October 13, 2010 • 32 mins
Since the internet allows users to access an enormous amount of data, it is theoretically possible for an individual to learn almost anything. Yet some experts believe this technology is adversely affecting the human mind -- especially the attention span.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello there, everyone,
Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Polette, and
(00:20):
I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Sitting across from me, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on
fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched seabeams glitter
in the dark near the tan Houser Gate. All those
moments will be lost in time, like tears and rain. Well,
(00:41):
it's a great way to start this podcast, as usual.
If you know the source of the quote, please feel
free to drop by uh Facebook or Twitter and let
us know. Yeah. I thought that one was appropriate because
the discussion we're going to have does play somewhat into
the realm of art of facial intelligence somewhat. We're going
(01:02):
to talk about technology and its effect on our noggins,
specifically gray matter, that brain that's slashing around in that
cranium of yours. Yeah, this is this has been a
topic of some debate recently. Um, probably, I guess more
over the past year. Um, thanks to our not really
good friend but someone we follow closely, Nicholas Carry, the
(01:25):
technology writer. He wrote an interesting article for The Atlantic
back in two thousand eight. Uh, and it was titled
is Google Making Us Stupid? Wow? Is it that long?
And that was two thousand eight July August two thou
eight edition. I've got it up right now, so as
I'm sorry, I was just gonna say, yeah, he wrote
this article is Google Making Us Stupid? And it was
(01:45):
an interesting, um, just an interesting take on technology, the
way we consume information, in the way we think. Yes,
and uh. He actually followed that up with a a
much longer format, a whole book called The Shallows Um,
which some people have taken issue with the title suggesting
he's already decided that we're all stupid. But I'm not
(02:08):
so certain that he actually meant it that way. Yeah.
That that's that sounds to me like the sort of
criticism one might make before fully uh reading a book,
you know, one of those things where it's just your
initial reaction to a title and then so let me
let me give you a little story here, Chris, Yes,
(02:30):
all right, Uh, Now, when I was going to school
the Internet was not really something I had access to
all the way up until until the point where I
got into college. Really, my sophomore year in college was
when I was starting to really get get access to
the Internet. I can relate to that. So up to
(02:50):
that point, I studied just the normal way you would
attend classes. You would read, uh study notes and read
books and that sort of thing, and that's how you
you would gain knowledge. Now today I work for a
company where I write articles and blog posts and do
podcasts where I have to research various topics new ones
(03:12):
each week. I'm doing so using the Internet. Meanwhile, I
also am tapped into various communication tools such as instant
messenger email. I've got text messaging on my phone when
it works. We're recording this on the day that my
android phone died. Anyway, normally I have access to multiple
(03:33):
means of communication, and this would presumably give me access
to to amounts of information I never would have had
access to before. Write a huge, deep, broad scope of information. However,
despite this amazing ability to tap into lots of information,
(03:55):
I find that it is much more difficult to concentrate
on a single task for an any length of time
and so I have decided that technology is to blame,
and uh, it is ruining my brain. Now, what could
possibly be wrong with this argument? Well, I would say
that you're using anecdotal evidence. It's a good point. Yes,
(04:20):
I am speaking from my own experience. I have not
conducted any any deep study of this, mainly because I
can't concentrate on that task for long enough to do it. Um, yeah,
this is it is anecdotal. It's now that does not
mean that the information is wrong, right, Yeah, so this
is This is something that I wanted to address early
(04:41):
in this podcast because this is really going to be
an interesting philosophical discussion. It's not just technology, it's really philosophy.
And part of that philosophy is that anecdotal evidence is
not really good evidence to base an argument off of.
But but that does not mean that it is in valid.
It just means that, you know, there there are better
(05:02):
ways to support your argument. Now, I've read quite a
bit of agreement with Mr Carr's work, and I've also
read quite a bit of disagreement. Uh, most of the
disagreement I have read suggests that they all think, uh,
you know, he's either afraid of technology or that he's
(05:25):
basing it on his own anecdotal evidence, which um, I
think the anecdotal evidence sort of started him down the path.
But in the Shallows he does explain, uh, a number
of studies that have been done on the attention span
of people who are using technology for work. Um And
(05:48):
and therefore, you know, I am inclined to say that
he's not. I'm why I'm not necessarily agreeing with his
arguments in both the article and the book. I would
say that um or is at least a kernel of
truth in it that it can be very difficult for
some people to manage the flow of information coming to
(06:10):
them from multiple sources, especially the Internet, where there are
so many different kinds of sources um to choose from. Yeah,
and going further than that, he car makes his argument
in in his article and I'm sure in the book
as well, but he makes his argument that reading and
the way we consume information shapes the way we think.
(06:32):
So the argument here is that there are two different
ways you can think about thinking. Okay, there's the the
method where you say our brains are structured in such
a way that thinking is a process that is going
to be the same no matter how you consume your
information like it's just it's just a device. In a way,
(06:54):
we're just reducing it in complexity to call it a device.
It's a device that can accept information and then process it,
and then we act on that information in some way.
The other argument is that the brain is a very elastic,
flexible organ that's that will generate different ways of thinking
based upon the stimuli that it encounters. And in a
(07:18):
way that argument makes a lot of sense because one
of the the sources that car sites in his article
is Maryanne Wolf's Proost and the Squid, which is a
book about reading and learning, and Mary Ann Wolfe argues
that humans are not born with the ability to read.
(07:39):
It's not an innate ability that we possess, unlike say
vision or hearing, where we can interpret the information in
the world around us using those sensory organs. That's something
that's innate that unless you have some sort of disability
or or disease or whatever, or some other form of
of impt a mint to those senses, you can. That's
(08:02):
one way you can gather information and learn about your environment.
Reading is a skill that we had to invent and
develop over time, and it's relatively recent. It's just a
couple of thousand years old. And that through reading, we
changed the way we thought. So the developing reading was
(08:23):
a skill that we had to learn. Through reading, we
changed the way we learn. We could preserve information unlike
we could before. Like before it was all folklore. Right,
you passed it down by explaining to people what you knew,
and then they would take the words you said and
they would apply it so that they would understand the concept,
(08:45):
and then they would have to pass it on. But
there was no easy way to share that information. It
meant that knowledge was kept in small pools across the
human race. Writing allowed us to to keep that information
in a locked format so that future generations could benefit
from it. Right, it could be fixed in some way
(09:06):
for you know, perhaps hundreds of years, so that that
people could read an original account or at least a
particular account of an event, or you know, to tell
a story. Now. Car says actually has a very interesting
little passage where he talks about how so creates uh
(09:26):
sorry Socrates. How Socrates bemoaned the development of writing because
he thought that by writing things down you did two things. One,
you reduced a person's ability to actually take in information,
understand it comprehended, and then build on it. Okright, because
now it's in a concrete format. And too, he was
(09:48):
afraid that it would give people a false sense of
knowledge that because there was a written thing down, there's
a written format of this information, that that would make
people feel like they knew more than they did. The
knowledge was written down, it wasn't necessarily in the person's head,
and so he was worried that people would become less
wise over time because they would be relying upon this
(10:12):
written information. They wouldn't really understand it, they would just
think they did. Hence cars argument exactly. Car takes that
to a further extent. Now. Um, like many many people,
I've read David Allen's Getting Things Done because there are
just so many things I have to do in a day,
a typical day here at how Stuff Works dot Com
(10:32):
and my my own personal stuff that I wanted to
improve my productivity. And one of the things that uh
that Alan argues is that it is stressful to try
to remember all the things that you have to do.
M Um. So one of the things he says that
is important for you to do is to write something
down as soon as it occurs to you. Uh, so
(10:55):
that you have you know, have it written down that
you know you need to do it. You don't have
to remember it anymore. You need to put it in
some sort of system. Now, it could be a piece
of paper, it could be a smartphone, it could be whatever.
It doesn't matter what the medium is in this case. Um,
but you need to write it down some way. And
that sort of plays into uh, you know Socrates slash
(11:16):
Cars argument, because if you're documenting everything, you don't have
to remember it anymore. For for Alan, that is a
sense of relief. You don't have to remember it anymore.
You can take a deep breath and relax knowing that
you're going to remember to do this thing because you've
written it down. Um. On the other hand, however, you
have the other argument that, well, you don't have to
(11:37):
remember it anymore, so you're not training your brain to
remember all the things that you have to do, and
you're not to focus on it. Yeah, you're not making connections.
That's another thing that Marian Wolf mentions in her book
is that the brain makes actual neuron connections kind of
like circuits really uh, for concepts, and you can start
(11:58):
to connect seemingly unrelated concepts in your brain just by
thinking about it, concentrating on it. Uh, it's not just
that you know you you encounter information and now you
know it. It's that you encounter information, you think about it,
you actually take the time to consider it, and you
start building connections from other information you've gathered previously, and
(12:20):
you form new knowledge based on that. It's it's similar
to a process a philosophy known as contemplative learning. In
contemplative learning, the goal is to actually take time to
consider the information that you have just encountered and to
incorporate that into your body of knowledge, not just to say, oh,
(12:43):
I encountered this fact, but to really have a deeper
understanding of what that fact means. What's what it's it's relevance,
it's context, that sort of thing. It's sort of an
element of critical thinking, but it's a particular, a particular
way to get to critical thinking. It also the think
on how much you read about contemplative learning, it can
start start sounding little touchy feely. It's got a lot
(13:05):
of elements of meditation in there, and there's a lot
of Uh, there's a lot of tie ins between contemplative
learning and spirituality, things that someone who may be more
skeptical might find a little um questionable. All right, But
the idea here is that you are allowing these connections
to be made, and you're not just encountering information, reacting
(13:26):
and then discarding, which is that That's kind of what
cars argument is that the way we encounter information now
on the web, we will look for some relevant facts
for whatever it is we're searching on, and if we
don't see it pretty quickly will bounce to another source, right, yes,
and we may never go back to that first source ever. Again,
(13:48):
We've mentioned that that study by the hands Britto Institute
in Germany several times on the podcast now Um, in
which they had studied what some people call the web
generation u UM and UH. Also another group in Britain
had had had done this, and I scrolled past the
name of it UM. The Center for Information Behavior and
(14:10):
the Evolution of Research cyber Cyber at the University College
London both did similar studies on young people who were
sort of expected to know how to use all the
ins and outs of the Internet because because they grew
up with it and they were they were born, they
were born after the Internet with public Yes. Um, I
studied this in my UH in pursuit of my Master
(14:31):
of Science and Information Sciences degree because I was looking
at and the way of people seek information, and those
studies both backup Car in that regard and that people
tend to look for information on the Internet. Now, this
doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it's
making you more or less intelligent. Uh, it's the way
seek people seek information on the Internet, and they do.
(14:52):
They skim from site to site, they hop around a lot. Um.
Very few people spend a lot of time on websites
when they are seeking information on a particular topic. Um.
And uh, I should point out to that the people
who have been demonizing Car for making these arguments. Uh,
he says. Look, no, I'm a writer. I absolutely need
(15:16):
the Internet. The Internet is completely revolutionized the way I
search for information, and it's awesome and it's brilliant. It's
just seems to be anecdotally, it seems to be changing
the way I think, you know, which may not be
a bad thing. No, changing the way we think that.
This has been the history of technology and ways of
recording information. It's just one of those things where we
(15:39):
do start to adapt the way we think. It's something
that's really unavoidable. I mean, unless you become a Luddite
and you decide that you're going to go and adopt
Socrates as manner and try and gain information that way.
And even then it's just on an individual basis. You know,
you're not going to stop the way the world is going.
Um and yeah, the study that you were referring to,
the cyber study, let me read exactly what they're finding was.
(16:02):
It was called that they called it horizontal information seeking.
This is a form of skimming activity where people view
just one or two pages from an academic site and
then bounce out, perhaps never to return. The figures are instructive.
Around six of the journal users view no more than
(16:22):
three pages, and a majority up to never return. So
the suggestion there is that people are able to find information,
but they may not necessarily comprehend it fully. So it
becomes sort of like our brains become filters, right, we
start filtering out anything that's not relevant to whatever it
(16:42):
is we're searching, and we sort of we sort of
pinpoint anything that is relevant and then uh, even Carl
will mention um and and also Clive Thompson of Wired
who wrote about this as well. He he had an
interesting article about the Let's see why. He called it
your outboard brain knows All was the title of his article,
(17:03):
and he's written about the subject multiple times as well.
He writes about how he uses various things like the
email and Wikipedia and other Internet sites to rely on
information so that he no longer retains it himself, and
that he he thinks of it as a richer thinking experience,
that he can add really valuable information in arguments and
(17:26):
discussions by linking to it. Uh So it almost becomes like, oh,
I know, I you know, I saw this, I found
this information. It's relevant to this discussion. Here you go.
But that's really all. That's incredibly different from understanding, retaining,
and being able to articulate information. It just means that
you're really good at searching. But that might be what
(17:48):
the new definition of intelligence is. It may not be
that's rotting our brains. You know. We kind of jokingly
titled the podcast that, but that it's it's changing the
the folk of how we think. Instead of thinking in
one way, we're now becoming really good at seeking out
and pulling up information. Although that that also takes practice
(18:11):
because the studies showed that students weren't necessarily uh innately
gifted with that ability. Now, there was an article called
uh and of course cars title has been echoed in
other titles, so this is kind of sound very familiar
an article style title Does Google Make Us Stupid? By
UM by Janet Quitney Anderson from Elon University and Lee
(18:34):
Rainey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. UM
and UH. They actually had UH referred to a rebuttal
from uh Jemy Cassio I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, UM,
who was an affiliate at the Institute for the Future
and a senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and
(18:56):
Emerging Technologies UM. And in response to that, they had
spoken with Nicholas Carr, who said, you know, clarified a
little bit more to say, Uh, the answer to our
question are the question we pose in our podcast title
is no, it's not about whether your i Q was dropping.
Your intelligence quote has nothing to do with this. It's
(19:16):
because it's whether or not people are becoming utilitarian thinkers. UM.
But Cassio UH, quoted neural physiologist William Calvin who basically
said that uh I was referring to an ancient volcanic
incident that that humanity learned from and in order in
order to survive. And UH. Basically the argument in the
(19:40):
UH in that article, which UH is really really awesome
also on the the Atlantic, basically is, look, this is
a new way of thinking. We'll adapt to it, and
we're gonna have to adapt to it if we're going
to survive because there's so much going on now, so
many different kinds of events. Technology has advanced to the
(20:00):
point where we are going to have to think differently
and we'll just have to get used to UH what
he calls fluid intelligence. Actually scientists call it fluid intelligence,
which is UH the ability to find meaning and confusion
and to solve new problems. As the quote there, UM, basically,
it's not memorizing and reciting facts. It's to sort of
(20:23):
think on your feet if you will. UM. And basically
his argument is, no, you know, it's it. It may
seem a little weird, it may seem a little funky
and and possibly even scary to some people to have
to think in this new paradigm, but um, we will
will learn and it will be able to use our
brains in this new technology. We just have to get
(20:45):
used to it. And we've kind of addressed this sort
of in our podcast about how to conduct research online.
It's kind of talking about how to use this tool
in the most effective way. And critical thinking is still
very important even in this new paradigm of thinking. It's
just that critical thinking, the definition of it may have
to be tweaked, rather than sitting there and saying, all right, well,
(21:08):
you have to really consider this information. It might be
you have to be able to evaluate things like the source. Uh,
it's validity, it's relevance. You may have to be able
to do that on a very tight schedule. You may
have to do it quickly because there's so much out
there that you have to be able to separate the
(21:29):
good from the bad quickly, or else you're just overwhelmed
with information, some of which may not be very valuable. UM.
I'm sorry, go ahead. I was going to say that.
Car points out that the internet can be a very
interruptive medium too. That you know, if you have alerts
turned on, if you're an accuser and you have growl
(21:50):
turned on, or if you're using Windows and have UM
outlook open and you have the little uh windows popping
up for example here at work or throwing around story ideas,
and everyone else starts joining in. All of a sudden,
you have new alerts popping up on your desktop every
five or six minutes or more frequently, depending on how
how often you turn it on. So pat your working
(22:12):
jokes are being thrown in there. But yeah, if you're
working on a project and you have these constant interruptions
from I AM and Twitter and your email, they may
distract you. Depending on the way you're thinking, they may
distract you from what it is that you're working on. UM,
and that can be that can be disruptive, especially for
somebody who's used to thinking in a very linear fashion. Yeah,
(22:34):
that actually brings us to another study I wanted to
mention in passing at least as a psychonomic bulletin and
review article Supertaskers Profiles in Extraordinary multitasking Ability and a Yeah,
this was a study by Jason M. Watson and David L. Strayer,
and they wanted to see, you know, people are getting
(22:55):
accustomed to having to multitask, but most of us aren't
very good at it. He wanted to kind of see
exactly how how well people could deal with handling more
than one task at a time. It also ties into
the the statement about how using a cell phone while
driving is equivalent to driving well under the influence of alcohol,
(23:17):
or actually worse than driving under the influence of alcohol,
depending upon the study. So what he did was he
and Strayer actually and he they did. They took two
hundred subjects, so small sample size. We should go ahead
and sure, yeah, you know, two hundred subjects scientific, but
could be more scientific, right, you're not scientific enough. But
(23:38):
they took two hundred subjects and they they gave them
tasks where they had to juggle multiple tasks at the
same time. They found that all but two point five
percent of the subjects performed poorly when having to do
multiple tasks at once. So, uh, they could still perform
the tasks, but they couldn't do it with the level
(23:58):
of proficiency they could if they were concentering on just
one task at a time. Two point five percent of
those people could handle it without any demonstrative reduction in
their abilities. So they were apparently able to do multiple
tasks just as well as if they were concentering on
a single one at a time, this two point five
percent were called super taskers. Now, the interesting thing is
(24:22):
that most of us think we're super taskers, even if
we aren't. That there was another element of the study
is that people who thought that they were really really
good at this. Uh, there were way more people who
thought they were really good at it than the actual
people who were Like, you only had two point five
percent who were good at it, but almost everyone thought
they were in that two point five percent um. Now,
(24:44):
it may be that the super tasking phenomenon is something
that will grow over time. It may be that we
as a species will adapt to this multitasking demand and
that future generations will actually be super taskers. Now, in Lee,
it's not it doesn't look like that's the case. It
looks like most of us aren't super taskers. But it
(25:06):
may be that that's part of this process of the
way we change our thinking, that future generations of humans
will actually be very adept at super tasking. Uh. And
of course, then there's also another science fiction need kind
of argument where you could say, yeah, or the singularity,
you'll take care of it because we'll all have, you know, uh,
(25:27):
sixty four core processors in our heads and we'll be
able to handle sixty four distinct processes at the same
time without any reduction in proficiency. That would be really useful.
I wouldn't mind having that. Yeah, I wouldn't either, except
my phone just died and I can only imagine what
would happen if the processor in my brain died. Yeah,
that could be problematic. But but that that kind of
(25:49):
ties into this whole technology rutting your brain thing. Again.
It's it's not it's we should we should go so
far as to say, it's not the technology that's doing this.
So it's it's not technologies fault at all. Yeah, So
we do not hate technology. We aren't afraid of technology.
Chris and I both embrace technology. We work for a
technology company. We each have our own gadgets that are
(26:11):
hooked into various networks. Um, it's just that it's the
process of having to deal with so many different lines
of communication when we're not used to that. That's not
how we've trained our brains over the last hundreds of generations, really,
And it's that, uh that you know, we had to
develop new skills in order to consume information. There's so
(26:33):
much information out there that you had to do it
if you weren't wanted to have a meaningful experience, right,
And I think to the thing to keep in mind
for both people on both sides of this argument is
it's gonna it's all going to depend on the individual.
Some people process information differently from the way other people
process information, and uh, you know, it's safe to say
(26:55):
that someone like the Nicholas car spoke with many of
the other writers that he knows and said, you know, look,
I can't It's hard for me to focus on reading
a book when I've been spending my time with the
Internet because I'm I've been immersing myself in a very
uh and a very short message, very immediate message type
of thing. And then I sit down with a book
and it's difficult for me to concentrate because I keep
(27:16):
wondering what's going on on the internet. And for them,
that may be the case, but it may not be
for some of the people who are saying, well, you know,
you guys are crazy, That's absolutely not the way we
think you're You're just you know, afraid of technology and
and you honestly don't know how to manage it, and
you need to find a technology that's that you can
use to manage your other technologies. Um, and maybe that's
(27:37):
true for one person, but maybe not for the other.
So you can say at least that there seems to
be some relevance to his argument in the in the
sense that old media adopts new ways of presenting information
that are similar to the way new media does. Well.
Marshall mclewin pointed that out long before the Internet became something, uh,
(27:59):
you know, for people to consider. It's just the medium
is the message, and you can't separate that the the
actual medium it comes to you in is also part
of the message itself, and that you can't separate them
completely from one another. That's why any book is different
from a paperbook. Well, it's also it also shows how
old media has tried to adapt by doing things like
(28:19):
you may look at a magazine and you see that
there are a lot of little boxes that have, uh,
an excerpt from that very article that you're reading. Like
if you were to read the full article and then
read the little box, he would realize, Hey, this is
just a quote that comes right from the article. But
that's quo. Yeah, it's an attempt to to give relevant
information in a very quick, efficient way for people who
(28:42):
that's how they consume information. It's also a good way
to fill two inches if you can't find the shop
at Okay, But I'm trying to say here, the Internet
has kind of trained us all to to consume information
that way. We're looking for the relevant facts as quickly
as possible, and everything else is kind of in the way.
And that's sort of how they sold media is kind
(29:02):
of adopting it to They're like, well, you know what,
if we don't play that game, no one's gonna buy
the magazine, So let's do it this way. And um,
I wanted to kind of talk a little bit, just
just sort of closing out there are two different uh
uh concepts I wanted to get across to our audience.
One is epistemology, which is the philosophy of knowledge and
(29:23):
how we gain knowledge and what knowledge is. That's sort
of guided a lot of this discussion because there is
a difference between information and knowledge. You know, you can
encounter information, be able to recite information doesn't mean you
know it, not not necessarily anyway, depending on how you
define no. Really, because again this is philosophy, so that's
a fascinating subject. If you're interested in this, I would
(29:45):
recommend looking into epistemology and some of the writers who
are really known for their their work in that field
of philosophy. The other is cognitive science, which again is
sort of how we learn and and what processes are
important the way we learn, and uh, it's just one
sort of branch of science that kind of tackles that.
(30:06):
And again it has a lot to do with psychology,
it has a lot to do with uh, various forms
of of imparting information or absorbing information. That's also really
interesting to me. So those two different fields or something
I would recommend listeners look into if they find this
topic really fascinating. If you don't, then I apologize for
(30:27):
the last thirty minutes, But I don't. I don't think
there is other than the literal uh answer. No, technology
is not rotting our brains. At least it doesn't appear
to be at this point. I haven't seen any studies
that suggests that, and even Nicholas Carr said, no, that's
not what I meant, um, But yeah, I mean it's
it's something that I think we're going to have to
(30:48):
do a lot of thinking about because the Internet is
still very new too many of us. Um uh and
and you know, even those of us who have like me,
who have had you know, twenty years of experiences in
the internet, you know, I still don't think that's long
enough to really grasp how it's going to affect how
we learn and how we think, how we deliver information.
So I think this is the kind of thing that's
(31:10):
going to require more study before we really understand what's
going on, and then that'll all change and want have
to study. That will really be fascinating if we could
just get a quick glimpse a hundred years in the
future and just see what society is like and what,
you know, what's the concept of learning at that point?
Of course, by then maybe we're just doing the matrix
thing and just downloading information directly to our brains. Yeah.
(31:31):
That looked painful though, the thing that shooting in the
back of your head. Yeah yeah, well, you know it's
not for everyone. No, I'm just saying, there is no spoon.
So well, that wraps up this discussion. If you guys
have any questions or comments, if you want to let
us know what you think, you can follow us on
Twitter or join our Facebook group. You'll find both of
(31:51):
both of those under the handle of text Stuff hs W,
or you can email us because we know you guys
love to do that. We would love to be able
to respond to all of you, but man, it's getting hard. Um.
The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot
com and Chris and I will talk to you again
really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure
(32:17):
to check us out on Twitter text Stuff hs WSR handle,
and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook
dot com slash tech Stuff h s W. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com and be sure to check out the
new tech stuff blog now on the how Stuff Works homepage,
(32:41):
brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello there, everyone,
Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Polette, and
(00:20):
I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Sitting across from me, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on
fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched seabeams glitter
in the dark near the tan Houser Gate. All those
moments will be lost in time, like tears and rain. Well,
(00:41):
it's a great way to start this podcast, as usual.
If you know the source of the quote, please feel
free to drop by uh Facebook or Twitter and let
us know. Yeah. I thought that one was appropriate because
the discussion we're going to have does play somewhat into
the realm of art of facial intelligence somewhat. We're going
(01:02):
to talk about technology and its effect on our noggins,
specifically gray matter, that brain that's slashing around in that
cranium of yours. Yeah, this is this has been a
topic of some debate recently. Um, probably, I guess more
over the past year. Um, thanks to our not really
good friend but someone we follow closely, Nicholas Carry, the
(01:25):
technology writer. He wrote an interesting article for The Atlantic
back in two thousand eight. Uh, and it was titled
is Google Making Us Stupid? Wow? Is it that long?
And that was two thousand eight July August two thou
eight edition. I've got it up right now, so as
I'm sorry, I was just gonna say, yeah, he wrote
this article is Google Making Us Stupid? And it was
(01:45):
an interesting, um, just an interesting take on technology, the
way we consume information, in the way we think. Yes,
and uh. He actually followed that up with a a
much longer format, a whole book called The Shallows Um,
which some people have taken issue with the title suggesting
he's already decided that we're all stupid. But I'm not
(02:08):
so certain that he actually meant it that way. Yeah.
That that's that sounds to me like the sort of
criticism one might make before fully uh reading a book,
you know, one of those things where it's just your
initial reaction to a title and then so let me
let me give you a little story here, Chris, Yes,
(02:30):
all right, Uh, Now, when I was going to school
the Internet was not really something I had access to
all the way up until until the point where I
got into college. Really, my sophomore year in college was
when I was starting to really get get access to
the Internet. I can relate to that. So up to
(02:50):
that point, I studied just the normal way you would
attend classes. You would read, uh study notes and read
books and that sort of thing, and that's how you
you would gain knowledge. Now today I work for a
company where I write articles and blog posts and do
podcasts where I have to research various topics new ones
(03:12):
each week. I'm doing so using the Internet. Meanwhile, I
also am tapped into various communication tools such as instant
messenger email. I've got text messaging on my phone when
it works. We're recording this on the day that my
android phone died. Anyway, normally I have access to multiple
(03:33):
means of communication, and this would presumably give me access
to to amounts of information I never would have had
access to before. Write a huge, deep, broad scope of information. However,
despite this amazing ability to tap into lots of information,
(03:55):
I find that it is much more difficult to concentrate
on a single task for an any length of time
and so I have decided that technology is to blame,
and uh, it is ruining my brain. Now, what could
possibly be wrong with this argument? Well, I would say
that you're using anecdotal evidence. It's a good point. Yes,
(04:20):
I am speaking from my own experience. I have not
conducted any any deep study of this, mainly because I
can't concentrate on that task for long enough to do it. Um, yeah,
this is it is anecdotal. It's now that does not
mean that the information is wrong, right, Yeah, so this
is This is something that I wanted to address early
(04:41):
in this podcast because this is really going to be
an interesting philosophical discussion. It's not just technology, it's really philosophy.
And part of that philosophy is that anecdotal evidence is
not really good evidence to base an argument off of.
But but that does not mean that it is in valid.
It just means that, you know, there there are better
(05:02):
ways to support your argument. Now, I've read quite a
bit of agreement with Mr Carr's work, and I've also
read quite a bit of disagreement. Uh, most of the
disagreement I have read suggests that they all think, uh,
you know, he's either afraid of technology or that he's
(05:25):
basing it on his own anecdotal evidence, which um, I
think the anecdotal evidence sort of started him down the path.
But in the Shallows he does explain, uh, a number
of studies that have been done on the attention span
of people who are using technology for work. Um And
(05:48):
and therefore, you know, I am inclined to say that
he's not. I'm why I'm not necessarily agreeing with his
arguments in both the article and the book. I would
say that um or is at least a kernel of
truth in it that it can be very difficult for
some people to manage the flow of information coming to
(06:10):
them from multiple sources, especially the Internet, where there are
so many different kinds of sources um to choose from. Yeah,
and going further than that, he car makes his argument
in in his article and I'm sure in the book
as well, but he makes his argument that reading and
the way we consume information shapes the way we think.
(06:32):
So the argument here is that there are two different
ways you can think about thinking. Okay, there's the the
method where you say our brains are structured in such
a way that thinking is a process that is going
to be the same no matter how you consume your
information like it's just it's just a device. In a way,
(06:54):
we're just reducing it in complexity to call it a device.
It's a device that can accept information and then process it,
and then we act on that information in some way.
The other argument is that the brain is a very elastic,
flexible organ that's that will generate different ways of thinking
based upon the stimuli that it encounters. And in a
(07:18):
way that argument makes a lot of sense because one
of the the sources that car sites in his article
is Maryanne Wolf's Proost and the Squid, which is a
book about reading and learning, and Mary Ann Wolfe argues
that humans are not born with the ability to read.
(07:39):
It's not an innate ability that we possess, unlike say
vision or hearing, where we can interpret the information in
the world around us using those sensory organs. That's something
that's innate that unless you have some sort of disability
or or disease or whatever, or some other form of
of impt a mint to those senses, you can. That's
(08:02):
one way you can gather information and learn about your environment.
Reading is a skill that we had to invent and
develop over time, and it's relatively recent. It's just a
couple of thousand years old. And that through reading, we
changed the way we thought. So the developing reading was
(08:23):
a skill that we had to learn. Through reading, we
changed the way we learn. We could preserve information unlike
we could before. Like before it was all folklore. Right,
you passed it down by explaining to people what you knew,
and then they would take the words you said and
they would apply it so that they would understand the concept,
(08:45):
and then they would have to pass it on. But
there was no easy way to share that information. It
meant that knowledge was kept in small pools across the
human race. Writing allowed us to to keep that information
in a locked format so that future generations could benefit
from it. Right, it could be fixed in some way
(09:06):
for you know, perhaps hundreds of years, so that that
people could read an original account or at least a
particular account of an event, or you know, to tell
a story. Now. Car says actually has a very interesting
little passage where he talks about how so creates uh
(09:26):
sorry Socrates. How Socrates bemoaned the development of writing because
he thought that by writing things down you did two things. One,
you reduced a person's ability to actually take in information,
understand it comprehended, and then build on it. Okright, because
now it's in a concrete format. And too, he was
(09:48):
afraid that it would give people a false sense of
knowledge that because there was a written thing down, there's
a written format of this information, that that would make
people feel like they knew more than they did. The
knowledge was written down, it wasn't necessarily in the person's head,
and so he was worried that people would become less
wise over time because they would be relying upon this
(10:12):
written information. They wouldn't really understand it, they would just
think they did. Hence cars argument exactly. Car takes that
to a further extent. Now. Um, like many many people,
I've read David Allen's Getting Things Done because there are
just so many things I have to do in a day,
a typical day here at how Stuff Works dot Com
(10:32):
and my my own personal stuff that I wanted to
improve my productivity. And one of the things that uh
that Alan argues is that it is stressful to try
to remember all the things that you have to do.
M Um. So one of the things he says that
is important for you to do is to write something
down as soon as it occurs to you. Uh, so
(10:55):
that you have you know, have it written down that
you know you need to do it. You don't have
to remember it anymore. You need to put it in
some sort of system. Now, it could be a piece
of paper, it could be a smartphone, it could be whatever.
It doesn't matter what the medium is in this case. Um,
but you need to write it down some way. And
that sort of plays into uh, you know Socrates slash
(11:16):
Cars argument, because if you're documenting everything, you don't have
to remember it anymore. For for Alan, that is a
sense of relief. You don't have to remember it anymore.
You can take a deep breath and relax knowing that
you're going to remember to do this thing because you've
written it down. Um. On the other hand, however, you
have the other argument that, well, you don't have to
(11:37):
remember it anymore, so you're not training your brain to
remember all the things that you have to do, and
you're not to focus on it. Yeah, you're not making connections.
That's another thing that Marian Wolf mentions in her book
is that the brain makes actual neuron connections kind of
like circuits really uh, for concepts, and you can start
(11:58):
to connect seemingly unrelated concepts in your brain just by
thinking about it, concentrating on it. Uh, it's not just
that you know you you encounter information and now you
know it. It's that you encounter information, you think about it,
you actually take the time to consider it, and you
start building connections from other information you've gathered previously, and
(12:20):
you form new knowledge based on that. It's it's similar
to a process a philosophy known as contemplative learning. In
contemplative learning, the goal is to actually take time to
consider the information that you have just encountered and to
incorporate that into your body of knowledge, not just to say, oh,
(12:43):
I encountered this fact, but to really have a deeper
understanding of what that fact means. What's what it's it's relevance,
it's context, that sort of thing. It's sort of an
element of critical thinking, but it's a particular, a particular
way to get to critical thinking. It also the think
on how much you read about contemplative learning, it can
start start sounding little touchy feely. It's got a lot
(13:05):
of elements of meditation in there, and there's a lot
of Uh, there's a lot of tie ins between contemplative
learning and spirituality, things that someone who may be more
skeptical might find a little um questionable. All right, But
the idea here is that you are allowing these connections
to be made, and you're not just encountering information, reacting
(13:26):
and then discarding, which is that That's kind of what
cars argument is that the way we encounter information now
on the web, we will look for some relevant facts
for whatever it is we're searching on, and if we
don't see it pretty quickly will bounce to another source, right, yes,
and we may never go back to that first source ever. Again,
(13:48):
We've mentioned that that study by the hands Britto Institute
in Germany several times on the podcast now Um, in
which they had studied what some people call the web
generation u UM and UH. Also another group in Britain
had had had done this, and I scrolled past the
name of it UM. The Center for Information Behavior and
(14:10):
the Evolution of Research cyber Cyber at the University College
London both did similar studies on young people who were
sort of expected to know how to use all the
ins and outs of the Internet because because they grew
up with it and they were they were born, they
were born after the Internet with public Yes. Um, I
studied this in my UH in pursuit of my Master
(14:31):
of Science and Information Sciences degree because I was looking
at and the way of people seek information, and those
studies both backup Car in that regard and that people
tend to look for information on the Internet. Now, this
doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it's
making you more or less intelligent. Uh, it's the way
seek people seek information on the Internet, and they do.
(14:52):
They skim from site to site, they hop around a lot. Um.
Very few people spend a lot of time on websites
when they are seeking information on a particular topic. Um.
And uh, I should point out to that the people
who have been demonizing Car for making these arguments. Uh,
he says. Look, no, I'm a writer. I absolutely need
(15:16):
the Internet. The Internet is completely revolutionized the way I
search for information, and it's awesome and it's brilliant. It's
just seems to be anecdotally, it seems to be changing
the way I think, you know, which may not be
a bad thing. No, changing the way we think that.
This has been the history of technology and ways of
recording information. It's just one of those things where we
(15:39):
do start to adapt the way we think. It's something
that's really unavoidable. I mean, unless you become a Luddite
and you decide that you're going to go and adopt
Socrates as manner and try and gain information that way.
And even then it's just on an individual basis. You know,
you're not going to stop the way the world is going.
Um and yeah, the study that you were referring to,
the cyber study, let me read exactly what they're finding was.
(16:02):
It was called that they called it horizontal information seeking.
This is a form of skimming activity where people view
just one or two pages from an academic site and
then bounce out, perhaps never to return. The figures are instructive.
Around six of the journal users view no more than
(16:22):
three pages, and a majority up to never return. So
the suggestion there is that people are able to find information,
but they may not necessarily comprehend it fully. So it
becomes sort of like our brains become filters, right, we
start filtering out anything that's not relevant to whatever it
(16:42):
is we're searching, and we sort of we sort of
pinpoint anything that is relevant and then uh, even Carl
will mention um and and also Clive Thompson of Wired
who wrote about this as well. He he had an
interesting article about the Let's see why. He called it
your outboard brain knows All was the title of his article,
(17:03):
and he's written about the subject multiple times as well.
He writes about how he uses various things like the
email and Wikipedia and other Internet sites to rely on
information so that he no longer retains it himself, and
that he he thinks of it as a richer thinking experience,
that he can add really valuable information in arguments and
(17:26):
discussions by linking to it. Uh So it almost becomes like, oh,
I know, I you know, I saw this, I found
this information. It's relevant to this discussion. Here you go.
But that's really all. That's incredibly different from understanding, retaining,
and being able to articulate information. It just means that
you're really good at searching. But that might be what
(17:48):
the new definition of intelligence is. It may not be
that's rotting our brains. You know. We kind of jokingly
titled the podcast that, but that it's it's changing the
the folk of how we think. Instead of thinking in
one way, we're now becoming really good at seeking out
and pulling up information. Although that that also takes practice
(18:11):
because the studies showed that students weren't necessarily uh innately
gifted with that ability. Now, there was an article called
uh and of course cars title has been echoed in
other titles, so this is kind of sound very familiar
an article style title Does Google Make Us Stupid? By
UM by Janet Quitney Anderson from Elon University and Lee
(18:34):
Rainey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. UM
and UH. They actually had UH referred to a rebuttal
from uh Jemy Cassio I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, UM,
who was an affiliate at the Institute for the Future
and a senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and
(18:56):
Emerging Technologies UM. And in response to that, they had
spoken with Nicholas Carr, who said, you know, clarified a
little bit more to say, Uh, the answer to our
question are the question we pose in our podcast title
is no, it's not about whether your i Q was dropping.
Your intelligence quote has nothing to do with this. It's
(19:16):
because it's whether or not people are becoming utilitarian thinkers. UM.
But Cassio UH, quoted neural physiologist William Calvin who basically
said that uh I was referring to an ancient volcanic
incident that that humanity learned from and in order in
order to survive. And UH. Basically the argument in the
(19:40):
UH in that article, which UH is really really awesome
also on the the Atlantic, basically is, look, this is
a new way of thinking. We'll adapt to it, and
we're gonna have to adapt to it if we're going
to survive because there's so much going on now, so
many different kinds of events. Technology has advanced to the
(20:00):
point where we are going to have to think differently
and we'll just have to get used to UH what
he calls fluid intelligence. Actually scientists call it fluid intelligence,
which is UH the ability to find meaning and confusion
and to solve new problems. As the quote there, UM, basically,
it's not memorizing and reciting facts. It's to sort of
(20:23):
think on your feet if you will. UM. And basically
his argument is, no, you know, it's it. It may
seem a little weird, it may seem a little funky
and and possibly even scary to some people to have
to think in this new paradigm, but um, we will
will learn and it will be able to use our
brains in this new technology. We just have to get
(20:45):
used to it. And we've kind of addressed this sort
of in our podcast about how to conduct research online.
It's kind of talking about how to use this tool
in the most effective way. And critical thinking is still
very important even in this new paradigm of thinking. It's
just that critical thinking, the definition of it may have
to be tweaked, rather than sitting there and saying, all right, well,
(21:08):
you have to really consider this information. It might be
you have to be able to evaluate things like the source. Uh,
it's validity, it's relevance. You may have to be able
to do that on a very tight schedule. You may
have to do it quickly because there's so much out
there that you have to be able to separate the
(21:29):
good from the bad quickly, or else you're just overwhelmed
with information, some of which may not be very valuable. UM.
I'm sorry, go ahead. I was going to say that.
Car points out that the internet can be a very
interruptive medium too. That you know, if you have alerts
turned on, if you're an accuser and you have growl
(21:50):
turned on, or if you're using Windows and have UM
outlook open and you have the little uh windows popping
up for example here at work or throwing around story ideas,
and everyone else starts joining in. All of a sudden,
you have new alerts popping up on your desktop every
five or six minutes or more frequently, depending on how
how often you turn it on. So pat your working
(22:12):
jokes are being thrown in there. But yeah, if you're
working on a project and you have these constant interruptions
from I AM and Twitter and your email, they may
distract you. Depending on the way you're thinking, they may
distract you from what it is that you're working on. UM,
and that can be that can be disruptive, especially for
somebody who's used to thinking in a very linear fashion. Yeah,
(22:34):
that actually brings us to another study I wanted to
mention in passing at least as a psychonomic bulletin and
review article Supertaskers Profiles in Extraordinary multitasking Ability and a Yeah,
this was a study by Jason M. Watson and David L. Strayer,
and they wanted to see, you know, people are getting
(22:55):
accustomed to having to multitask, but most of us aren't
very good at it. He wanted to kind of see
exactly how how well people could deal with handling more
than one task at a time. It also ties into
the the statement about how using a cell phone while
driving is equivalent to driving well under the influence of alcohol,
(23:17):
or actually worse than driving under the influence of alcohol,
depending upon the study. So what he did was he
and Strayer actually and he they did. They took two
hundred subjects, so small sample size. We should go ahead
and sure, yeah, you know, two hundred subjects scientific, but
could be more scientific, right, you're not scientific enough. But
(23:38):
they took two hundred subjects and they they gave them
tasks where they had to juggle multiple tasks at the
same time. They found that all but two point five
percent of the subjects performed poorly when having to do
multiple tasks at once. So, uh, they could still perform
the tasks, but they couldn't do it with the level
(23:58):
of proficiency they could if they were concentering on just
one task at a time. Two point five percent of
those people could handle it without any demonstrative reduction in
their abilities. So they were apparently able to do multiple
tasks just as well as if they were concentering on
a single one at a time, this two point five
percent were called super taskers. Now, the interesting thing is
(24:22):
that most of us think we're super taskers, even if
we aren't. That there was another element of the study
is that people who thought that they were really really
good at this. Uh, there were way more people who
thought they were really good at it than the actual
people who were Like, you only had two point five
percent who were good at it, but almost everyone thought
they were in that two point five percent um. Now,
(24:44):
it may be that the super tasking phenomenon is something
that will grow over time. It may be that we
as a species will adapt to this multitasking demand and
that future generations will actually be super taskers. Now, in Lee,
it's not it doesn't look like that's the case. It
looks like most of us aren't super taskers. But it
(25:06):
may be that that's part of this process of the
way we change our thinking, that future generations of humans
will actually be very adept at super tasking. Uh. And
of course, then there's also another science fiction need kind
of argument where you could say, yeah, or the singularity,
you'll take care of it because we'll all have, you know, uh,
(25:27):
sixty four core processors in our heads and we'll be
able to handle sixty four distinct processes at the same
time without any reduction in proficiency. That would be really useful.
I wouldn't mind having that. Yeah, I wouldn't either, except
my phone just died and I can only imagine what
would happen if the processor in my brain died. Yeah,
that could be problematic. But but that that kind of
(25:49):
ties into this whole technology rutting your brain thing. Again.
It's it's not it's we should we should go so
far as to say, it's not the technology that's doing this.
So it's it's not technologies fault at all. Yeah, So
we do not hate technology. We aren't afraid of technology.
Chris and I both embrace technology. We work for a
technology company. We each have our own gadgets that are
(26:11):
hooked into various networks. Um, it's just that it's the
process of having to deal with so many different lines
of communication when we're not used to that. That's not
how we've trained our brains over the last hundreds of generations, really,
And it's that, uh that you know, we had to
develop new skills in order to consume information. There's so
(26:33):
much information out there that you had to do it
if you weren't wanted to have a meaningful experience, right,
And I think to the thing to keep in mind
for both people on both sides of this argument is
it's gonna it's all going to depend on the individual.
Some people process information differently from the way other people
process information, and uh, you know, it's safe to say
(26:55):
that someone like the Nicholas car spoke with many of
the other writers that he knows and said, you know, look,
I can't It's hard for me to focus on reading
a book when I've been spending my time with the
Internet because I'm I've been immersing myself in a very
uh and a very short message, very immediate message type
of thing. And then I sit down with a book
and it's difficult for me to concentrate because I keep
(27:16):
wondering what's going on on the internet. And for them,
that may be the case, but it may not be
for some of the people who are saying, well, you know,
you guys are crazy, That's absolutely not the way we
think you're You're just you know, afraid of technology and
and you honestly don't know how to manage it, and
you need to find a technology that's that you can
use to manage your other technologies. Um, and maybe that's
(27:37):
true for one person, but maybe not for the other.
So you can say at least that there seems to
be some relevance to his argument in the in the
sense that old media adopts new ways of presenting information
that are similar to the way new media does. Well.
Marshall mclewin pointed that out long before the Internet became something, uh,
(27:59):
you know, for people to consider. It's just the medium
is the message, and you can't separate that the the
actual medium it comes to you in is also part
of the message itself, and that you can't separate them
completely from one another. That's why any book is different
from a paperbook. Well, it's also it also shows how
old media has tried to adapt by doing things like
(28:19):
you may look at a magazine and you see that
there are a lot of little boxes that have, uh,
an excerpt from that very article that you're reading. Like
if you were to read the full article and then
read the little box, he would realize, Hey, this is
just a quote that comes right from the article. But
that's quo. Yeah, it's an attempt to to give relevant
information in a very quick, efficient way for people who
(28:42):
that's how they consume information. It's also a good way
to fill two inches if you can't find the shop
at Okay, But I'm trying to say here, the Internet
has kind of trained us all to to consume information
that way. We're looking for the relevant facts as quickly
as possible, and everything else is kind of in the way.
And that's sort of how they sold media is kind
(29:02):
of adopting it to They're like, well, you know what,
if we don't play that game, no one's gonna buy
the magazine, So let's do it this way. And um,
I wanted to kind of talk a little bit, just
just sort of closing out there are two different uh
uh concepts I wanted to get across to our audience.
One is epistemology, which is the philosophy of knowledge and
(29:23):
how we gain knowledge and what knowledge is. That's sort
of guided a lot of this discussion because there is
a difference between information and knowledge. You know, you can
encounter information, be able to recite information doesn't mean you
know it, not not necessarily anyway, depending on how you
define no. Really, because again this is philosophy, so that's
a fascinating subject. If you're interested in this, I would
(29:45):
recommend looking into epistemology and some of the writers who
are really known for their their work in that field
of philosophy. The other is cognitive science, which again is
sort of how we learn and and what processes are
important the way we learn, and uh, it's just one
sort of branch of science that kind of tackles that.
(30:06):
And again it has a lot to do with psychology,
it has a lot to do with uh, various forms
of of imparting information or absorbing information. That's also really
interesting to me. So those two different fields or something
I would recommend listeners look into if they find this
topic really fascinating. If you don't, then I apologize for
(30:27):
the last thirty minutes, But I don't. I don't think
there is other than the literal uh answer. No, technology
is not rotting our brains. At least it doesn't appear
to be at this point. I haven't seen any studies
that suggests that, and even Nicholas Carr said, no, that's
not what I meant, um, But yeah, I mean it's
it's something that I think we're going to have to
(30:48):
do a lot of thinking about because the Internet is
still very new too many of us. Um uh and
and you know, even those of us who have like me,
who have had you know, twenty years of experiences in
the internet, you know, I still don't think that's long
enough to really grasp how it's going to affect how
we learn and how we think, how we deliver information.
So I think this is the kind of thing that's
(31:10):
going to require more study before we really understand what's
going on, and then that'll all change and want have
to study. That will really be fascinating if we could
just get a quick glimpse a hundred years in the
future and just see what society is like and what,
you know, what's the concept of learning at that point?
Of course, by then maybe we're just doing the matrix
thing and just downloading information directly to our brains. Yeah.
(31:31):
That looked painful though, the thing that shooting in the
back of your head. Yeah yeah, well, you know it's
not for everyone. No, I'm just saying, there is no spoon.
So well, that wraps up this discussion. If you guys
have any questions or comments, if you want to let
us know what you think, you can follow us on
Twitter or join our Facebook group. You'll find both of
(31:51):
both of those under the handle of text Stuff hs W,
or you can email us because we know you guys
love to do that. We would love to be able
to respond to all of you, but man, it's getting hard. Um.
The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot
com and Chris and I will talk to you again
really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure
(32:17):
to check us out on Twitter text Stuff hs WSR handle,
and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook
dot com slash tech Stuff h s W. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com and be sure to check out the
new tech stuff blog now on the how Stuff Works homepage,
(32:41):
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