It is as many of us have feared: having facts at our fingertips is reducing our ability to store them in our heads.

Call it the Googlization of our brains.

A study published last week shows that accessing information on the web is reconfiguring our personal memory banks, meaning we are retaining fewer facts, according to researchers at Harvard and Columbia universities.

Scientists used a variety of simple tests to show that our minds are adapting to the proliferation of search engines, smart phones, electronic tablets and laptops by remembering less and less.

Test subjects who knew information was being stored electronically were less likely to remember it than people who knew it was not, according to the research.

“Our memories are changing,” Daniel Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard told the Boston Globe. “So we remember fewer facts and we remember more sources, which website you saw it on or whose email to look in to find that… It’s like having information at our fingertips makes us always go to our fingertips.”

Many of us are familiar with the phenomenon. We may be watching TV when we see an actor popular 20 years ago. But what’s his name?

A decade ago, we would have racked our brains until we figured it out. We would have gone to sleep wondering. We would have tossed restlessly for hours, tormented by the question, only to awaken at 2 a.m. with the answer.

Not so anymore. Pick up the iPhone and within minutes — or seconds — we have the answer.

Which, according to the research, is making us less likely to remember facts, figures and formulas.

Really, who needs to recite the Pythagorean theorem when it’s right there on your BlackBerry?

News that we’re losing our memory muscle, of course, will disturb some traditionalists.

And we say two things to that:

First, today there is simply so much more information thrown at us that finding a better way to store and organize it is just a practical necessity.

The dawning of the information age has left many of us feeling overwhelmed, the old cranium overloaded with new information.

Remembering less, but knowing how to find what we need, may just be a smart way of adapting to a new challenge, something human beings have done for thousands of years.

Second, as many of us have learned, our memories are not very reliable to begin with. Tinkers, Evers and Chance turned double-plays for the White Sox, right?

Or was it the Cubs?

Of such differences are bitter barroom disputes born. Now they are quickly settled by the guy in the corner with the little iPhone, and he says it’s the Cubs.

“This idea that a person has to know everything or try to know everything is just maladaptive,” Richard Moreland, a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told the Globe. “It’s just so much easier to remember where information is than what the information itself is.”

Still, we can’t help but think that a certain amount of memorization will remain essential, like the National Anthem, the Pledge of Allegiance and last year’s World Series winner.

Which was, by the way, which team?

Hey, we can wait.

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and editorial board.