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Nicholas Carr Foresees Brains Optimized For Browsing
An anonymous reader writes "In the next decade, our brains are going to become optimized for information browsing, says best-selling author Nicholas Carr. According to Carr, while the genetic nature of our brains isn't being changed by the Internet at all, our brains are adapting 'at a cellular level' and are weakening modes of thinking we no longer exercise. Therefore, in 10 years, if human beings are using the Internet even more than they do today, says Carr, "our brains will be even more optimized for information browsing, skimming and scanning, and multitasking — fast, scattered modes of thought — and even less capable of the kinds of more attentive, contemplative thinking that the net discourages."" While Carr isn't making a case for Lamarckian evolution, the argument here seems weak to me; the same kind of brain change could be attributed to books, or television, or the automobile, couldn't it?
Television and the automobile, certainly. However, it seems arguable that books encourage attentive, contemplative thinking. The automobile can be a bit fuzzier - but certainly highway driving requires extreme amounts of attention. City driving isn't usually done for long stretches - unless it's stop and go, in which case nothing is happening to make it require much brain exercise.
Also, how does this make the argument seem weak? I'm sure there's a large body of work arguing the same is indeed true of television.
I want to see brains optimized for gopher and emacs.
If brains become web browsers, does that mean we'll need antivirus injections, javascript bandages, and be careful what cookies we eat?
I'm LostCluster but I lost my password to that user. Hey Slashdot, how about helping me get it back!
Do something more often and your brain will become optimized for it. I think they call it learning.
The counterargument here seems weak to me; books, television, and the automobile aren't the same as the web, so the learned change wouldn't be of the same kinds.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
oh well. I guess somethingawful was right all along! Now I must research this by finding blogs that agree with my bias..
---
the internet is a tool. like any tool it can have positive and negative effects on the user, remembering that positive and negative are relative terms.
Evolution requires death, selective pressure, serious things like that, and takes place over generations. This ain't evolution. It's just people getting into a habit.
Yes it probably does change our brains on a cellular level, just like the recent habit of no hard physical labor changed our muscles on a cellular level. It's easily reversible simply by doing the old things again.
Caveman0: I am draw story on cave wall!
Caveman1: No! Memorize oral tradition make brains strong! Picture story make brains weak!
[panel of cave-children staring vacantly at cave paintings, slack-jawed, drooling]
Caveman0: Me go too far! Me am play gods!
In case you don't know the meme, original source: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
While Carr isn't making a case for Lamarckian evolution, the argument here seems weak to me; the same kind of brain change could be attributed to books, or television, or the automobile, couldn't it?
Yes, the same kinds of changes could be attributed to the things you named. Which is likely why people who grew up with black and white television dreamed in black and white. Our brains are absolutely affected at a deep level by the things we spend our time on. It seems almost trivially obvious to say so. The real question is whether or not this is a bad thing. Yes, our modes of thinking may become dependent on "browsing" -- on having a ready cache of facts and trivia that don't need to be stored in gray matter. But if it is the case that browsing is indeed always available, might that not be a good thing? Couldn't that free up resources, currently devoted to memorizing state capitals, that could be better spent on higher level reasoning? Math classes can certainly teach more interesting topics now that calculators have obviated the need to memorize logarithm tables.
I didn't RTFA, but this point is roughly similar to the one made by Plato and others as the early greeks transitioned from an oral tradition to a written one. It's an obvious point, but one we should probably pay attention to: mathematics and writing changed the way we think because it allowed us to offload certain kinds of computations (arithmetic/geometric, storage/recall) to physical systems. Where humans interact most with algorithms is the internet, and the modes of information retrieval and display there will certainly effect which linguistic tools get developed in the next generation.
But like I said, old news.
Doing something because it had practical benefit (or is even a necessity) does not mean it's optimal. Certainly neural pathways that are unused may atrophy, and repetition will make us better at any activity mental or physical, but I'm not sure that's really something I would call optimization.
Also, it seems a bit narrow to insist that "evolution" be defined only in terms of genetic inheritance. The ability of a sufficiently intelligence species to not only learn new behaviors but also teach them to their offspring is – in effect – a persistent change in that species. We didn't become a species of arithmetic-performing apes through natural selection of genetic material, but by passing on that skill through teaching. Furthermore, a species which is capable of (more or less permanently) altering the environment in which future generations are born and develop is also producing a form of evolution. For example (and for better or worse), most of humanity now grows up looking at lighted screens a substantial part of their lives, and will continue to be different in their cognition from previous generations because of that. The genetics of H. sapiens have changed insubstantially in the past century, but H. sapiens as a population is a markedly different primate. That is evolution.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I only skimmed the article though. Back to facebook.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
we will endup with no brain at all.
WTF!!! Don't you have something about an elixir of immortality or a time-travel machine, I meant, something real.
Achille Talon
Hop!
While Carr isn't making a case for Lamarckian evolution, the argument here seems weak to me; the same kind of brain change could be attributed to books, or television, or the automobile, couldn't it?
Do you doubt that has occurred? Not to mention video games, urbanization, industrialization, birth control, etc.
Whether humanity's method of information gathering is books and TV, the Internet, or (Heaven Forbid) interpersonal interaction, we'll all do it in some combination of long and short intervals. The Internet makes it possible to do both the high-frequency information gathering described here, and low-frequency contemplative activities such as gaming sessions, ./ articles and reading science papers. It's a lot easier now to learn about a single, narrow topic in depth than it has ever been in the past. Science has become more specialized. Less time spent searching for facts means more time to spend contemplating your favorite scientific issue. Consequently, given a period of time and a problem of a given complexity, scientists can now analyze an issue / solving a problem in greater detail and with better efficiency. Contemplate that, Carr.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
There are always some members of each generation of humans which are resistant to learning, and up as evolutionary dead-ends. Sorry, dude, but you appear to be Homo Erectus.*
*and not in the sense of a crude juvenile joke.
A best selling author is apparently equal in credentials to a phd in Neurology? Really, slashdot? Where's the evidence? Brain scans? Double blind tests? Who was the control? What's the confidence rating? He's practicing pop psychology -- and he's even less credible than Dr. Phil. No evidence of any kind and he's making extraordinary claims about a field he has no formal training in. If this was a story about someone's evidence disproving evolution, Slashdot readers would be tearing the author limb from limb -- this guy's making claims that belong in the same bucket. Why are you wasting your time with this crackpot theory? You're supposed to be scientists, technology experts, and engineers -- act like one. Demand proof.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
My brain is already optimized for ignoring Nicholas Carr. The first couple of sentences were enough to determine the rest is not worth reading.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
So is this why that every time we come to this point technologically, and some cataclysm happens and society crumbles, that there is no record left for the survivors to remember and pass down?
The brain remakes itself constantly, in weeks, not decades. ANYTHING you do repetitively becomes a source of new pathways. So in our case, our brains are already optimized to Bear Party bootlegs and Pizza Bites.
Just because the brain develops a new mode of operation it doesn't mean the brain forgets the old mode.
Did you forget how to ride a bike? Forget how to swim? Forget how to play chess or play video games? Forget how to read?
Just because you learn to speed read it doesn't means you forgot how to read. And just because you pay close attention and don't use the internet it doesn't mean you've developed the ability to reason. The ability to reason comes from discrimination of good and bad information. Also what about the benefits to vocabulary? We will know way more words if we read a greater variety of text.
Early exposure could hijack parts of the brain that were meant for other things. It's the same reason why all polyglots are airheads. Just limit your kids to an hour or two a day and they'll be normal.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Browsing concentration is sort of the opposite of "flow" concentration. Flow concentration is engaged when you're doing something engrossing - painting, writing, sudoku, coding. As long as we balance out our browsing habit with artistic and creative pursuits, we'll be fine.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I'm pretty sure the data shows that if our brains are "optimized" for anything on the Internet, it's the pornography first and foremost.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, it would be Larmarkian if he claimed you could inherit this characteristic. It has long been known that the brain's wiring depends on how you use it.
The thing about this claim is browsing the web a lot is enough unlike how people have used their brains in the past that it will cause a noticeable difference in how we gather, understand and analyze information.
Myself, I don't think it's all that different than what humans have done for a million years. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as the web. We gathered information by consulting various sources: television, books in the library, magazines, talking to other people and observing things for ourselves. Occasionally, we set out to break new ground and find out things that nobody knew, or that we didn't know somebody knew. People still gather information in all those ways but now they use the web too. The kinds of information a web search dredges up are the same kinds of things we used to draw information from 30 years ago: magazine articles, bloadvertisements, videos (analagous to television programs), blogs (which are journals) and scholarly articles. Although you get the information to your eyes a lot faster, you can't absorb it any faster with the web. And the quality of the information is probably worse, because it's so damn cheap to put up a blog full of bullshit, unchecked facts and misunderstood information. It's left to the searcher to decide what information is relevant, which of conflicting information sources are more accurate or reliable, etc. This is the same problem people always had.
The activity of creating new information -- original research or analysis -- was never easy, and there were never good tools available to most people to help with it. Now, at least there are computers that can assist you in analyzing large volumes of information or carrying out calculations too daunting to do by hand.
So all said, I doubt it will have much effect. People will still need to analyze data, but that has always been an activity for a few who were especially good at it. The rest of us can browse away, just like our apelike ancestors did 4 million years ago. (I bet they said Google, too.)
The guy is an editor for Encyclopedia Britannica, a publication which is likely being endangered by the free flow of information on the internet (wikipedia, we're looking at you!) and he's making arguments against it. What. A. Shock.
Severe conflict of interest here.
The Normans invade England, and the language changes. It makes sense to me. The question is, to what extent does language, culture, the means we acquire information, etc. change our minds? I wager quite a bit. After Gutenberg, people began to lament the loss of memory. Illiterate elders were no longer remembering the town register. It was all written down. If anything, society is the better for it. However, that might represent an "optimal enhancement" for the human mind. The fear is that if we go to far, the brain will atrophy. IMHO, the question is moot. The experiment is being run. Primitive cultures still allow us to compare the value of tribal memory against the written word. I suspect that small communes, orders like the Amish, and others who pick and choose their technologies will serve a similar laboratory function, provided we don't go all fascist and try to force things on them. Diversity in level of technology, just as in diversity of crops and other things is a good thing, I think.
Describing evolution strictly in terms of DNA isn't exactly "wrong"... but it's comparable to describing astronomy strictly in terms of Newtonian physics: perfectly good most of the time, but there are "edge" cases (such as objects approaching the speed of light, or certain species of intelligent primate with advanced communication skills) where it doesn't quite explain what's happening. To fully understand and explain hominid evolution, you also need to look at the linguistic/educational channel through which certain non-genetic traits are passed from generation to generation.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is like Sony getting up and telling us all that the Xbox is making us stupid.
You have to question the source here. The guy is an editor for Encyclopedia Britannica - something that is likely being hurt by free information publications such as Wikipedia.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I read the first part of the summary, but the paragraph was really too long. I find these days I'm prone to starting one thing and then
Have gnu, will travel.
when people had only black and white tvs people and some still do have all there dream in back and white. wile the newer generation of people raised on color tvs dream in color. so yes are brains did change from tv.so saying we are becoming at storing alot more wile less detailed info is not so far fetched.
This seems redundant to me, since the way in which we find relevant answers from a vast source of information such as the internet needs to (and will) change considerably in the near future so that we no longer scan large volumes of information and search results.
If you consider that in terms of efficiency of getting 'an answer from a question' we currently:
Have Question -> get vast amounts of information from intertubes -> sort through information -> hopefully get answer.
But this is stupid. We can build things (as demonstrated by Siri and Wolfram with natural language processing) that do the processing for us, so we can:
Have Question -> Tell [algorithm] -> get answer.
This is the most efficient way to get an answer from a question, we don't need to be involved in sorting and processing of vast amounts of information. I'm sure that in the near future we geeks will make this happen.
"Brains Optimized for Browsing" can only mean one thing: zombies optimized for browsing.
(Talk about a case of "soft inheritance"...)
When movies were first made, they were single shots. A train approaching a station, something like that. Audiences oohed and ahhed.
But, the first time a cut was introduced, the audience was completely flummoxed. They had no idea what they were seeing. It's hard to believe that now, but we've probably seen 100,000 cuts by the time we are 5 now, and our brains are rewired to accept it.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I didn't RTFA. I accept that brains adapt to the activities they do, and I understand that that's not the same thing as evolution, so this is not a claim of 'lamarckian' evolution.
My conjecture is that while the brain of a passive browser/lurker may develop one way, that of someone who also posts to the net might develop in another way. Conversations may be discussions of various issues, and interactions on the net could be likened to that but with more time to think about what you're about to say. Feedback in that you see later exactly what you did say (and maybe wince when you do sometimes), plus feedback from numerous people, including the classic "tl;dr" may sharpen certain thinking skills. There've been submissions about that here on slashdot in the past. The question would then be: how many mere lurkers are there out there as opposed to active posters. Plus it's a matter of degree, how much lurking per day, how much posting and thinking about posting per day.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Excuse me, but isn't this just a rehash of what Macluhan already stated some fifty years ago?
Paai
But, the first time a cut was introduced, the audience was completely flummoxed.
More than that. The average shot length in movies has been decreasing over the years. There are up and down trends; 1971 had longer shots than 1974. But shot lengths today average around 2 seconds. The Bourne Ultimatum has a mean shot length of 800ms. This is the current record. MTV got people used to that rate of cuts.
Another thing that people have learned to tolerate is the demise of editorial geography. The best way to explain editorial geography is this (which I'm quoting from memory): "Bogart gets a phone call. He hangs up the phone. He puts on his coat, He opens his door and walks out. He walks down the front steps. He hails a cab. He gets in the cab and the cab drives away. We see a shot of him inside the cab. The cab stops in front of a building. Bogart gets out. He looks up at the tall building. We're shown the building. He walks into the lobby. He pushes the elevator button. He looks up at the elevator indicator. We're shown the elevator indicator moving down. The elevator doors open. Bogart gets in. We're shown the elevator indicator moving up. On another floor, we see the elevator doors open. Bogart gets out and walks down the hall. He knocks on a door, and Lauren Bacall opens the door. Bogart walks through the door into the apartment." Today, we'd see the phone call, and in the next scene, he'd be in the apartment.
I believe the main reason we don't have more female programmers is not a question of talent, but early exposure and the belief they can be successful in that area. If you don't think about something, "that part" of the brain will end up being used for something else instead.
When I was a teenager, my brain became optimized for looking at pictures of girls' tits and for jerking off... anything you do, that represents a new behavior changes the structure of your brain, that's how the fuck you learn new behavior. New pathways are formed, or old ones are altered or destroyed... or the attributes of the pathways might change, i.e., activation thresholds could raise or lower, reuptake of neurotransmitters could be impacted, but in any case, any time a new memory of any kind forms, be it episodic, (watching parents fighting, fucking, etc.) procedural, (learning to type, drive a car, operate a web browser...) or sensory (acquiring a taste for calamari, getting so tired of fruit-punch "flavored" Gatorade that you want to vomit just thinking about it, without any specific event tied to the idea) etc., your brain is changed. Conversely, without change, no learning of any kind occurs. So this is not news. It's about as profound as saying "fire is hot". No shit, Sherlock.
I attribute that to sheer lack of technical skill. There's few if any left in the industry with the skill both on both sides of the lens to carry off the long scenes that the old movies had. Part of that was the difficulty in the old lenses and in manual editing. But today's actors, directors and camera men just can't pull off the basics any more.
I can follow the 2 second shots, but actively dislike it. It's too much like following a bunch of stills and makes me feel like I'm watching a story board roughly migrated to the big screen instead of an actual 'movie'.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I'd argue that duration of movies is shorter, because of the longer work hours and more media competing for our attention and not shorter attention spans. When you had nothing to do all day, you went for 5hr opera. Today it's impossible because you work 40-80hr per week and all the many things you can do after work. In such environment if something is short and sweet you can fit it inside your busy schedule more easily.
About the Boggart example. So, basically we are skipping all the unimportant detail and focusing on the important. That sounds like minimalism and not anything to do with Carr and his opinion.
Ontopic:" THE SKY IS FALLING!!!! IF WE USE BOOKS/MOVIE/INTERNET INSTEAD OF SITTING AROUND TRIBE CAMPFIRE TELLING EACH OTHER WHAT WE DID WE WILL BE STUPIDER!!11!!!"
It's not lack of talent, it's just aesthetics and marketing. Look at guys like Robert Elswit and Roger Deakins. They're still doing work that rivals anything in old movies, but if you put a film out with long takes and a deliberate pace everyone complains that it's "slow" and automatically gets put in the arthouse category. These films just don't sell that well anymore.
I'm very intrigued to see what style Elswit brings to the new Bourne movie. I enjoyed the last one on TV, but I sat too close to the screen when I saw it in the theatre and it made me sick.
Brain scans have shown that TV makes you stupider and trains your brain to be passive and unquestioning.
Time on the net mostly displaces TV viewing - a fact that advertisers hate.
Of course, we can't stop them from searching for pics of the Jersey Shore cast, how to win the lottery with astrology or what prayers will get you into heaven but at least it's better than TV because on the net they might just accidently end up on wikipedia and learn something.
Part of it is that the current generation of movie goers has grown up watching TV, so they're used to it. Try turning the sound down and watching a typical TV show, it's like watching flashcards. Of course most of the sound these days is canned laughter so you don't miss much by turning it down anyway.
>the same kind of brain change could be attributed to books, or television, or the automobile, couldn't it?
The thing is, that DID happen! Prior to writing, people had to remember entire epic poems. There's records of the Greeks essentially saying "These darn kids with their scrolls, they'll never remember anything." Were you aware that it took centuries for the first person to read a book silently?
Saint Augustine wrote on Ambrose's ability to read silently in awe: "When he read his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud."
Reach for the dream ---- vote Green.
Dr. Jill Stein in 2012.