
How the Web Became Our ‘External Brain,’ and What It Means for Our Kids - jonbaer
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/end-of-absence-how-technology-changes-our-brains-society-children/
======
cle
From the article:

"Some experts expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which
most people become shallow consumers of information, endangering society."

A key part of this argument is that people are becoming (or are going to
become) more shallow than those in the past. But how shallow were people in
the past? I have a sneaky suspicion that many of these dissenters are just
being nostalgic. Anything beyond their own lifespan is also questionable--how
do we know how well people were able to focus in previous generations? Are
people _really_ more shallow than they used to be, or does it just feel like
that?

This whole topic incredibly nebulous, so I question the value of jumping to
these conclusions when we don't even have a clear understanding of what we're
talking about in the first place.

~~~
sriku
I recall reading somewhere that when books were invented, people thought
they'd degrade the mental ability of people to accumulate and hold "wisdom".
Did that happen? And even before that, when writing was first invented, it was
some kind of devil magic. Now, where might I begin finding out where this
might've been said?

~~~
mjklin
...but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth,
“will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an
elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”

But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget
arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their
users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have
been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that
which they really possess.

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn
to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in
writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will
discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an
elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the
appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without
instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the
most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but
only appear wise.” (Plato, Phaedrus 274c-275b)

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dm2
What will also be interesting is how it will affect education.

We were all told we have to memorize things because we can't carry the
textbook around with us, that's simply not true anymore.

Filling our brains with dates for civil war battles and the dates of
birth/death of random authors was completely pointless.

I think that more critical thinking style education will certainly be a good
thing.

Educational material should focus much more on how to keep kids interested in
the material rather than making sure you know every detail of every event.

I think the educational system needs a major overhaul. Let kids learn the
subjects that interest them at their own pace rather than constant exposure to
random bits and pieces. Or at least try it, now that technology is so cheap
and powerful we can track and allow access to everything imaginable for
education (other than instant learning, but it's probably not too far off).

If I had something like Khan Academy and a tablet in school it would be
amazing. Now would be a great time to be starting school, you still need
teachers and parents that are willing to inspire and know how to appeal to the
interests of children of course.

~~~
justizin
right, but not committing any of history to memory, collectively, makes it
pretty easy to rewrite.

~~~
ef4
No, history is all about writing. That's pretty much its definition. The
invention of history happened precisely when people decided to start writing
things down for the future.

We prevent the rewriting of history by distributing the writing as widely as
possible. And that's precisely what the internet is doing.

~~~
walterbell
A post on archive.org estimated the average lifetime of a URL as 100 days.

Physical distribution of acid-free paper books are better at preserving
history.

Edit: blog post by archive.org on digital preservation efforts for Wikipedia
outbound links: [http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-
links/](http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-links/)

~~~
ef4
> Physical distribution of acid-free paper books are better at preserving
> history.

I don't doubt that those books have better survivability, but they also
represent only the tiny fraction of written information that was worth
publishing in book form.

archive.org is a great example of how a relatively small nonprofit
organization can now afford to archive historical information at volumes that
were previously impossible.

~~~
walterbell
Archive.org wrote a post explaining why they are keeping physical copies of
their digital assets, [http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-
the-ne...](http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-the-new-
physical-archive-of-the-internet-archive/)

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joshstrange
I've thought for quite some time now (last 5+ years, which as a 23yro seems
like a long time) as the internet as an extension of my brain. I've joked to
friends that I simply keep a small "cache" of "pointers" in my brain to the
internet where I know I can find the information if I need it but I have
little use to memorize the details.

I fully understand that if the internet were to disappear tomorrow that I
would be very lost but it's not something worth preparing for IMHO. While I
agree with preparing for the future I do not think preparing for the fall of
humanity/technology to be a good use of my time. Call me naive or stupid (or
lazy), you may be right, but I find little advantage in remembering large
swatches of information when it can be called up (from either local copy or
the internet) at will. It's one reason I vehemently opposed the C++ exams I
took in college that required me to know the boilerplate of a C++ program as
there would never be a time in my life that I could imagine I would be without
an IDE or the internet to generate/fetch it for me.

I'm not saying that I think this is a "more advanced" way of living/existing
but just that it is the way I live/exist. I have friends who have expressed
similar feelings but I'd be very interested in what both people older and
younger and I think/feel about this issue.

~~~
WhoBeI
The human brain is incredible at making connections and finding patterns. When
you feed more and more information into the brain and think about it the
potential for better, more accurate and more profound connections increase.
You see an apple fall from a tree and understand how the planets move around
the sun.

What worries me is that your "pointer latency" makes it increasingly difficult
to get those aha moments. Vast amounts of knowledge at our fingertips but very
little understanding and wisdom.

As for education systems, I (mostly) agree with this dude:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...](http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity)

I'm one of the older btw :) 35yro.

------
walterbell
Note that evolution depends on random mutations.

What's the techno-environmental equivalent to random mutations? Remix culture,
open-source software, fan fiction, fair use, cross-corporate IP licensing,
emergent outcomes of search engine SEO and Google's top ten revenue
categories?

If we are going to expose children to technology, should we expose them to
open-ended technology with many degrees of freedom and possible innovation, or
walled gardens/devices with a limited menu of pre-approved operations?

------
ssivark
Imho, while it is not important to blindly memorize data, it is difficult to
build mental models if you don't hold some information in your brain. For
starters, it is not quite feasible to have all the information be stored in a
secondary location (the internet/cloud) but have your brain process that
information to make conclusions, to the best of its ability. Even if it were
possible, in such a situation, a person would be completely dependent on the
source of information, and could be easily misled by a wrong resource --
because they might have little primary data developed from their experience of
the world, on which to base their decision making -- in a sense, how does one
develop a sense of whether or not to believe something one reads on the
internet, without regard to the reputation of the source? This is an example
of what I would call critical thinking.

If one is always used to having the information at one's fingertips, then how
does one acquire the ability to "figure things out"?

Isaac Asimov touches on something along these lines in his wonderful story --
"Profession" (
[http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php](http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php) )

~~~
walterbell
Great quote from the Asimov story: "It won’t do to say to a man, ‘You can
create. Do so.’ It is much safer to wait for a man to say, ‘I can create, and
I will do so whether you wish it or not.’"

Memory training speeds up the recognition of design patterns,
[http://www.patternlanguage.com/](http://www.patternlanguage.com/)

.. and anti-patterns,
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthAndLies](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthAndLies)

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c23gooey
I dont understand how this article can claim that our brains are malleable,
but then go on to claim that our children's brain will be wired differently to
ours.

Surely those two points are incongruous.

~~~
goodcanadian
Young brains are extremely malleable. Our brains grow (and we learn fastest)
during infancy and toddler-hood with a second, less impressive, burst during
adolescence. So, our children's brains are malleable in the sense that they
readily adjust to this new reality while their brains are growing fastest, but
since the reality during their most formative years is different from the
reality during our formative years, their brains will be wired differently.

One could argue that this happens to a certain extent with every generation,
however, and it is not necessarily a new thing. One might also argue that as
technology changes faster, the inter-generational gap grows larger. One might
also argue that while our adult brains change more slowly than a toddler
brain, they do keep changing which might mean the difference is not so large
after all. Interesting questions to be sure.

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imgabe
How the Written Word Became Our 'External Brain' and What It Means for Our
Kids

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JoeAltmaier
I wonder how much IQ I gain from the web. Anybody done that experiment? Take
an IQ test with and without access to the web.

~~~
DLister
Depends does farming out the questions to mechanical turk count? Or would that
be more a hive minds cumulative IQ?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Totally! Access to the web is the issue to be tested; not my skill at
research.

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throwaway7808
Dream on. Most likely you and your kids are gonna be wiped out by intellegent
machines just in a few decades.

~~~
walterbell
Or some other kid's human-augmenting machines will make irrelevant the
"intelligent" machines.

