Read the entire article here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the
argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.
That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to
drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin
looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my
wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come
naturally has become a struggle.
“The perfect recall of silicon memory,”
Wired’s Clive Thompson
has written, “can be an enormous boon to
thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist
Marshall
McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just
passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but
they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be
doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” - Bruce Friedman.
People using internet to research:
People using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping
from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d
already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an
article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site.
Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they
ever went back and actually read it.
“We are not only
what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are
how
we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a
style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be
weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an
earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of
prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become
“mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make
the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without
distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.
It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our
minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language
we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning
and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping
the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that
readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry
for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of
us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend
across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such
essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual
and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by
our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of
books and other printed works.
Effects of the typewriter on a writer's works:
His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic.
“Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the
friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’
in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.” “our writing
equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the
machine, writes the German media scholar
Friedrich
A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
Human brain's malleable:
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think
that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100
billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time
we reached adulthood. even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old
connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the
ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather
than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the
qualities of those technologies.
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being
the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of
timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older
one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed
the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding
when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our
senses and started obeying the clock.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s
image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads,
and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content
of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for
instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest
headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention
and diffuse our concentration.
The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated
collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its
legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the
perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come
to describe as “knowledge work.”
“Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to
your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain,
you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists
that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do
it on a large scale.”
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our
brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial
intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is
the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can
be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we
enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of
contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be
fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster
processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing
machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the
network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the
Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities
Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to
feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial
Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we
leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better.
The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or
slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us
to distraction.
In Plato’s
Phaedrus,
Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people
came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they
used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of
the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become
forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of
information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very
knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They
would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”
Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he
feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that
writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas,
and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or
nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive,
data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and
universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although
it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether
different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages
promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the
author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off
within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained,
undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation,
for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences
and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf
argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
Illustration by Guy Billout
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop,
Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut
Dave Bowman
in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of
Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a
deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly
disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain.
“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can
feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable
sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,
remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t
going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I
used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing
myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get
caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend
hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case
anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three
pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else
to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the
text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a
struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been
spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes
adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a
godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the
stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A
few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the
telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m
as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and
writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and
listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
(Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t
merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the
conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears
and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an
incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely
described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,”
Wired’s Clive Thompson
has written, “can be an enormous boon to
thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist
Marshall
McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just
passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but
they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be
doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes
it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in
the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to
friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re
having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they
have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the
bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon.
Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media,
recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was
a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he
wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all
my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed,
i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has
changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in
medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental
habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a
longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A
pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of
Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a
telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a
“staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages
of text from many sources online. “I can’t read
War and Peace anymore,”
he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of
more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the
long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a
definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently
published
study
of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University
College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea
change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research
program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of
visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British
Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to
journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information.
They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming
activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to
any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one
or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to
another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no
evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of
the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense;
indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users
“power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and
abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to
avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the
popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more
today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium
of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a
different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are
not only
what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are
how
we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a
style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be
weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an
earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of
prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become
“mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make
the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without
distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.
It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our
minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language
we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning
and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping
the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that
readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry
for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of
us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend
across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such
essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual
and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by
our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of
books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a
Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and
keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful,
often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his
writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The
typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered
touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the
tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the
page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s
friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His
already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps
you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend
wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in
music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
Also see:
Living With a Computer (July 1982)
"The process works this way.
When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an
article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the
screen..." By James Fallows
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing
equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the
machine, writes the German media scholar
Friedrich
A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think
that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100
billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time
we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s
not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the
Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says
that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break
old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has
the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it
functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our
“intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than
our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of
those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in
the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In
Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic
Lewis
Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from
human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of
mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided
time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being
the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As
the late MIT computer scientist
Joseph
Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book,
Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation,
the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of
timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older
one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed
the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding
when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our
senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected
in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves.
When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains
as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have
come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes,
neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our
brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching
effects on cognition. In a
paper published in 1936, the British mathematician
Alan
Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time
existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform
the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what
we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing
system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s
becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter,
our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s
image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads,
and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content
of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for
instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest
headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention
and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen,
either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet
media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new
expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and
magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule
summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets.
When, in March of this year,
TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to
article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained
that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the
day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning
the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to
play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our
lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet
does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been
little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s
intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started
using his typewriter, an earnest young man named
Frederick Winslow Taylor
carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia
and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the
efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s
owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on
various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every
movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down
every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing
different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise
instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker
should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime,
claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the
factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the
steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its
philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to
call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time,
around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output,
factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure
the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated
1911 treatise,
The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and
adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to
effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout
the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual
labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a
restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of
perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared;
“in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of
industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that
computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual
lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as
well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated
collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its
legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the
perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come
to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the
Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced
inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric
Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of
measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does.
Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its
search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a
day, according to the
Harvard Business Review, and it uses the
results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people
find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the
work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s
information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to
develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that
“understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you
want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a
utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial
efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the
faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as
thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men
who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science
at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search
engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be
connected directly to
our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as
people—or
smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on
search is
a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a
2004 interview with
Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s
information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that
was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told
a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build
artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair
of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a
small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally
scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use
technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never
been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem
out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our
brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial
intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is
the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can
be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we
enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of
contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be
fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster
processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing
machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the
network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the
Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities
Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to
feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial
Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we
leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better.
The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or
slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us
to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to
glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the
worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s
Phaedrus,
Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people
came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they
used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of
the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become
forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of
information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very
knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They
would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”
Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he
feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that
writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas,
and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th
century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo
Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to
intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.
Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine
religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread
sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor
Clay Shirky
notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press
were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to
imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who
dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be
proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a
golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again,
the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing
press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep
reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just
for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the
intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the
quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a
book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our
own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own
ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from
deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we
will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in
our culture.
That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on
computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own
intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
======================================================================
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains - Nicholas Carr
As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries
by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press,
the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of
recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich
and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence
reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use
to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural
pathways.
Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to
McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology
carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of
knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to
focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark
contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of
small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the
industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production
and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are
becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are
losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.
" We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a
valuable piece of information... And so we ask the Internet to keep
interrupting us, in ever more and different ways. We willingly accept
the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and
the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of
compelling or at least diverting information we receive. Tuning out is
not an option many of us would consider. (p. 133-4)" This means in
effect that our powers of concentration and contemplation, if not
diminished all at once, are nonetheless put less to use. It means that
we do not really take in much of what we read and see, but rather let it
pass by as something new comes to attract and distract us.
Reading which was an extension of story- telling enabled us to begin to
speak to ourselves, to contemplate reality in deeper ways. The bookman
mind is a deeper mind than the electronic - mind.
- Greater access to knowledge is not the same as greater knowledge.
- An ever-increasing plethora of facts & data is not the same as wisdom.
- Breadth of knowledge is not the same as depth of knowledge.
- Multitasking is not the same as complexity.
Thus, if the brain is trained to respond to & take pleasure in the
faster pace of the digital world, it is reshaped to favor that approach
to experiencing the world as a whole.
The mind that immerses itself in the universe of a book, rather than
simply looking for a few key phrases & paragraphs? The mind that
develops through slow, quiet contemplation, mulling over ideas in their
entirety, and growing as a result? The mature mind that ponders
possibilities & consequences, rather than simply going with the
bright, dazzling, digital flow?
some aspects of life -- often the most meaningful & rewarding aspects -- require time & depth.
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How to Rewire Your Brain For Success
http://bigthink.com/experts-corner/how-to-rewire-your-brain-for-success
By learning how to control our mentality, we may be able to deliberately
reshape our neural pathways and rewire our brains to make ourselves
more successful and fulfilled. In other words, shape your brain and you
can shape your life.
Greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical growth to it. Practice rewires the brain.
1.) that mental training may have the power to change the physical
structure of the brain, and 2.) that the brain doesn't distinguish
between a real or imagined exercise.
The downside of neuroplasticity is that negative experiences can have a deleterious effect on our brains.
Stress is associated with neural degeneration. His research found that
long-term stressful life experiences cause elevated production of
cortisol, which results in the shrinking of the hippocampus area of the
brain. The hippocampus is one of the few regions of the brain known to
be able to produce new neurons, a process called neurogenesis.
By consistently training our thoughts, like those imaginary piano
players, we can expand the number of branches and synaptic connections
in our hippocampus, potentially leading to an increased ability to
retain new information and adapt to new situations.
Control your environment.
Because our brain cannot distinguish between real and imagined
practice, if we subject ourselves to 30 minutes of watching
sensationalized news stories, or find ourselves listening to a 30-minute
dose of complaining and gossiping with those people around us, the
effect on the brain is the same as if we had lived those experiences
ourselves. The good news, according to Sapolsky, is that the negative
effects of excessive stress can not only be stopped, but also reversed
“once the source, psychological or physical, is removed or sufficiently
reduced.” Limit your exposure to negativity by staying away from people,
environments, and sources that are negative.
Stay positive. End the day and start the day with positive thoughts.
