although it is clear how memorizing is important for human brain (??), little is known about the phenomenon of transactive memory. This aspect was first introduced by Daniel Wegner in 1985 as an early theory based on groupthink. The first studies on transactive memory were conducted on families and couples: relationships in which people were connected sentimentally; but later the theory was extended also to groups and bigger teams to demonstrate how a “group mind” is more effective and complex compared to that of its single component can have.
The transactive memory system suggest that people that often work together or people in a close relationship can build a specialized division …show more content…

Thanks to Google and Wikipedia we can access to a huge amount of information in a couple of seconds. Under those circumstances, it is proved that people that expect to have future access to information prefer not to recall to the information itself but instead to recall for the place where to access it. As a consequence of it Internet has become a new form of transactive memory, and it’s acting as an external hard drive of human brain, an outsourced memory where information is stored. In other words, human memory is adapting its processes to the development of technologies and Internet and, in the same way transactive memory works, people are remembering what the computer knows and where those information are stored in the computer memory. This leads to a symbiosis between men and technology, where people can have an instant access to any kind of data. An outcome of it is that, in order to have this connection with the external memory on internet, we have to be constantly wired and we are dependent from our gadgets. We must stay connected to know and to remember, and being unplugged has become like losing our friend that we rely on for remembering …show more content…

Although this phenomenon has a lot of similarity with transactive memory, it also presents a big difference from it: Internet is completely different from any real person we can rely on for information: it knows everything and it is constantly present to give us help. Thus, a smartphone can provide a lot more information that a single individual or group can remember. The speed at which we can access information from the Internet is much faster than the one that takes a human brain to look for something from its own memory. The rapidity that takes to have access to anything is now blurring the boundaries between the limited and personal human memory and the depth of the digital storage. The information age is making humans splitting their memories between the brain and the digital devices, making people seem like they know more than ever before, while they remember ever less about the world as they think. Not only we are becoming part of the “Inter-mind”, but reasonably we may develop a new form of intelligence, where we won’t need to remember facts anymore, but instead we will merge with something vaster. Our transitive relationships won’t be with other people anymore but rather with an impressive source of