If you can't remember as well as you used to, blame it on the Internet. According to a study from Kaspersky Lab, you have "Digital Amnesia," which is forgetting information and not committing it to memory because you trust a digital device to remember it for you.

Digital devices, they say, are not just changing the way we live and work; they are also changing the way we learn, think, and remember.

A previous study published in 2012 found that the way young people remember information was changing since they always had information available at their fingertips.
Called the "Google Effect," researchers found that while young people remembered fewer facts, they easily recalled where they could find the information.

To study the effect of digital devices, such as smartphones, the Kaspersky Lab studied 1,000 customers 16 years of age and older. Their research revealed that the Google Effect doesn't apply just to online information.

"The 'Google Effect' likely extends beyond online facts to include important personal information," the researchers wrote. "Many consumers are happy to forget, or risk forgetting, information they can easily find — or find again online."

The vast majority of study participants — 91.2 percent — said they used the Internet as an online extension of their brain, and 44 percent said they relied on their smartphones for information they needed to remember. A total of 85.5 percent said there were too many numbers, email addresses, and other information to remember, even if they wanted to commit them to memory.

What if the data contained in their devices was lost? More than half of women (51 percent) and almost the same number (48.6 percent) of those 25 to 34 years old said the data would be lost forever, since they store memories on their devices.

Most people could recall their partner's number without looking it up (69.7 percent), their children's (34 percent) and workplace's (45.4 percent). But 44.2 percent didn't know their siblings' numbers without looking, and 70 percent couldn't recall their neighbors' numbers.

Interestingly, up to 67.4 percent could remember the phone number of the home they lived in at the age of 15, reflecting the need to commit numbers to memory in the past.

Older adults depend on their devices more than younger ones in some cases. While more younger people said they owned a tablet and used it to surf the Internet, more people over the age of 55 said they searched online to find the answer to a question, and more older adults (68.5 percent compared to 58.7 percent of young adults) said they didn't need to remember facts they found online, but only needed to remember where they found them.

The study also points to the need to secure personal devices from cyber attacks.

"Connected devices enrich our lives, but they have also given rise to Digital Amnesia," the researchers wrote.

"Digital Amnesia is a growing trend among consumers of all ages, not just younger digital natives, and we need to better understand the direction and long-term implications of this trend in order to protect the information we no longer store in our minds."