Is technology rotting our brains?

in the dark near the tan Houser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears and rain. Well, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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