Google effect (digital amnesia)

Biological Parallel

Leafcutter ant colonies store food in fungus gardens rather than memorizing every cache location—stigmergy means environmental markers replace internal memory when retrieval is cheap. Honeybees use caching-distributed-storage: the waggle dance offloads navigation to social protocol. Squirrels bury 10,000 nuts annually and find them through spatial memory, but rely on environmental cues when memory fails. The Google effect follows the same metabolic-scaling logic: brains evolved to minimize expensive internal storage when reliable external sources exist. This is not cognitive decline but distributed-pacemaker-control—optimal resource allocation. Remembering where information lives costs less than remembering information itself.