Erikka Askeland: Precious memories - now available online

I AM worried about my memory. Gaps like moth-eaten holes have appeared where names should be - that of my boss, most recently.

Luckily, this blip wasn't in that most socially awkward of cases - having to introduce him to someone and where his name should be ready to slip down easily on to my tongue; instead there is only a clear blue blank of silence, while my eyes are staring and I go a bit pale.

Yet I have always been like this, to a certain extent. When people boast, "I never forget a face", it makes me feel wistful. More often, I just smile as widely as I can and exaggerate my cheerfulness in hopes the person who knows my name and where I had lunch last week doesn't realise I haven't the foggiest who they are. Except it usually turns out it is them who I had lunch with last week, a dinging realisation which usually wakes me up from a sound sleep eight hours later.

I have coping strategies when faced with running into a familiar stranger, which usually involves suggesting to my partner in a louder than normal voice: "Please, introduce yourselves." Except this doesn't always work, no matter how hard I dig my elbow into his side, as he has forgotten the previously agreed cue that when I give him a hard stare and talk loudly, he should step into the breach.

But I am beginning to realise it is not just me. Instead it is a thoroughly modern condition caused by the internet. Psychologists have long been worrying about how mass media is affecting our brains. Why memorise anything, the name of whosit, or year that thing happened, when you have Google? And now, many of us have smart phones, which means recalling the name of that band who had an obscure one hit wonder about bears in the 1980s can be retrieved in the pub as well as the office while only having to recall snatches of lyrics.

The British Psychological Society (BPS) has highlighted a recent study by researchers at Columbia University, which has proven that people are using the internet as extra memory storage. In the study, dozens of undergrads were given statements to read which they typed into a computer. Half were told that the computer would save their entries, while the others were told they would be deleted. Those who were allowed to "save" the statements performed worse at a subsequent recall test, as if knowing the things they were going to be tested on were stored meant they did not bother to commit them to memory.

Those who think highly of rote memorisation can only wring their hands in despair. But the researchers in the same study also found that this may not be harmful, but may mimic and perhaps enhance the brain's function. When asked which folder the line about the ostrich was saved in, the students were actually better at remembering the location of the statements than the statements themselves, and were even more likely to remember the location of statements they'd failed to recall.The BPS said: "It's as if we've become adept at using computers to store knowledge for us, and we're better at remembering where information is stored than the information itself."

Oddly, that prophet of the media age, Marshall McLuhan, ?saw it all coming as early as 1962, at the dawn of the TV era. Last week it was 100 years since he was born yet he deftly predicted that: "The next medium, whatever it is - it may be the extension of consciousness…A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind."

Sounds a little like today - where I could even do a sneaky search on Linkedin that would even reveal my mystery friend's picture and where they work in a matter of seconds. As long as I'm somewhere my phone has a connection.

And as long as I can remember their name in order to search it.