For me personally, the internet has made my brain better at remembering associations between ideas, but worse at free-recall of factual information. It's like my mind got better at indexing at the expense of storage.
Perhaps the information "explosion", "deluge" or "overload" is part of it. There is so much - or too much - information, we can still ingest a lot, maybe we rely on making the connections and finding the generalities/mental models because there are too many specifics.
My mind got better at indexing at the expense of storage >> Well said. I am going to use your quote :) (so that it moves to my long-term memory.) Thank you.
Ah, that's interesting, I read it the opposite way: computers are so different from the brain that the end result is that they complement each other really well.