The Ghost in the Machine

Assuming that he means to suggest some sort of negative influence – will he manage to do what the illustrious Baroness Greenfield has singularly failed to do, and provide some actual evidence for this claim?

Perhaps Carr is saying that the mechanism of action isn’t entirely through the endocrine system?

Damn you McLuhan! Will we never be free of your unshakable grip on the public’s perception of mass media effects?!

I think it’s an important point. An obvious point, but an important one nonetheless that people are getting dumber by using Twitter and Facebook. People understand the danger of smoking or drinking alcohol but they don’t comprehend the dangers of other tools they use like Facebook and Twitter. A great discussion on the effects of the ubiquitous facebook photos and Twitter on people’s lives:
http://www.pandalous.com/topic/ubiquitous_facebook

Or, “the kids are alright”. They’re just different. Yes, we’ve lost skills. I’ve little doubt that somewhere in the ancestory of all of us there were human being who had the extraordinary tracking ability and elephantine memory (like remembering where you buried an egg full of water in a vast desert) still evident in nomadic Khoi-San people, but its not like we didn’t gain stuff along the way. I know I shouldn’t prejudge but whenever I hear about stuff like this it always comes across as someone spending an awful lot of time examining the empty half of the glass and ignoring the other part.

Sorry to rain on your Carr-bashing party, but there is indeed evidence (reviewed here and here) out there that multitasking changes one’s brain.

Can you list the things you can do that don’t change your brain? Asking for a perfect friend.

I’ve scanned my whole life, since long before the Internet, trying to get the essentials rather than read every word. Handy when Tolstoy blathers on for 4 pages about a freaking wedding dress. I stop and savour particularly attractive turns of phrase, but yeah, I miss a lot. I also got into the habit at a very early age of reading up to 9 books, both fiction and non-fiction, in a month, every month – sometimes several at once. Its equipped me with an encyclopedic knowledge. I started using the net in the days of Mosaic and it was a natural fit for my reading style. Unlike my dad at my age (40), who was similarly interested in all things scientific when he was younger, I’m still learning at a fairly rapid pace. At least one of my nephews is even more of an information soak, despite having to do two years of remedial schooling for dyslexia (from which he proceeded to a school for the gifted). And he can’t live without access to the net.

Again, this is all anecdotal, but I have a powerful intuition that these examinations of changes in cognitive style (a) wilfuly ignore any gains that might offset perceived losses and (b) are motivated by the soon-to-be historical experiences of a generation for whom the transition is not as comfortable.

And while one might think it a trivial thing, I doubt that any of you would allow me to change your brain, in ways unknown to you, without your permission. That is, in essence, what we have all done.

But assuming a non-paradoxical reading of “allow… without one’s permission, that’s… exactly what you just did.

trying to get the essentials rather than read every word

But sometimes — always in poetry, and often enough in prose — the rhythm, music, texture, interplay etc of the words is essential.

Farren @ 15. I concede your point about opinions, as the Edge comments are just that. But the second post I referred to focuses on a recent study in PNAS which is hardly opinion. To be fair, neither is it conclusive.

But that is just distraction from the most important point of all, which I shall take a moment to clarify. I have no need to become encyclopedic as Farren suggests @ 16; after all, I have access to an unprecedented storehouse of knowledge at my fingertips. Rather, I believe that the most important cognitive trait that we can facilitate is our ability to engage in reflexive thinking, the sort of considered and extended analysis which is increasingly rare. Multitasking – jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink, from blog to news to an academic paper – does nothing to enhance that ability and may even degrade it. I would submit that this is to our common detriment, and that our intellectual lives are somewhat impoverished by it (lively discussions such as this notwithstanding). But what is most interesting about the phenomenon to me is that it has occurred surreptitiously, certainly with good intent, but clearly with potential for untoward effects. Given how glued we all seem to be to our computers, it is worth at least reflecting for a moment on whether it is the best course for brains to follow.

For the record, even though today is my 55th birthday, I am hardly uncomfortable with the transition to modern technology. Indeed, the concern is how simple it is for me to be drawn into the damn thing.

I’m actually shuddering at the deep misanthropy and misogyny evident in that Pandalous discussion linked to by Timberlee.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how it’s always young women who are the archetypal “bad” technology users who are degrading themselves and others by its use. God, they’re taking photos of each other. Next thing it’ll be sex standing up, which might lead to dancing.

Dr. S: Perhaps poor, dumb old Socrates had a point: ie, that an aural culture has a distinctive and fragile beauty. That something has a distinctive and fragile beauty doesn’t mean that history must come to a dead stop for fear of its being lost. It means that one should reckon with the prospect of losing it and the possibility of preserving it, and not just leave the whole matter to chance, the market, the inexorable march of technology, etc. In the present case, it means that traditional literacy gives access to the matchless beauty of Elizabethan lyrics, Milton’s epics, Dickens’s and Tolstoy’s prose, etc., and that therefore we should take care that it doesn’t become vanishingly rare, the quaint indulgence of a miniscule minority.

The offboard storage analogy is a good one but what about the quantitative qualitative shift that occurred in human evolution giving us this big brain? Won’t mounds of electronic data start to ‘walk like a duck ‘ at some point?

Physical labour was once loaded on to slaves. And over time, non human technology proved to be much more desirable for reducing the effects of toil. Human action has reached technological saturation. Naturally, everyone has physical health worries.

There never was such a thing as an intellectual slave even though slaves were consulted by their masters on intellectual matters. In most societies, the problem of tiresome and difficult intellectual labour was dealt with instead by the emergence or rescuing of a professional elite.

If a technology comes along which addresses the tiresome intellectual labour problem, then older adults understandably race to embrace it. All those facts we can’t remember? All the names and phone numbers we need handy to keep our lives going? All on the trusty laptop or whatever.

And if you’re younger and have been educated by an anti-memorization pedagogy, you don’t lose your cognitive skills unless you lose your device. Bringing me to my first and last point. We’re allowing our minds to relax and empty themselves of thought altogether — no, it’s not yoga — by ‘thinking’ with our devices, saving and savouring our memories with our devices, expressing our creativity with our devices and creating a hermeneutically sealed world of experience accessible only through our devices.

If I was regularly attached to one of these devices, I bet it would not be long before it would seem to be acting a lot like me; before it started to feel, in my head, like part of my brain or body, at any rate.

A lot of this discussion assumes that what is important in being human and interacting with the world is knowledge – facts that might be stored in our brains or in google. But there is increasing evidence that social interaction is at least as important in being human. The Internet allows more social interaction (good) and different forms of social interaction (maybe bad) which at least at the moment lack the nonverbal cues (eye contact, smiles) that facilitate live interactions. These different kinds of social interactions will surely affect our brains and our society but I don’t think anyone can say if the effects are good or bad.