Google is making you more forgetful. Here’s why that’s a good thing.

According to research by the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, “digital amnesia” is gradually blotting out our brains. The report surveyed 6,000 adults in six Western European countries, as well as 1,000 people in the United States, about things such as the phone numbers they memorize and what they do when they need to remember a fact. Among Americans, half said they would try to look up an answer online before trying to remember it, and 29 percent said they would probably forget it again right after. Europeans weren’t quite so bad, but pretty similar: 36 percent said they Google first and think later; 24 percent admitted they would forget the Googled thing as soon as they closed their browser.

This brings us back to the specter of “digital amnesia”: the idea that our computers somehow hurt our memory. But when you remember that we’ve always stored memories in outside people and things, and that we don’t have the capacity to remember everything, the phenomenon looks less like amnesia and more like prudent outsourcing. That was, in fact, the conclusion of three psychologists who studied the “Google effect” in 2011: Although their results were widely interpreted as evidence that Google makes us forget, the researchers themselves were far more optimistic. “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools,” they wrote, “growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found.”