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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.
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..
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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.
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.
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.
DUH. Brains can already run on emacs, didn't you know Lisp was originally developed for AI research?
Just type ctrl-shift-R meta-K semicolon shift-Q-X, hit F13, and hold your occipital lobe against the SysRq key for 5 seconds. Voila - instant, permanent transfer of consciousness from the boring old physical world, into your third-favourite text editor! It couldn't be simpler.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
"Brains Optimized for Browsing" can only mean one thing: zombies optimized for browsing.
(Talk about a case of "soft inheritance"...)
Pfft that's ridiculous, on Python just type "import consciousness" and you're done
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
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.
And the best part is that your now mindless body can make a wonderful career in either politics or the financial industry!
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.