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Are Computers Stealing Your Memory?
alangmead writes: "According to this article in the Sunday Times an increasing number of
people in their twenties and thirties are suffering from severe memory loss. Doctors blame this problem on their over relience on PDAs and computers for holding information for them. As one doctor succinctly put it, 'Young people today are becoming stupid.' I know that I rely heavily on PDAs for keeping track of things for me, but it was because I was already forgetting things. Maybe my decision to use them is rather short sighted."
Yes engineering's worth is self-evident.
Now let's look at art. Music in particular.
It taught me discipline, motor coordination, time management, and finely tuned listening skills. Music develops connections in your brain that are useful for other things-- for example, musicians tend to make good programmers, since there's a lot of structural thinking on small and large scales in both disciplines. It also teaches communication, teamwork (gee THAT's never useful in the real world), and creative thinking.
I've always thought it to be a good thing to balance out one's disciplines, that's why I double-majored in physics and music. And if it weren't for the music programs in middle and high school, I would never have gotten that opportunity.
I've known too many engineers that really excel in just one thing. Why? People are capable of so much more than that!
In a nutshell, I just see Utilitarianism as being boring, but that's just me. I know many great minds who aren't engineers at all. However, they aren't as naive to think that great minds only work in their particular field.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
It's a summary in the Sunday Times, not the research article itself. What did you expect? Perhaps you believe that every popular news story on a scientific topic should reprint the actual reasearch article in full?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
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Perhaps the notion of PDA's being responsible is a blind alley. I would like to see some real statistics, but the notions of significant quantities of 25ish people suddenly experiencing significant memory problems is a very disturbing notion!
Perhaps the mad cow prion disease is secretly rampent in the population, and the vaguest warning signs are only now just beggining to show themselves. Maybe it is a new, as yet undiscovered virus. Maybe it is the ever increasing quantity of electromagnetic bombardment we all recieve as a result of wireless communication technologies.
I have no idea. But if it really is true that a lot of young people are beggining to show significant memory impairment... That is very frightening!
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
How we educate our children has nothing to do with how we punish our criminals, and nor should it even have to do with how we fund our athletics--they're in completely different social spheres, only loosely bound together by a common interest in squandering tax monies.
If studying trivial matters can lead to studying important things like the hard sciences, then I applaud you. But a quick look at death row will find many who found their way to religion by killing people. Is it really worth the expense?
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Going along with blaming this reporting on grumpy old men - have you ever noticed that the older types seem to keep downplaying the fact that the distribution of unrenormalized IQ scores has been steadily rising, something like 5-10 points with each generation, ever since the 1930s? Why is that anyway? Better schooling? Better parenting? More nutrition? More information availability? A healthier environment? At least taking the lead out of the environment has helped. But the gloom-and-doom types like to ignore this fact.
One of the most amusing (yet supposedly serious) books I ever read was a debate from some time in the 1970's between a proponent of "nature" (i.e. genetic predetermination of IQ scores) and another fellow who claimed (A) "nurture" was very important and (B) IQ didn't measure much meaningful anyway. The "nature" guy got into hysterics over "regression to the mean"; from which he seemed to take the conclusion that dumb people had dumb kids (of course), but smart people tended to have dumb kids too (that regression to the mean thing). From which he concluded we were doomed to ever-increasing levels of stupidity in our descendants!
Energy: time to change the picture.
If it's a random phenomenon, then what are we doing wasting our money to try to encourage it? If it isn't a random phenomenon, then why aren't we using methodologies that produce greater successes?
And if we had to pick a modern language to recode our minds in, it'd have to be C -- they use it for kernels for a reason, you know.
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"Skill and drill" at the state school level gives kids the raw material they will later need to even begin to grasp principles let alone apply them.
How do you think you got into Caltech in the first place?
I will agree tho', that some students wilter in the face of "skill and drill", and that may well be due to an inclination that first wants to know how and why rather than simply what.
**>>BELCH
Colt M4A1 Carbine: $3100
Kevlar Vest and Helmet: $1000
Flashbang: $250
Forgetting to wear pants to work...
Priceless!
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After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
cat memory >> /dev/null
siri
Wow, I'm inclined to trust a doctor's opinion who equates memory loss with stupidity.
Albert Einstein never bothered to remember menial things like phone numbers. He'd probably be a big PDA user if he was alive today.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I think my memory loss might be more related to the tendency of people my age -- smoking a lot of pot.
go get it
The problem isn't with utilitarianism, it's with naive utilitarianists. The original poster is a great example:
The arrogance of this is breathtaking. It implies a clear, simple, immutable understanding of what all human activity should be for. It also assumes that the world is simple enough that all worthwhile goals are simply and apparently connected to things that contribute to them.
Both of these are clearly and demonstrably untrue. The world's a big, complex place; anybody who thinks they know it all hasn't been paying attention.
Wow! There's so much wrong with this post that I don't know where to begin. But here's Exhibit A:
1.Engineering's worth is self-evident. [...]3.Physics is overrated. All the great minds are like my fellow engineers at IBM.
Oh, of course! "The smartest people are all just like me!" Hey, that's original. If you had read a little more history, you might know that this is a classic mistake. Or a little more art in your life and you might have heard of hubris.
4.Art is vulnerable to misuse by tyrrants in propaganda.
Which is, of course, utterly unlike the products of engineers, which are never used to maintain tyrrany.
You're just being ridulous here; art and literature have an enormous power to subvert, and all tyrants suppress "dangerous" art. Note also that broadly educated people are immunized against propaganda in ways that uneducated people and people with only technical educations cannot be.
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are wonderful unattainable quanitities.
So? You can never get to "East", either, but that doesn't mean that compass directions are useless. Moreover, capitalized essences like Truth and Beauty were a western intellectual fashion; they are an interesting way of looking at the world, but by no means the only one. Yet another thing you don't learn in a Mech E class.
It's not that things can't be nice or pleasant, and perhaps someone is willing to pay for such commodities in the free market. But if we're going to finance public education with public taxes, then we'd better show some results now.
I will happily grant that art instruction shows absolutely no value this week. You can't eat it. It doesn't keep you dry in the rain. If an animal bites you, you can't use it to cover the hole.
The utilitarian value of art is in the longer term. For the artist, the value is twofold. As another poster pointed out, art develops skills and capacities that are not easily gained otherwise. But beyond that, the artist uses art to explore the world, to come to grips with and to gain and understanding of something. Art is especially good at dealing with the sorts of non-rigorous and ill-defined areas that science is poor at: perception, emotion, culture, and what it means to be human.
For the consumer of art, the utilitarian value is not mainly, as you seem to think, entertainment. It is in the ability of art to present new views, to challenge old understandings, to convey and evoke emotion.
A Slashdot-friendly example is George Orwell's book 1984. It makes issues of privacy, transparency, and the power of information control accessible to anyone, and it gives it personal, viceral meaning. Through his art, George Orwell developed his view of the evils of totalitarianism; through his art, he helped us all see his terrifying vision.
That piece of "useless" art has been continuously in print for more than 50 years. Thank goodness you weren't on his school board to guide him away from "useless" activities. And thank goodness you weren't on my school board to cancel the literature class where I read it.
Let's not forget that cultures that predate written language are documented as having extraordinary memories (for example, much of the Old Testament was passed down through generations by memory before it was finally written down). Our minds got rewired when we formed language, when we began writing, etc. So, now that external information storage is so easy to come by, it's natural that our brains will be less trained to handle this aspect of our lives.
It nearly borders on eugenics: if the bottom portion of the population is doomed to failure no matter what rehabilitative processes we enact, then why shouldn't we just weed them out to begin with? You don't need to be reminded where this kind of thinking can lead.
Education should embrace children's potential. You seem to want to leave them lying in the gutter.
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It's the same document it was two hundred years ago precisely because it was intended to last for all time as a universal declaration of human rights in the face of tyranny.
We may have higher taxes than we used to, but that's because we chose to under the 16th amendment. Unlike your country where you're perpetually beholden to the whims of your parliament, we answer to no one but Divine Providence and the letter of Law.
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You leave me hanging for two days only to come back and laugh at me? To laugh at my country? To laugh at my hopes and dreams, the glories and aspirations of this great land?
I stand for something. We stand for something. What do you stand for?
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as Einstien used to say, never commit to memory anything that which you can write down. I used to get very upset with myself when I couldn't remember the memory map of my c64 or the hex value of every opcode. The attitude is perverse and only necessary if you plan to be stranded on a desert island with your c64. Since when has memory had any association with intelligence what-so-ever? That's sort of quiz show mentality went out in the 50's didn't it?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I personally used to remember every single one of my appointments. I got tired of doing it and began to write everything down. Now I make no effort to remember, but instead check my calendar every day. Does this mean I can't remember? No. It just means that I freed my brain up to work on other things.
Another observation is that this article appears to be somewhat misrepresented here at "/.". The article presents 2 different possible causes for memory loss. The first is that young people have relied too much on technology and have not exercised (my word) their brains enough. Thus, they lose their memory abilities due to the brain's equivalent of obesity. The second is that there is so very much information in today's computerized society that the brain gets overloaded and loses its ability to distinguish between what is important and what is not. Thus, people lose their memory abilites due to the brain chucking away important things and remembering unimportant things.
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Perhaps this is a sign of a greater shift in importance from pure memory to analytical skills. The teaching world seems by and large to have followed that.
I'm taking a math class right now and having a hard time because the prof seems to have put such a high emphasis on memorization. However, working as a programmer in lots of different environments and rapidly changing technologies, i've found that my capacity for research has helped me far more than my memory.
Too much info == not enough time to process it. The younger you are, the more info is thrown at you, and the better you get at processing it, but the less time you have to spend memorizing any of it. Information is commoditizing, and consequently becoming less valuable intrinsically as consituent parts. Those who can make sense of it in a larger view do well, and those who hang onto it will find themselves with that info and not much else when that info is no longer valid.
just my blog and pix
Please, using a PDA is no different than telling your secretary to remind you of your appointments for the day, or keeping numbers in a rolodex, or even having your secretary keep numbers in a rolodex. "Ms. Smith, please get Mr. Brown on the phone". I'm sure any programmer with a PDA can remember the syntax of all the commonly used C commands, regardless of whether they know their mother's phone number. I think that's a much more impressive feat of memory.
However, there is some relevance here. As we rely more on technology, we become more interested in things getting done, and not how they get done. For instance, many grade schools now allow calculators to be used in grade 2 to add and subtract. Only a couple lessons are spent on multiplying or division, and then it's simply plugged into the calculators. What this results in is that students get their homework done faster, and with fewer calculation mistakes, but they have NO idea why it works. When these same students hit calculus, algebra, etc, they become lost, because they don't have the basic mathematical foundations to understand the more complex ones -- they just know the calculator can do it. Society ends up with people pulling out a pocket calculator to figure out how much the tax on their big mac meal is going to be because they can't add 5% in their heads. This ignorance simply perpetuates itself. Instead of understanding how a mathematical simulation of a complex model works, it's taken for granted that some programmer correctly entered the formula they were handed. The answer pops up, it looks right, so we continue on, and then boom, a nuclear bomb goes off in Iowa.
Someone with solid basic math skills could probably make a killing by adding an extra percent to grocery, restraunt, or shopping bills, because just about anybody who checked their bills wouldn't have a clue that they were being overcharged.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
...about this, I can't remember where though... I think it said... um... forget it, next time I'll bookmark it.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oh well. More crap for the "information overload is a disease" pamphlets. Using external memory aids is only going to help you remember things better, so don't take the article's implicit device and throw out your datebook.
I don't mean to troll, but I really disagree with the hypothesis of the experiment.
I think the more likely culprit is nutrition and changes to the educational system more than whether or not we are using computers and PDAs.
Firstly, did you know that the amount of monosodium glutamate (a neurotoxin and flavour enhancer) and preservatives in food has been increasing by a factor of 10 every decade? This means that today's teens and 20 year olds are consuming around 10,000 times the number of preservatives and chemicals that our parents consumed, and we are consuming them often during critical mental and physical development stages. Laws go into place so that companies have to indicate monosodium glutamate on their ingredient lists so that people can avoid it if they want. You know the solution companies use to avoid this? Hide MSG in completely natural sounding ingredients like hydrolyzed proteins, yeast extracts, natural flavour, modified starches, etc... They might seem natural, but they're teeming with chemicals that our grandparents were largely not exposed to.
Who knows the long term effects of these chemicals on people? In fact, it's been shown that even in people who are not sensitive to MSG, the amount of MSG consumed, on average, in a day, overexcites and kills (fries) a large number of neurons in your hypothalamus.
Education systems have also changed. My mom went to school with the nuns and they were forced to spend long hours at night memorizing things like Shakespeare passages and such. We don't encourage that in today's education system. Memory is like a muscle; the more you work it, the stronger it becomes. Less emphasis goes on memory and more emphasis on thinking. Thus it's only natural that memory will decrease.
v
When I quit this line of work (there's not an awful lot of market demand for burnt-out air traffic controllers), my short-term memory went to shit. I'm lucky to be able to remember my home phone number, and I certainly can no longer listen to someone rattle off a string of characters or instructions, and then regurgitate them verbatim. It's apparent to me that short-term memory is something that's developed over time, and is also something that atrophies over time when it's not used. Long-term memory is still there: I can rattle off an approach clearance per the 7110.65, although there's nowhere on my resume to put that particular skill.
Einstein said that you should never memorize what you can look up.
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Another study I read linked eye-blinking to Alzheimers. Same reasons. Boy are we in trouble.
2) Look at this quote: "One high-flying 28-year-old salesman treated by Dr Sawaguchi was forced to give up his job when he found himself forgetting where he was going, who he was supposed to be seeing or, when he finally got there, what he was selling." Maybe he's just trying to do too much and is burning out, PDA or no.
Well...oh crap - I forgot why.
As I became a computer geek I went from remembering books worth of information in my head to keeping a rough draft of many many more types of information in my head along with knowledge of how to find the details when needed. So it may seem I remember fewer things but really it is just a memory management technique. For me I can't completely work when you take away the Net because it's became a part of my mind. Eventually I suppose enough people will evolve around the Net that it'll have a direct hack to the Net directly into the human body. Every step closer takes us that way. Mainframe to desktop to laptop to PDA etc. It gives intelligent people great flexibility to be able to only remember what they must and to store the details somewhere else. Anyone can be reasonably expert in anything if they learn how to look up the information on demand and understand how it goes together.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I just posted like 5 minutes ago and I used the EXACT SAME ANALOGY!
Sad how much space counterstrike information has eaten in my brain... heh I find it more fullfilling, that's for sure.
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Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Please go back to your hive and tell the Queen that we prefer to think for ourselves nowadays. Your brute-force method of implementing "common sense" makes you sound like a Fascist.
"Only that way can we insure that the new generations can learn from my generation's mistakes and fulfill our promises of greatness."
You obviously aren't the model for the new Master Race. The mistakes of past that should be learned from are based on the misadventures of small-minded technocrats who sought to eradicate free thought and make the world conform to their sense of morality.
[You should have been beaten more in English class... or is it your plan to do away with the inefficient rules of the English language, like the difference between "ensure" and "insure"? Doubleplusungood, citizen!]
And whose "promises of greatness" are we trying to keep? Yours?
Keep your dogma off my humanity.
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
My memory is all shot to hell, but I sort of figured it was because it was ram-packed with hundreds of ips -- networks, host addresses, etc.
Just curious, but in what qualitative and quantitative measures do you believe arts are trivial compared to engineering and classical studies? Truth, Beauty, and Goodness can all be found in arts, as well as sciences; and each of these is defined in classical studies, if not by the laws of physics.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
So what if people use Palmpilots as auxillary storage for stupid crap
(like '1 yr anvrsry 05/23, make rez at cafe de la pimp', for example).
Just because you use a Palmpilot to 'remember' appointments does not mean you're getting 'stupid', just that you have more important things to keep track of in 'moist memory'.
My 'trivial crap memory' has sucked as long as I can remember (heh), but stuff I've done on a day-to-day basis in the past sticks to this day.
I could prolly be back up to speed in VB within a day if I had to be, even though I haven't touched it in ~3 years.
It's the one-off stuff that catches me, and thus, goes into the Visor.
Sounds to me like the case examples referenced had more to do with people not paying attention in the first place, rather than forgetting.
--K
When I was younger, similar arguments were made regarding pocket calculators: so many people were fussing about it that we in fact weren't allowed to use them at all (not even for square roots and logarithms) until something like grade 7 (this happened in Italy BTW, not sure what's the situation here in North America).
;)
I personally think that electronic aids *help* people become smarter, since one has to use less brain power for trivial things (i.e. remembering your doctor's phone number or that you have a dentist appointment in three weeks). Being able to calculate a logarithm or a square root by hand doesn't mean that you're smart, most of the time it means that you are able to find your way around logarithmic table books
I am sure that similar arguments can be made about cars: since when car usage has become widespread, the population has become much more sedentary (with all the problems associated with it) but at the same time the quality of life has become better in many ways (if you get sick, you don't have to wait hours/days for a doctor to travel to your neck of the woods).
If PDAs are so bad, why don't we ask the author of this article to stop using his computer and write future articles with a chisel in a slab of stone? I'm sure that overreliance on word processors has made as many people stupid as overreliance on PDAs...
-- the cake is a lie
Aren't scientists of all people supposed to know these things?
They should, but they've been using their intelligence-sucking Palmpilots too much.
--K
Not everybody can be a poet, novelist, painter, or philospher. But we sure as heck could use a few more McDonalds attendants that can add or read the captions of the little pictures of a hamburger.
Need I say more?
-Michael
-Michael
Yes, it runs linux and you insert it into a child's ear.
The content of your choice will be directly forced into the brain through rap-music.
The unfortunate side effect is that if there is a buffer underrun (no content to force) the child immediately begins producing Movies like Save the last dance...
I'm throwing the prototype away.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
Short-term memory loss is also a frequent side effect of common anti-depressants like Prozac and Zyprexa. I bet the more widespread acceptance and subsequent prescription by more doctors/psychologists has to do with the memory loss.
Now I'm sure this was relevant to something... what were we talking about, again?
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
I'm 24, have been using computers/PDAs since I was 5. I bought the first freakin' Newton for cryin' in the beer! If anything, having to remember IP addresses has helped my memory, rather than hindered it.
People have had the analog equivalent of a PDA for decades! What about all those 1980s, dot-com equivalent, wall-street high-flyers with their leather-bound day-planners? Did writing down someone's phone-number in their address-books cause them to forget their mother's maiden name? I think not.
Any as far as the information overload issue, if anything, the digital generation is better at weeding our useless information than their elders. I can watch TV, listen to my stereo, talk with friends and code all at the same time. My parents have to mute the commercials on the TV in order to think.
At any rate, this is pure media sensationalism. If students are getting "more stupid" these days, why the hell can't my dad program the freakin' clock on the VCR or write down a URL I say over the phone.
-Name Forgotten
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It appears that the end of the article suggests people aren't bothering to remember names and numbers, that PDAs and speed dials are keeping us from placing names, addresses, and phone numbers into long-term memory. We enter the data in under 20 seconds and poof! we're on to short attention span moment 153 for the day. To remember something, you repeat it to yourself for about 30 seconds. It's a shame the article takes such great lengths to remind us of short- and long-term memory spans.
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One scientific study: Hokkaido University, Japan, 150 people aged 20 to 35, showing 10 had "severe problems with memory"
One quote from the university's professor of neurobiology, including "Young people today are becoming stupid."
2 "journalism" case studies, of two young people who suffered from extreme memory loss (the human angle)
3 experts from Japan, Britian, and the US, who guessed at why this might be the case, all pointing fingers at technology (all who gain from people with memory problems).
1 typical British hyberbolic headline, "Computer-mad generation has a memory crash".
<rant>
This kind of reporting seriously annoys me. The original scientists call it a preliminary study, it gets posted on the wire, and "journalists" make the story sound like they just discovered a cure for cancer or that the end of the world is next week. Journalists once were the voice of moderation (let's check the story, just the facts) but now have resorted to encouraging panic to sell papers.
</rant>
For one thing, this research has yet to be independantly verified. It is possible that the study was flawed / biased, that the results aren't as bad as they first seem, or that 7% of the population has ALWAYS had "serious memory problems" by the age of 20. I know a few kids I went to school with had problems memorizing, even before they were in the second grade.
This seems to be a raw old-world vs. new-world story. A few extreme cases are used to call the entire younger generation flawed, to say that new teaching methods suck, etc. etc., until you want to walk away and say "You don't get it, old-timer!"
Sure, I have trouble remembering dates, times, birthdays, etc. That's because, when I judge a date to be important, I put it into my PDA, which reminds me with enough time in advance to do something about it. I simply don't spend any time memorizing this stuff. But I can judge what is important and what isn't. Important stuff goes into my backup memory (the PDA), unimportant stuff goes into the shredder.
To say that the PDA is making me stupid makes as much sense as saying cars make us slower. Sure, if it was me vs. someone from 2000 years ago, that person may be able to walk 10 miles faster than me. Maybe significantly faster. But I can beat him with a car anyday.
The end test is effectiveness. I believe we haven't come up with an education method that truly prepares kids for working with technology, but we are getting better. The answer isn't to take away technology until they've memorized tables and historical dates, but instead to teach them to use the technology more effectively. If they have to look up when Columbus landed in America, but know how to use Quicken to do their taxes and use Outlook to insure they never have to send a belated birthday card, then more power to them. Or better yet, can figure out Linux or BSD enough to use the open-source versions.
Let's stop living in 1950, and start living in 2050, or at least 2000.
Okay, what exactly is a PDA or a computer? It is a storer of information. What is a booklet, a notebook, or a filing cabinet? The same thing, but less efficient. Quite simply saying that "young people are becoming stupid because of computers" is like saying that anyone who takes notes on a pad of paper and then looks at those notes later is also "stupid." These people aren't stupid, they're at least smart enough to know when they need something to help store their information.
Doubly funny is that a doctor would say this. Doctors typically have nurses and staff secretaries to help keep track of the things that they quite simply forget. How a secretary or a nurse cleaning up after you is better than you taking notes in a notebook (or PDA) is beyond me. This is just somebody who has some sour grapes in regards to PDAs blowing off steam.
-wd
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chip norkus(rl); white_dragon('net'); wd@routing.org
mercenary albino programmer for hire
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
I am glad that today I'm taught how to think instead of what to think. Maybe you're thinking of church instead of school? I don't know, but I learn what to think by myself. Nobody tells me. I am just taught the basics of how to solve a problem, then I must piece the puzzle together myself. I can't always have a teacher standing by my side when a problem comes up that I have never seen before. If I learn to just "do" a specific problem, then I will never be able to do a different problem, even if the concepts behind the two are related. I must learn the concepts first so that I can apply them to any problem.
Strict memorization is not the key to anything, besides getting an "A" on your test or quiz. You may be able to recall the information that day, but what about the next day? Or the next year? I doubt you could recall it. What is important today is application. You don't learn what 2 + 2 is. You learn how to get your answer. Of course, one doesn't have to ask themselves "ok, I have two, and I have to add two to it, what do I have now?" After applying the concept of addition over and over to the same problem you naturally remember the answer. This is the best way, by far, to learn--not only in math, but any subject.
However, if you don't know what an answer is, you learn where you can find it. It is so much more important today to know where you can find an answer if you don't know it, since there is so much more information today. It's more important to learn "how to get an answer" than "the answer." That's why teachers in math, physics, etc. give credit to incorrect answers. It's the correct steps to getting to an answer that are more important. Not the answer itself.
You had to learn how to recall trivial things, because it was the only way to survive and prosper. The best minds of my day were like that.
That doesn't work today, unless you plan on going on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Application today is the key. Not the recollection of pointless facts.
You have to give them rigid rules and test them on their grasp thereof.
I took one of those today. They are called quizes. I have another one tomorrow. It's called a test.
You can't teach a whole generation to drive society by encouraging them to feel about driving. You have to give them rigid rules and test them on their grasp thereof. And if they don't conform, then you make them conform.
You add 2 + 2 and you get 4. Hypothetically, let's say that when I see 2 + 2 I had 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. I did it differently than your way, which is the "normal" method, but am I wrong? By your standards I am.
What's needed is a better combination of the two methods. We should insist that our children learn both what and how to think. Only that way can we insure that the new generations can learn from my generation's mistakes and fulfill our promises of greatness.
So in Literature class, we should teach students that one work sucks just because, but this other one doesn't instead of explaining why it is such a good work and how to distinguish them from others that are not?
So, to summarize everything here, school today is not about remembering answers. It's how to get answers to infinite amounts of problems. There is only so much that you can remember. There is no limit on the application of concepts. Now there is something you can remember. So do it.
I don't have a PDA (or GSM for that matter) and I'm forgetting heaps of stuff daily.. In fact I just remembered I should be calling a friend of mine.
What's true is that PDA's just make you look much smarter than you really are though, and one can start wondering whether society is currently being pushed beyond human capacity with all these nice little techtoys.. Still, if buying a PDA can save you from the pain of your colleagues throwing silly looks back at you on monday morning, gimme gimme!
No sir I'll be training my memory for just a while longer, for one it gives me a kick being able to do things without stupid techcrap, it's like this extra challenge, and lastly those PDA thingies may be very fancy but I'm not buying them unless they start becoming less restrictive in use (keys, voice rec, wireless,..) less expensive, and most of all, SAFE FOR OUR BRAINS (as opposed to GSM's which are not, but apprently no one cares)
With great power comes great electricity bills.
I'm in my twenties. I do NOT own a PDA. I don't even own a cellphone or a calculator (mainly because I don't actually need any of these things, so see little point on spending money on them).
Despite this, I'm still terribly absent-minded. I tend to remember interesting stuff in incredible detail, but boring stuff like phone numbers, and the names of people I'll only ever meet once, I tend to forget (the former I write on a piece of paper). I even forgot to do the State Inspection on my vehicle for two months. However, I didn't forget the policeman's reminder because it suddenly got very important (the removal of wealth in the form of a fine if I didn't get it done within 10 days!)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I discuss these and other principles in my memory document:
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
"Many experts believe information overload is making it difficult for some people to absorb new information, as they have reached a limit of what they can store in their brains. These people forget things because they were too distracted to absorb them in the first place."
Holy sh*t. This is *so* me. I have been getting increasingly scatterbrained over the last couple of years (coincidentally since I've taken a full-time software development position). I can't remember discussions I've had, or specifics of meetings. I can't stand to read much except to-the-point news and manuals. I even keep a friggen sticky note with my phone number and address near the telephone so that I'm not flustered when I order out, for Christ's sake. Man, and I thought I had like early-onset alzeimers or something. I need one of those daily brain teaser calendars or something.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Have a look at this link for a good introduction to a number of mnemonic memory systems. I did one years ago (which I paid a few clams for) and I've never regretted it.
When up to speed you can remember things like:
Interestingly, memory seems to suffer from bit-rot much like software does - use it or lose it.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Encyclopedias. Dictionaries.
The worst offender of all:
*Index Cards*
And it's all those Babylonian's fault for using their pointy little heads to figure out how to use their pointy little stylus' to make pointy little marks in wet clay.
Just look at the historical record. Civilization and technology have been going down hill ever since.
The causal relationship is clear.
People at my work kid around with me because I have 20+ windows terminals open at any given time.. Half of them are man pages, some have perl-debugger windows (to test out concepts), and many just sit in the proper directories so I don't have to cd back and forth.
I'll have 10 emacs frames open so I can compare and contrast sections of code.
I've arranged all the windows so as to maximize parallel viewing..
The reason? I can't remember all the little fragments. "0xFFE08 is the search key.. Ok, what was it again? Oh hell, let me copy and paste." "I just used this function like 10 times, but I forget what the parameter order is. Let me look it up again."
Not too long ago, I memorized pie and "e" to 50 digits as a mental exercize.. I had no problem doing so (simple repetitious exercize), but I still haven't memorized my second-phone-line, even though I look it up like twice a day for the pizza guy.. I never remember a new person's name. I scoff when someone gives me a phone number to remember, assuming I'll remember it (I politely do that when they give me a name). I can't remember the IP address that I regularly ftp to manually (I look it up every time).
I don't carry around a PDA, but my work-station serves just as well. I carry around a date-book with all my phone numbers (which essentially plays the role of a PDA). I use to carry around a pocket notepad and pen to jot down reminders, but that got to be too combersome; I just carry my book-bag around everywhere.
With things like cut-and paste, and high information over-load, I've trained my mind not to even try and remember.. Even the important stuff like equations I can always reference within 5 seconds.
My friends all joke about my lack of memory, and my girlfriends have often been frustrated by it. But not a one of them would characterize me as stupid, as this article seems to imply I should be.
I honestly believe that if I had never seen a computer in my life my memory would be many times greater than it is today. Also if I'd continued to use my bench-press, my arms would be many times their current diameter. I don't feel a loss for either of them. My mind is very tuned. I read a lot; I philosophize a lot.. I learn new computer languages regularly and can analyze with the best of them. I'm an engineer by trade, and can talk physics until the sun comes up.. Just don't ask me what your name is.
-Michael (something or other)
-Michael
Oups, but, as you had only learned how to memorize, you forgot to think and realize that thinking and memoriztion are two different things.
Kids are today thought how to think. Some of them get rather bright on it. They are not thought how to memorize, or tricks for speedy head-calculation of rather trivial formulas.
And, we need not to teach them what to think, but the mistakes we made, so they kan think of new ones.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Next thing you know, we'll be writing down stories instead of passing them down verbally from mother to daughter, as is proper. Think of the chaos that will ensue.
I blame big industry - the mule-herders and temple-builders always trying to find ways to squeeze one last giant stone wheel out of their customers.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I have no idea what my social security number [...] is
Translation: I have not gone to college.
Once, I was at my house and I had just gotten some new memory, a 128 MB DIMM, and I went out to grab some food. When I came back, the memory was gone. Of course I didn't want to accuse it out right, but I had a feeling my computer took it. But maybe I had put it somewhere else. So I looked around, but couldn't find it. I said, "alright, who took my memory?" My suspicions were confirmed when the computer said nothing, just sat there with a humming fan and running a screensaver like nothing was going on.
It turns out, my computer stole my memory, and I haven't really trusted it since. I opened it up and there it was, plain as day. Did it think I wouldn't notice?
It's a tradeoff...do you want knowledgable dumb kids or smart ignorant kids? Both are extremes and we need to hit a happy middle.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I can't seem to remember facts as well as I used to. But instead I seem to remember where information is. I might not remember the details, but I can remember where to find it again, which seems more useful to me.
Modern technology is being designed to replace existing, decent applications. The best example is the idea of a date book. You can step through several iterations of this technology:
It's important to have technology that complements current ideals. Such as datebooks that remind us every morning what we have to do that day. Or reminds us to start thinking about paying off that AmEx bill. Without these hooks into our brain to remember things, yes we do forget about them. But with advanced enough software to remind us of the little things (such as give Sweetest day presents, attending useless meetings, or wash behind our ears) we can use our potent intellect for more advanced processing and more advanced thinking.
For instance, i've been using my extra capacity to memorizing Counter-Strike maps. Currently I'm up to 20-30 or so maps that I know by heart. However, I'm sure Dr Takashi Tsukiyama would put me in the 'stupid as hell' catagory because I can't remember my own cell phone number because I have it stored in 5 different electronic places and on my business cards. And well, that one number I've avoided memorizing has allowed me to know where to snipe on de_jeepathon2k. Hurray for technology!
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Well, at least you got this part almost right:
>Kids are being taught how to think, instead of what to think, out of some liberal notion that we shouldn't make their beliefs conform to our own experienced ones.
Though to be completely correct, it would be "some liberal notion that understanding logic, reasoning, and how to do your own research is more important than being able to recite 'facts' that someone else presents to you".
Having attended schools that were on opposite extremes of this -- a state school (where everything was "fact", "skill and drill"), and Caltech, where, everything very heavily emphasized understanding basic principles, I can say with some experience that "skill and drill", and memorizing "facts" is a total crock.
The "tough" problems at the state school were the ones where they used variable "x", instead of variable "z" (like in the book). This would complete mystify most of the class, because they'd "learned" to recite "facts", instead of understanding principles. At Caltech, after having one problem during the term emphasizing a basic principle, you'd be expected to be able to apply that principle to novel problems for the rest of the course. You were never expect to regurgitate it as some "fact".
There are volumes of research, now, backing this. Not only do more comprehensive teaching techniques produce students that are better able to apply their knowledge to novel problems, it turns out they also enjoy it much more, and are more interested in pursuing education.
What are churches but a school for divine thought? They're both instances of the profound advancement of human thought: we, unlike animals, build temples to knowledge. Sometimes they are the science buildings your fellow students inhabit. Sometimes they are the parishes that guide schoolboard decisions. Either way, it's a beautiful thing.
Reread what I advocated: I'm advocating a balanced approach, incorporating the best of both worlds in a magnificent compromise. Students should be taught both what to think as well as how to think. The only way they'll succeed in this dark world is if they can do both.
You can't argue against this point, because it's tautological. The only argument you can propose is that we can't expect so much of our students and their teachers. But that's a lazy good-for-nothing cop out. I'd be embarassed to live in a society that can't expect the most of those who would weave its moral and social fabric. You're not actually arguing that, are you?
So, to summarize everything here, school today is not about remembering answers. It's how to get answers to infinite amounts of problems.
Kids aren't getting any answers, today. Whatever your philosophy, it's important to realize when you must throw your hands up and try something new. It's called the scientific method. You're the one advocating dogma, here.
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I had a great argument refuting this article, but I forgot what I was gonna say...
150 people is hardly a study. "No formal studies" means no studies. Premlimary findings such as these are essentially meaningless, and really we should all...
Someone you trust is one of us.
Are Computers Stealing Your Memory?
My computer just got an addition 512M of memory. I could have used that myself!
NO CARRIER
Yeah...we all went to college to learn to memorize our socials.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Sounds like this is typical of technology. The more you rely on the tech to do your job for you, the less practice you get.
A farmer, for example, who used to plow his fields by hand or with an Ox, would be much stronger through use and practice of his muscles than today's farmer, who augments most physical labor with machinery.
Apply this to technology. Let others think for you, and soon you forget how to think at all. This is a nice point to keep in mind for those people who like to think that our government should do as much for its people as possible. (hint!).
Hehe, your right but for the wrong reason. Those jobs attract the walking wounded because they are the only people who can't get better jobs. If you want good help you have to pay for it -- businessess know that, they just don't care.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
To quote my high school football coach (no I didn't play): "Our team can't even hold the ball, let alone do any fancy passes."
The trick is time management. Less and less of a given day is available for a given subject.. I've watched as my high school periods shrunk from an hour per class to 40 minutes. Skill and drill works very well in the military where they can't make any assumptions about your competence. They've found a system that keeps their soldiers alive, so they're going to burn it into their heads like little dogs (at least for the enlisted).
For those that could care less about school, and for the school where the teachers are most worried about keeping the kids quiet and paying attention, getting them to complete their times tables might be enough (or equivalently, being able to spell conscience).
Cal-tech isn't for your average high-school graduate, and it assumes a certain level of personal discipline.
There's an alterior approach known as montasori(sp?). Which is a hands on method. It's a great motivational tool, but as I've seen from it's graduates, they tend to be behind in the amount of material they cover. A quote from a graduate, "It's a fun school, not a science school."
In short, different methods work for different people. Those that feel confined by "skill and drill" are more than welcome to seek out more sophisticated approaches.
-Michael
-Michael
Out of the many facts you learned as a child, exactly how many of these do you remember today?
Most all, I would say. I still remember how many legs horses have and how many legs pigs have. And that knowledge has served me well.
Many? If this is the case, how many do your peers remember?
My peers? I reckon they're doing ok, because my generation wasn't exposed to these abominable teaching philosophies as much as yours was. "Debate"? Sure, we had debate. We also had plenty of other things. Don't criticize what you don't understand, son.
If things are constant, then it's only a greater sign that the system has failed us and has failed our children. We must learn from our mistakes and strive to do better than our parents did. You haven't emigrated back to where your great grandparents (my parents) came from, right? Why? Because you've learned better. We made this country the best in the world through hard effort and hard choices.
The status quo is not a choice. You must learn to grow.
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Example: I have no idea what my social security number, blood type or insurer is. If I was ever in an accident, I'd be good as dead. However, that seems unlikely since I'm inside all day playing Counter-Strike, of which I've memorized every inch of every stage, the cost of each gun and ammo type, and the IP address of my favorite servers. My memory is now commited to useful things.
Given a reasonably level playing field, who would win a fight between a bear and a shark?
Personal observation bears this out. When I was in college, young people were really smart. Now that I'm my forties, they seem really, really stupid.
Funny, though, my parents said the same thing when I was young.
The first comments were a little sparse, so I'll practice using my memory... :-) (I had some pretty compelling personal reasons to research this in the early 90's)
:-)
Aspertame is composed of two amino acids. One of these amino acids will cross the "blood-brain barrier." That, by itself, isn't particularly worrisome, but the blood-brain barrier has a finite capacity and (iirc) transports the amino acids in the same proportion as they appear in the blood stream. This means that consuming a lot of aspertame will "crowd out" the other amino acids.
This can have some surprising results. A close friend of mine was an apparently healthy 30-year-old, but he had such severe tachycardia that he was starting to black out - imagine sitting quietly and having a pulse of 180-200! (That's higher than the "maximum heart rate", faster than what you would get in an all-out sprint!) His doctors had given him EKGs, CAT scans, etc., and had no idea what was wrong. I knew he drank a *lot* of diet soda and suggested he try cutting it out. He did, and the tachycardia stopped. There is no proof of a causal relationship - maybe it was a coincidence - but he swore off diet sodas for life.
My experience was that diet soda (which I rarely consumed anyway) would actually cause me to become more "intoxicated" than a six-pack of beer if I drank a single can of soda while taking a particular prescription medication. My doctor and I both checked the PDR, there was no interaction listed but that was where I learned about the blood-brain barrier effect. I'm sure some people would go "cool!" at being able to get stoned off a legal diet soft drink, but it terrified me since nobody knew how it was happening and what damage it was causing.
Finally, the <u>Atlantic</u> also did a long article on concerns about Aspertame in the early 90s (or late 80s), but I don't recall the details of that article. (I think that's normal memory loss
Bottom line: I try fairly hard to avoid unnecessary exposure to artificial sweeteners. (It's impossible to avoid all exposure unless you live life like its 1799.) The extra pounds I'm carrying have their own risks, but those risks are known and can be mitigated by taking care to exercise regularly. The risks posed by consuming artifical sweeteners for decades, sweeteners that cross the blood-brain barrier, are unknown.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
This is why you see much greater emphasis on arts and other trivial applications of human talents, instead of engineering and classical studies.
Dude, you can't be serious. The arts? A trivial application of human talents? What are you, a robot?
To me it looks like the cases cited in the article can be attributed to a stress related mental breakdown. One of my co-workers (at an old job) got physically sick (requiring bed rest), when the responsiblities he took on, and the idiots he hired, caught up with him. And its not like the Japanese aren't know for working themselves to death... Better get a tinfoil hat, the orbital mind contol lasers might get you and zap your memory.
--locust
Even better than that is the quotation from Oliver North, famed figure in the Iran-Contra Arms scandal in the 1980s. Note that there were tons of accusations that North ordered senstive documents destroyed to prevent the truth about the scandal from emerging. When later asked about why such important elements of the deal were never commemorated in writing, North is quoted as saying: "If it's really important, you don't have to write down." Actually, I can't find the direct quote around here, but that's a pretty close paraphrase.
==
Yeah, like that happened...
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
...the Windows-loving jackass in the next cubicle keeps stealing my memory! Last week I had 256 MB, now I only have 64.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Besides, have you watched MTV lately? Point made.
BTW, I'm thirty, I use a Palm daily, and my wife can vouch for the stupidity part.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
I don't know if that's entirely true. I'm becoming less and less dependant on, say, the PHP online reference as most of that is starting to stick. I also work sometime in technical support, and I'm finding myself referring to our knowledgebase less and less.
Perhaps this is for those who are developing their learning skills in general by using the net?
Oh well. Sorry honey . I wish I didn't repeat the same stories all the time.
----
... script kiddies;
Young, stupid, and access to a database of scripts on their BITBOXES.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
They claim these gadgets lead to diminished use of the brain to work out problems and "information overload" that makes it difficult to distinguish between important and unimportant facts.
To me "information overload" and "diminished use of the brain" because computers remember stuff for you is two entirely different things.
Information overload is certainly something I experience.
I grew up in Africa and we didn't have any TV. Or phone or electricity except for two hours in the evening. If I was bored then I played soccer or went fishing etc. We had one magazine subscription to National Geographic and I read all of those articles the whole way through.
In America life there is so much stuff going on. Instead of sitting down and reading National Geographic the whole way through I surf the internet. And instead of reading everything I just skim through articles quickly. And instead of reading one page after another in a linear way I always end up having 8 netscape windows open.
Not just netscape though because I have to have good music playing in the background. And I am also supposed to be doing some programming homework so you xemacs open. And also it is important to be playing mud so I have a mud client running. And my roomates are watching TV in the other room.
So it's no wonder I start forgetting things. And I don't even have a PDA.
Of course the state is going to fail to set the proper curriculum. It's beholden to politics. All governments are. This is nothing new.
Children need to be taught both to memorize and to learn. You must first memorize what you cannot understand; only then can you keep it within your mental grasp long enough to ponder it and mull it over. It's central to all right models of learning. This is nothing new.
What is new is how we've completely given up on trying to solve this problem. We're overrun with apathy in a world where we see that our parents have failed and see that our children are failing their children. "Why bother? It's inevitable." And that's a reprehensible attitude for you to take.
Learning comes from the grasp of the ability to distinguish differences. You must have a base of knowledge before you may learn to recognize other data and build analogies from there. This is why it's more important than ever for children to be given truth that they can trust, so that they may form opinions of the uncalculated and unprocessed world out there. To do otherwise would be to insist that their lives always consist of pre-chewed pablum.
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Next time someone throws one of these "kids today" stories in your face, bring up the following.
.01
Socrates, as Plato's mouth-piece in Phaedrus suggests that books are going to destroy the art of memory. Basically, before there were a lot of books, people spent immense amounts of time memorizing entire works and repeating them. Simonides, for example, used what he called 'loci' to recite entire 20,000 line poems from his head. It's how we have have Homer's works and a lot of other "oral traditions."
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates laments that Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented letters, had misjudged the effect of his invention:
"This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without reality."
Yeah, so if you believe this PDA piece, then go burn down the local library while you're at it. I'm sure your local doctor would appreciate that (laugh). Memory prosthetics are good as long as you don't use them to stop remembering, but instead to be able remember more than you could possibly otherwise.
My
-carson-
http://www.media.mit.edu/~carsonr/
Or made us code stuff that was already in the STL or an existing library?
I can see the point for learning something once, but these examples usually existed in classes where you were not allowed to use advanced calculators or the STL or(name your specific example here) throughout the entire class!
And they give the lamest excuses for making us hold onto the way they learned to do something! "If you get stuck on a desert island, you'll be glad you learned how to use a slide rule." Yeah, right.
If humanity is to progress, we must learn things once, and learn how not to reinvent the wheel. The skill we should be learn is to find out whether or not a problem has been solved before - if so apply the solution, and if not, be able to use our wit, intelligence, or if those are lacking, a smarter persons wit and intelligence to solve the problem.
Our society is getting an order of magnitude more complex each generation. We need to have computers do our grunt thinking for us if we are to keep up with advancing technology.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Remember Sean Connery as Indiana Jones' father in the most recent movie? Indiana asks him something, Dad says it's in his diary and he doesn't know, Indiana disbelievingly asks him if he can't remember, Dad summons up his dignity and replies, "I wrote it down so that I wouldn't have to remember."
Or my favorite quote from Alan Turing (paraphrased): Programming should always be exciting, because as soon as something becomes boring or repetitive, it should be turned over to the machine.
I've automated so many of my sysadmin duties that I can't remember how to do them manually anymore. :-) Frees up more time for programming.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
These people have obviously never seen my grandfather try to program a computer.
Of course, neither have I... He won't go near the things.
---
This sounds like the story we saw a while back about neurologists becoming worried that people using grafitti on palms were losing their ability to write normally. It even had quotes from people, saying things like, "I looked down with shock - I had written the entire sentence over the same spot!"
It was a satire of course, and I thought it was hilarious. Some people were taken in though, which I suppose just made it funnier.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Um, basics of logic? Correlation is not causation? Aren't scientists of all people supposed to know these things?
Maybe it is?
a
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
You've got balls man (course you're going in as the coward). I'd almost want to see this marked up as funny; almost.
Though I think there is a modicum of legitimacy to your argument. I'd like to point out one thing.. Women tend to do better in high school.
The "agressive" males are usually too busy being the class clown, the jocks, or just dissidents (frustrated with their mal-adjustment to society). Women have better "spot memory" as I call it. Men are more prone towards mental visualization of the abstract. But the general maturity level still gives the edge to women.
I don't see how mainstream History, Chemistry, English, Physics, Biology, or most definately Math has changed for the femanine. All I see are attempts at multi-culturalizm, with emphases on the emotion of the children. That doesn't make it any more boring for the aspiring student (no matter the gender).
At my school, at least, we had 4 difficulty levels.. Remedial, general, college prep and honors/AP. There was plenty there to challenge you. (If they weren't enough, you'd often go to a school upstate).
-Michael
-Michael
Seems to me the Doc forgot what he was talking about in between sentences. Notice how he switched from a capacity issue to an attention issue as if the two were related.
Of course, the best work is often done by those closest to the problem!
--
Starting early this year, aren't we?
Manifest reality. Education through revelation. The world is a beautiful place, but that doesn't make it a complicated one. Most of it is self-evident: history is a collection of incontrovertible facts viewed through the lens of contemporary values.
Go ahead and teach them why to think, also, if you wish. I'd rather not leave that decision up to them. If they don't want to think, then they'll be disciplined until they do think. It's pretty simple.
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The concerns you have expressed have very little by way of solid basis. If you're worried about your own personal reaction to all the technology around us, you can control it yourself to a large degree. You don't have to use a cellphone, PDA, etc. etc.
But translating your own personal attitudes into some kind of global biological meltdown isn't justified. Our technology will have a big impact over the next hundred years, including many bad ones like pollution of various kinds, changes in the Earth's temperature, weather patterns, etc. But all the evidence we have to date indicates that brain meltdown isn't going to be one of those problems, pop-sci articles in mainstream media notwithstanding.
I have to say, you did have me going for a while; I was right there with you until you started going off on the uselessness of art, the futility of teaching unobtainable ideals, etc. But first, a little background; I'm a classicist. I finished High School here in 1997, with several years of Latin and Greek. I had to memorise good chunks of the Aeneid and Homer, as well as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Byron, Milton, and others. I had the sort of education you seem to be advocating. On the other hand, I had a year of music, two years of art, history and practice. Throw in a little calculus, physics, chemistry, and 4 years of religious studies, and you've got my High School experience in a nutshell. By now, I've probably done more dead languages than you've ever heard of.
So why all this bullshit about removing art and other intangibles from the curriculum? Nobody (sane) ever said that they have to be mutually exclusive. Art, beauty, truth were the great ideals of those classical civilisations you seem to love so much; Medieval Europe stole those values from Rome, Rome stole them from Athens and Greece, Greece stole them from the Hittites and Assyrians, the Hittites and Assyrians stole them from the Sumerians, the Sumerians...well, that's where the record ends, but I'm sure they came from somewhere. Sure, throw in a little innovation at each point along the way, borrowings from a lot of 'loser' civilisations, and you start to come somewhat close to history.
I suppose I still agree with your end point, the combination of fact/memorisation and analysis, but your methods stink.
"Oh Bother", said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."
Analysis is not the be-all of solving problems in this world, even in "rational" fields like science. Experience, too, plays a key role, and here memory is key. Many are those "eureka" moments when your brain, for some reason, connects two things together and you leap forward. Te more "stuff" you remember, the more your brain can draw on here. Without that library of experience, it's like you're solving a new problem every time from scratch. This is a good counterpoint. Why did you post it as an AC where nobody will read it? I'm not arguing wholesale one way or the other -- the shift i'm describing is imagined as a subtle one. Short and long term memory is always needed, I just think that analytical skills have become equally important (not necessarily more), and that is being recognized as we are overblown with information. Without the library of experience, you're solving a new problem every time from scratch, but without the research skills to search through that library and pull in data from outside it (and your library of experience is pretty small compared to the collective one), all your experience won't help you. Only "the experience in the world" will.
just my blog and pix
I guess PDAs are valuable because nowadays we have more items to remember. Everybody seems to have several phone numbers (home, business, mobiles), fax numbers, pager numbers, instant messaging numbers, email addresses, you name it. I was never able to remember that kind of information...
There are no accidents. Science has gotten where it is by adhering to the specific demands and casual propositions of a well-ordered universe. Sometimes that structure manifests itself as a "miracle". Sometimes it's as a "discovery". Either way, we're progressing.
Don't be so caught up with your petty notions of competition. We're all in this one together.
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Money spent on art over the last few decades in our schools has dwindled down to next to nothing.
Art is integral to society. Let's not forget that art and technology are inextricably intertwined. When humans were running around in loincloths with spears, they were drawing on cave walls, trying to understand the world in which they lived.
Some of the greatest minds in human history - people like DaVinci and Jefferson, were versed in the arts and technology. In DaVinci's case, they were inextricable.
Without the art in industrial design, there would be no Palm devices, no military camouflage (yes, artists came up with the idea of camouflaging ships in WWI). I could go on and on about the benefits of art in practical terms, but that ignores the larger benefits.
Art is part of being a human being. Without art, without personal expression, life is soulless. Art is what makes imagination real. Greatness is not just measured by how well someone knows their multiplication tables.
I agree that we need to improve how we teach children, but rote memorization of facts at the expense of art and other "trivial" subjects (do you consider music to be art?) is not the answer.
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If people are no longer exercising their memories at all because they can rely on PDAs and other tools, certainly their memories will atrophy. However, I know a significant number of people who use various tools to keep track of large bodies of information that has no intrinsic significance in order to free themselves to learn things that are useful to them.
As an example, I stopped trying to remember my parents' phone number the first time they moved after I left home. The only importance that sequence of digits has is a way to reach them. But I still take the time to remember the names of their friends and neighbors at each new home. I've met several of them. They are important. I don't bother remembering things that I can look up when I need them, but I give more attention to things I may need to know when I can't consult my secondary storage.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
This reminds me of that one quote, from that one guy...
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
You have a point, but you've gone way off the deep end with it. Your point is simply, someone who has well-developed memorization skills has a huge advantage, and we shouldn't neglect developing memorization abilities in kids.
That said, it's still true that it's more important to learn how to think, then it is to memorize some facts.
The solution? Engage kids in activities that develop their brain, as opposed to their mind. Treat the brain as an organ, much like muscle, that grows stronger from exercise. Memorization games, visualization games (such as chess), language games, etc. Work the mind like a muscle, and it will develop all the skills it needs. Give it a rich environment, and it will learn lots of knowledge, and retain it, too.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
They haven't been implemented because they don't work, and not the other way around. The usual liberal mantra is to throw more money at it and just "try harder". It's a waste of resources and a waste of time.
You don't seem to think that teachers investigate their teaching methods before they implement them. That's an insult to teachers, in my opinion. Back in the day, they were the most respected branch of the public sector because of the leadership and influence they held over our children. They still do, in spite of what you're claiming.
How can you expect teachers to thrive if you won't give them the respect they are due? That's the question you should be asking.
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(attention deficit disorder) Diagnosed, but it is simply a subcategory of a whole brace of culturally and biologically derived symptoms. When I was a kid I sure wished I had a laptop and a PDA, so I could read what I wrote, catch everything the teachers said, and not drift off.
That stuff sure helps me now. My brain is so active now because I can stay consistent on something for an extended period of time, without having a teacher to watch over me to do it!
What's wrong with shaping my environment to increase my effectiveness? And who would think that they are the only person who efficiently uses these tools, either? Most people who invest in these tools and continue to use them must find a use for them.
Maybe it's video games that breed stupidity? Some marketer deliberately harnessing eyeballs? Screw video games, lets focus on educational technology. My attention span certainly improved when I figured out all the useful, profitable, and interesting things I could do with a computer.
Wouldn't you think everyone else's would, too?
-perdida
Goat sex free since 2001
Think about it this way. Just because I can't come up with a certain fact off the top of my head, doesn't mean that the fact is not available to my subconscious, the device that comes up with that "eureka!" thing. This happens to me on a daily basis...somebody asks me about a movie, I say "Oh yeah the one with...uh...that actor...name was on the tip of my tongue..." only to sit up bolt upright in bed that night thinking "Elijah Wood" (no, I was not in bed with Mr. Wood that night. Nor any night.)(huh huh...I said wood...)
Anyhow, the point is valid, but I think that conscious memory retrieval is very inefficient compared to the unconscious "crawler" we've got running around maintaining our link integrity. : )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Contrary to the article, I use my palm for storing short poems I want to memorize or formulae I need to review before a closed-notes, no-calculator test. I find that having the information with me absolutly everywhere allows me to effectively use my otherwise wasted time.
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
In order to develop kids' brain, you have to give it a nourishing environment. The nourishment you must provide is a rigorous feeding schedule of memorization. It's the basis and matrix for further development.
Games are what you should be playing with your friends. They're not what you should be doing in school. Doesn't school mean anything anymore? Do we just send our children and grandchildren to a massive festival of self-congratulatory intellectual masturbation? Where are the standards? Where is the discipline? How are we supposed to expect them to come out at the end with a sense for where they belong in society?
Teach them skills. Teach them how to put themselves towards useful ends. What you're advocating is the complete abdication of our role as parents and grandparents.
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Keep it in perspective. We must have priorities.
If money is scarce, then we must have stricter priorities. Scarce quantities must be rationed, lest we not produce the results we intend. If we have the choice between teaching people how to read or teaching them how to draw, then we have a duty to teach them how to read. Literacy is of paramount importance. If we have a choice between teaching them how to do math and teaching them how to play music, then we have an obligation to teach them how to do math. Math skills are of paramount importance.
You're being unrealistic, here. You're saying we should do everything. We simply cannot. We must have our priorities, and the responsible choice is to put extraneous subjects like music and arts lower on our list of priorities than important subjects like reading and maths.
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I'm posting this at the risk of seeming like a reactionary fruitcake, but make your own decisions:
Also check http://www.dorway.com/ for extensive background information.
- US Air Force pilots are not allowed to consume Aspertame
- More than 10,000 food products contain Aspertame, everything from mints to soda to cereal.
- When heated above 86 F (30 C) Nutrasweet turns to Methanol (wood alcohol) This then digests as formaldehyde and Formic Acid.
- The two main ingredients of Nutrasweet are: Phenylalanine and aspartic acid which are essentially natural, however are never found independent of other amino acids.
- May cause autism by affecting unborn children (cases of autism has been on the rise for the past 20 years)
- in 1996, 60 minutes showed a porportional rise between brain tumors in the US and use of Aspertame in the US since 1981. Why has this never been mentioned in the recent cell-phone cancer scare?
Someone scanned what claims to be a Department of Health and Human Services paper cataloging symptoms reported to the FDA.Additionally, these are the "92 symptoms" the FDA knew were associated with Aspertame when they approved it. These were discovered in an FDA document brought to light thanks to The Freedom of Information Act.
The things that I do pass off completely on the palm are cd track lists, directory contents, and rarely-used phone numbers, none of which I would store in my brain otherwise. If a person starts to use the palm to keep track of their friends' numbers, or of the locations of their weekly classes, then I might start to worry about their memory -- but otherwise, it's a boon not to have to remember trivia -- who thinks we should give up DNS service so that people will have to develop better memory for dotted quads?
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
GROWING numbers of people in their twenties and thirties are suffering from severe memory loss because of increasing reliance on books and other word storage devices, according to new research.
Sufferers complain they are unable to recall names, written words or appointments, and in some cases have had to give up their jobs.
Doctors are blaming paper books, personal organisers and road maps. They claim these sophisticated information devices lead to diminished use of the brain to work out problems and inflict "information overload" that makes it difficult to distinguish between important and unimportant facts.
One researcher commented, "Why, in my day we could memorize the entire Odyssey! All we had was the 'rosy fingered dawn' to help us. Kids these days!"
The problem with anecdotes is that they're precisely that: anecdotes. A single datum in a vast world of contradictory stories. I'll share one of my own, if you want.
But getting back on point: teaching people what to think is the only way our species can survive in the new millennium. We only live on this earth for eighty years or so. There's far too little precious time to reinvent the wheel by having each person perform the same elementary experiment or reading of primary sources. Heck, kids can't even manage to do the reading as it is -- they'd rather read the cliff notes.
Teaching them what to think is the only way to end this vicious cycle. Teach them what we already know to be true so that they may be freed up to discover what we do not yet know. That's what you guys like to call the "open source" method, and as philosophies go, it's one of the better ones. Don't reinvent the wheel. Build on what your forefathers built.
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What? The use of repetition to establish rhythm is now verboten? I consider it a threat to my craft to have limits placed so arbitrarily: "Here, and no farther."
Fuck that.
I'm gonna do what I damn well please. Because I have that choice, and I'm me.
there is no such word as troll.
there is no such word as troll.
there is no such word as troll.
there is no such word as troll.
there is no such word.
there is no such.
there is no.
there is.
so there.
thex23
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
Your right, but I forgot why.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's not just kids' memories, though they're the ones who are feeling the brunt of it, having spent the most time in the environment our society has created for them and for us. People everywhere have been experiencing deteriorating memories, and I'd say it has to do with how we teach them in school.
It used to be that you'd learn facts in school. You'd get a big textbook or two and carry it around in your burlap sack, go to classes and get orally quizzed on your ability to recall facts, and go home and get the snot beaten out of you if you didn't show any progress. You had to learn how to recall trivial things, because it was the only way to survive and prosper. The best minds of my day were like that.
Today? The emphasis is on task-based learning and goal-oriented teaching. Kids are being taught how to think, instead of what to think, out of some liberal notion that we shouldn't make their beliefs conform to our own experienced ones. It sounds great on paper, but in reality, kids are not only failing to learn how to think, they don't even know what to think about anymore. This is why you see much greater emphasis on arts and other trivial applications of human talents, instead of engineering and classical studies. For better or worse, we're breeding a generation of mental invalids.
You can't teach a whole generation to drive society by encouraging them to feel about driving. You have to give them rigid rules and test them on their grasp thereof. And if they don't conform, then you make them conform. It's not totalitarianism; it's just common sense.
What's needed is a better combination of the two methods. We should insist that our children learn both what and how to think. Only that way can we insure that the new generations can learn from my generation's mistakes and fulfill our promises of greatness.
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Really, is this any different than having a high end graphics card offload processing from the CPU so that it can concern itself with more generic processing? Yes, one could consider personal information management software as a memory sink for the human brain; however, one could also contend that such artifacts abstract the more trivial elements of our lives out of our cognitive processes thereby providing more time to the mind to deal with more important matters. Rather than worrying about when to walk the dog or the time of your next meeting, you now have time to post comments /. or contemplate the cultural ramifications of PDAs and PIMs upon society.
;-)
RE: above
Don't you love self-referencing arguments?
Computers extend my memory. Computers remeber all of the stupid stuff I don't have to. Computers do all the stupid stuff I don't want to do. Example: I don't want to remember everyone's phone number in my department, nor do I have to thanks to the computer. I Don't LIKE to do taxes by hand, what does it? A computer. Does that mean my memory has gon to pot? Nope! I remember weird stuff like how to get out of a current recurrent bug in Linux or at work on a computer until it's fixed. I remember things like my son's birthday, my wife's birthday, our anniversary, my dad's birthday and all of my family's b-days. Now quick, ask me what year! I have NO idea when my dad was born. To me, no matter how old he is he will be dad. I remember things that MATTER. Why should I remember how some obscure command works when I always have a reference and when I look at said command it lights up in my head and I say BINGO! Books, computers and calculators are extension of my mind and help me think and analyse better. I guess that means anlysis is more important than rote learning huh? (They finally get it eh? :))
Gorkman
There is growing evidence of Aspertame (main ingredient of Nutrasweet) affectting short term memory.
Search Google for Nutrasweet and memory loss and you'll get a huge listing. Not just health-food stores either, several university studies come up too.
This is not just a conspiracy-theorist, natural-foods idea, the evidence is compelling. Researchers are linking consumption of nutrasweet to the rise in Alzheimers disease and it would also justify the research in this article.
How much diet coke do you drink?
This is like "nine out of ten doctors recommend..." which usually means nine out of THESE SPECIFIC ten doctors recommend...
Sure there are some out there who might say that in their opinion, PDAs are making people dumber. That doesn't make them right. These are just unfounded scare tactics.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Was chronic marijuana use considered as a factor? What cultural characteristics were prominent in these people studied?
Goat sex free since 2001
Was this a peer reviewed study? What journal did it appear in? Was a coorelation between PDA use and memory loss found, or were the findings correlated with age. Was there a control group?
Newspapers should print proper citations...
See, older folk just don't recognize lazyness when they see it; they think it's just that we have bad memories. hah.
Now where did I put the upc for adultcheck.com...bah...I knew I shoulda organized these.
Then again, who can forget that freaky kid from Tom Sawyer who memorized the entire Bible...
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
the vast amounts of information that we have to keep track of nowadays. With the fast-paced society we live in and all the bazillion little schedules and meetings and numbers and [dizzying amount of other trivial things], it's no wonder things get forgotten. It's not our lack of retention, it's that our memories haven't caught up with the influx of data. Plain and simple, we have a lot more things to remember than we used to, and it just doesn't all fit. Damn 640K limit.
This is not a Fugazi
I also disagree with the stipulation that because there is a finite amount of teaching that can be done in a school day, that art should be eliminated.
If mathematics, sciences, and literacy were taught in a more capable fashion, there would be room for the teaching of art. Our schools' problems are not primarily matters of limited funds or wasted time spent on art.
Having worked and volunteered at K-12 schools in Pittsburgh and DC, I can say that the quality of education received depends on ONE thing: Expectation
If we expect that our students will fail, if we don't set them up to succeed, if we don't push them hard and set high standards for them, they will fail.
Parents expect that their children will fail, and they fail. Teachers expect that the children in their classrooms will fail, so they fail. Our society as a whole says that our schools are terrible, and yet we do nothing to change the expectation for students and the schools they're in.
If we teach our children how to think critically, they will be able to adapt and learn throughout their entire lives. If we teach them the arts, they will be able to create. If we drill them to remember the exact date of the sinking of the USS Maine, or pi to the tenth digit, that may make us think we've taught them something, it may make it easier to quantify education, but it won't make them any smarter, nor will it make our society any better.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ