Humans changing the way they use memory…

This was my seventh Naadam, and though I do not believe that when you have seen one you have seen them all, I do confess that I was hit with déjà vu and would have found it difficult to survive the holiday week without help from the Internet. Many young Mongolians tell me they felt the same. What does this shift in social habit mean for the race? And how do we, as part of an ever evolving world, adjust to this comparatively new adjunct to our existence? One result of using the Internet,  psychologists have shown, is that people are becoming more concerned about knowing where to find information rather than knowing the information itself.
According to a report appearing in the US journal Science,  group of US scientists designed a set of four experiments involving student volunteers to explore whether ready access to search engines or databases might affect the way people store things in their head. They say this was the first scientific study of the Internet’s impact on memory. In the words of the lead author of the study, Ms. Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University, “The Internet is changing the way people use memory — people have adapted memory to prioritise where to find information than to memorise information.”
Ms. Sparrow and her colleagues say their findings suggest that people are now treating online search engines or the Internet itself as an “external memory system” that can be accessed at will. This trend by itself would appear similar to other external memory systems that humans have used in the past — telephone books, for instance — but the volume and the diversity of information surpass any such tools of the past. “We don’t need to store the same amount of data as we used to — so information that is not essential for us to store we allow to remain in the external memory systems such as the Internet,” Ms. Sparrow says.
An Indian clinical psychologist who was not associated with the study says the findings appear significant as they raise issues about the impact of search engines and databases on individuals as well as on society. “Searching for information requires a person to evaluate each option as a hit or a miss, and search attentively for the best option among an array of possibilities,” said Ms. Jamuna Rajan, at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore. “So information searching may help enhance attention, working memory and decision-making.”
But, she said, the long-term and widespread dependence on search engines or databases may even impact in some ways on person-to-person transfer of knowledge, a tradition in society since the dawn of modern humans. “If everyone begins to rely on computers for knowledge, the amount of knowledge that moves from person to person could decline,” Ms. Rajan said. “Such a trend may also have wider consequences on social interactions.”
The experiments that Ms. Sparrow and her collaborators from Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison performed suggests that people quickly begin to think about computers when they need to find knowledge. Their findings also suggest that people tend to forget things that they believe will be available through an external memory system such as a computer and remember things that they believe will not be available any more. In one experiment, the researchers also observed that people seem better able to remember which computer folder an item was placed into than the identity of the item itself. These are signals that memory processes are adapting to computer tools, Ms. Sparrow said. She is currently planning a fresh set of experiments to test whether the need to memorise less because of access to search engines may translate into an enhanced capacity to grasp conceptual issues.

Sticking to the Naadam days, I stayed away from where the crowds were likely to be and also chose to be out when they were more likely to be at home. Thus I was at Gandan a couple of times, simply walking around, stopping at times to watch the pigeons getting ready for the day. The vocal capacities of pigeons have never failed to fascinate me. They seem to converse, conspire or quarrel in a tone that is almost human. The songs of birds are also their language, and listening intently to their chatter to discover the underlying tune can indeed open up magic casements over the foam of perilous seas, as the nightingale’s song did to Keats. In Gandan, of course, there was no peril, and one could agree with the war-veteran character in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, who imagined sparrows telling him (in Greek, to boot) that no death exists in a world in which God is love. In Gandan, the pigeons, whether strutting or fluttering, might use Tibetan, which is no more and no less Greek to me than Mongolian.  
I was not totally alone and some of the other early morning visitors offered tidbits to the pigeons. What impels them, I am not sure; it can be a punishment for past karma, it can be a desire to earn future merit, it can also be subconscious pride in appearing to be a provider. However, behind the light-hearted amusement of feeding pigeons may lie deep biological underpinnings that explain why the practice has flourished down the centuries.
According to scientists, pigeons can discriminate between friendly and hostile humans, an evolutionary advantage that may be one of the factors helping their populations thrive across urban centres at a time sparrows are in decline. Ornithologists have long observed what they believe is a rise in pigeon numbers in urban areas, with many of them having public zones, such as Gandan, where pigeons congregrate to eat grain or other stuff offered by humans. It is interesting that while newborn sparrows require an exclusive diet of insects, young pigeons can survive on a liquid called “vegetable milk”, regurgitated by adult pigeons that feed on grain or other food that are always abundant from human feeders.
Now scientists in France have identified another facet of pigeon biology that probably help these birds in their search for friendly humans: pigeons appear to recognise individual people despite changes in clothing. In their experiments, Ms. Dalila Bovet and her colleagues at the University of Paris asked two sets of people wearing different-coloured coats to feed pigeons in a Paris city centre park.
One set ignored the pigeons and allowed them to feed while the other group chased the birds away preventing them from feeding. The pigeons appeared to recognise who was friendly and who was hostile, and were able to remember that information later. The pigeons could recognise the hostile people even when they swapped their coloured coats with the friendly people. Even when hostile people changed stance and became friendly to pigeons, the birds continued to avoid them.
“What is important — and surprising — is that the pigeons spontaneously used relevant characteristics of individuals instead of the most salient feature, which was the coloured coats,” said Ms. Bovet, associate professor at the Laboratory for Comparative Ethology and Cognition at the University of Paris. “They seem to know that clothes are not a good way to tell humans apart,” Ms. Bovet has said, a lesson we could use with profit.
Presenting their findings, published earlier this year in the journal Animal Cognition, at a recent meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology in Glasgow, the scientists say the ability to discriminate between friendly and hostile humans is ecologically relevant because it could help the birds recognise a safe human feeder faster and save energy and time in gaining food.
Overall, it is a combination of an abundance of food and nesting places as well as a decline in the population of natural predator birds that contributes to rising pigeon populations at a time of expanding urbanisation. As platform-nesters — birds that can build nests along ledges and corners of buildings – pigeons prefer constructed buildings to open spaces or gers, and a city will almost certainly have predators such as falcons. But any human-driven or unnatural rise in the population of a species can mean an ecological imbalance, just as much as any such decline. Pigeons are friendly birds, but they may also carry the risk of exacerbating respiratory infections.
Not that we in Ulaanbaatar need any avian agency for that