This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up. [em: mine]
[snip]
My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.
And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I'm using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat. Say you mention the movie Once: I've never seen it, but in 10 seconds I'll have reviewed a summary of the plot, the actors, and its cultural impact. Machine memory even changes the way I communicate, because I continually stud my IMs with links, essentially impregnating my very words with extra intelligence.
[snip]
Still, I have nagging worries. Sure, I'm a veritable genius when I'm on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I'm not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Prepare to be assimilated
Clive Thompson considers his "outboard brain" in Wired:
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4 comments:
Well of course "a reliance on machine memory shut[s] down other important ways of understanding the world." But it also opens up ways of understanding the world that weren't previously available. We can't all always understand the world in all available ways at once. Something's lost, something's gained.
Why are people so afraid of this fact? Why do human beings have such seemingly innate nostalgia for The Way It Was?
Case in point: Brother's Keeper. At one time, all human beings were like those guys. Thanks, but I prefer my "reliance on machine memory."
I'm not familiar with Brother's Keeper, so maybe you've already made my point, but before written language people memorized vast accounts of clan history and group memories. We no longer do that, or see much value in it. Memorizing passages of some length was still a taught skill in my youth (AFTER the Punic Wars, if you please), but I notice students now have not had to do this. Memorizing the U.S. presidents in order to have a framework for U.S. history is a tall task for the sharpest of them. So we've lost something, but the digital natives can find just about anything faster in cyberspace than I can.
But what good is information without context? Memory and reason are the only things that can create and maintain context.
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