Digital Amnesia and Why Print Should Be Prized
Digital reading boosts convenience but weakens comprehension and memory; evidence links “digital amnesia” to shallower learning, making print vital for deep clinical study.
COMMENTARY
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates (ca. 400 BCE) warns that relying on written texts atrophies memory, offering only the illusion of wisdom without true understanding. Brilliant though he was, Socrates failed to appreciate that human memory is deeply flawed and frequently biased. Nor could he possibly have foreseen that, 20 centuries later, the written word would make the Scientific Revolution possible, thanks in large part to Gutenberg’s recently developed printing press. Ironically, it was only because his student, Plato, wrote down Socrates’s words that we are aware of his views today.
And yet, on a deeper level, Socrates was on to something—namely, the idea that certain ways of consuming information can create the appearance of wisdom and understanding but facilitate neither. Fast-forward 24 centuries: today, anyone can watch a few 10-minute YouTube videos and come away feeling like an expert in, well, almost anything—even psychiatry. Don’t get me wrong. This is no Luddite lament, and I recognize that digital learning (DL; or e-learning) has a useful and important place in medical education. This includes educational podcasts, digital lectures, mobile learning, and,1
“…instructional practices that utilize internet-connected tools, platforms, and resources to support teaching and learning regardless of time or place. This includes fully online courses, hybrid and blended models, and digitally enhanced in-person experiences…”
To be sure, DL has several attractive features. With a single click, hyperlinks can provide a window into supplementary sources. Digital texts can embed videos, audio, and animations. DL can provide instant feedback and—more speculatively—may lead to rapid activation of the dopamine reward system.2 But this picture belies both the risks and limits of DL, when it comes to medical education—particularly in the realm of psychiatry, where depth and discernment matter. Enter, the concepts of digital amnesia and the Google Effect.
Do You Have Digital Amnesia?
The term digital amnesia arose from a study done by Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity firm.3 The study found “…a direct link between data available at the click of a button and a failure to commit that data to memory.” The study defined digital amnesia as “the experience of forgetting information that you trust a digital device to store and remember for you.” The Kapersky study quickly caught the eye of academic researchers and soon led to a study that coined the related term, the Google Effect.
Researchers Betsy Sparrow (Columbia University), Jenny Liu (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Daniel M. Wegner (Harvard University) conducted 4 experiments on how search engines change human memory. They discovered that when university students were told that a fact would be saved and accessible to look up later, they made far less cognitive effort to memorize it, resulting in poor recall of the actual data. In effect, instead of remembering what the information was, participants' brains adapted to remember where to find it (eg, remembering the specific internet source). Basically, their brains treated the internet like an external hard drive.4
Your Brain on Digital Learning
What does all this have to do with the role of printed information? We can get a quick answer from a study by Delgado et al (2018), titled, “Don’t throw away your printed books.” This was a meta-analysis comparing print vs. digital reading.5 The aim was to analyze existing studies to see if the reading medium (eg, print or digital) affects reading comprehension. The researchers analyzed data from 54 studies involving over 170,000 participants conducted between 2000-2017. The results showed that screen reading was consistently associated with lower reading comprehension scores. The researchers described what they called “screen inferiority”, and concluded that,5
“The strong appeal of digital-based assessment and learning environments has led many educational systems to adopt them. As findings from the current work reveal, however, digital environments may not always be best suited to fostering deep comprehension and learning. The straightforward conclusion is that providing students with printed texts despite the appeal of computerized study environments might be an effective direction for improving comprehension outcome.”
The findings from this study are consistent with the “shallowing hypothesis,” put forward by technology and culture critic Nicholas Carr in his 2010 Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.6 Carr hypothesized that the structure of modern internet media—characterized by always-on notifications, quick hyperlinks, and bite-sized text—is fundamentally resculpting human neural pathways. He argued that this environment trains our brains to skim and scan information rapidly, causing a decline in our capacity for deep, sustained attention and ordinary reflective thought.
What Do Clinicians Prefer?
I am not aware of studies looking at the preferences of psychiatrists, but there are 2 important studies surveying the attitude of medical students and residents toward print vs digital text. Watson (2024) surveyed 232 medical students and residents regarding their preferred medium for education. In essence, medical students and residents valued e-books’ search function, portability and accessibility. However, they preferred to use print books for studying, with a majority feeling that they are better able to absorb information from print books.7Similarly, Al Shmanee et al found that medical students deliberately reserve print textbooks for deep, sustained studying and long, focused study sessions. They reserved digital electronic resources for rapid index searches, quick point-of-care lookups, and on-the-go clinical questions. Approximately 62.6% of medical students prefer a hybrid approach, strategically segmenting how they use each medium.8
Implications for Psychiatric Journals and Newspapers
As major medical publications transition primarily or entirely to digital-first content platforms, clinicians are increasingly consuming dense medical literature on the same media they use for superficial entertainment. This shift may very well alter the cognitive architecture of how future psychiatrists absorb, retain, and apply clinical knowledge. Digital amnesia exacerbates this problem by creating an overconfidence bias: physicians may feel they have mastered information simply because they have quickly and easily read it online—but their actual retention may be significantly poorer than had they read it on paper. This is why print should be prized.
Psychiatry relies heavily on narrative-driven case studies; psychodynamic conceptualizations; and nuanced pharmacological judgments. Reading about these topics requires deep focus and sustained study. In my view, print editions should be used to host major feature articles, ensuring better retention and comprehension of complex clinical material. Socrates was wrong about the harmfulness of print. But he was presciently right about how some ways of communicating information can create the appearance of wisdom and understanding while leaving the reader with neither. By all means, let’s use electronic media and digital learning for the quick dip into a subject of medical interest. But let’s retain print for the all-important deep dive.
As Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Psychiatric Times (2007-2010), this matter is deeply personal for me. I would be interested to hear your own perspective.
Dr Pies is professor emeritus of psychiatry and a lecturer on bioethics and humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York; a clinical professor emeritus of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts; and editor in chief emeritus of Psychiatric Times (2007-2010). Dr Pies is the author of several books, including several textbooks on psychopharmacology. A collection of his works can be found on
References
1. Herron J. A primer on the evolving landscape of digital learning modalities. Online Learning Consortium. July 9, 2025. Accessed August 19, 2026.
2. Counts L. How information is like snacks, money, and drugs—to your brain. UC Berkeley Haas. June 19, 2019. Accessed August 19, 2026.
3. The rise and impact of digital amnesia. Kaspersky Lab. 2015. Accessed August 19, 2026.
4. Sparrow B, Liu J, Wegner DM.
5. Delgado P, Vargas C, Ackerman R, Salmerón L.
6. Carr N. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton; 2020.
7. Watson EM.
8. Al Shmanee M, Issa M, Alkholy H, et al.
Related Content
