Google Why Are You So Stupid

Google: Just another manifestation of an age-old strategy. Chris Hondros/Getty Images hide caption

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Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Google: Only another manifestation of an age-old strategy.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Technology makes us nervous. There was a corking public response to the publication some weeks ago of a Columbia University written report indicating that the Cyberspace is changing the mode nosotros remember information. What Betsy Sparrow and her colleagues found is that nosotros are less likely to recollect data if that information was readily available to usa on the Internet. Is this a crusade for alert? There'south no dubiousness people are alarmed. Only should they be?

The study is worthwhile and of import; but like so much of the best work in cognitive science, it serves just to confirm something we already know.

Consider: I domestic dog ear my books. That style I tin can recall where I left off reading.

Or perhaps nosotros should say: That style I don't need to remember where I left off. I let the volume itself, with its bent down corner, remember for me.

There's nothing fancy, up-to-date or Internet historic period about this instance, to be certain, but information technology is striking nonetheless. It's a down-dwelling illustration of the fact that we naturally tend to offload our memory tasks onto the world around u.s.. This makes practiced sense. Why go to the problem of relying only on our interior cognitive resources to keep track of what is going on around us when the earth is right there and can serve reliably equally a store of information most itself?!?

I say we exercise this naturally. I utilize the term "naturally" advisedly. According to the old view of ourselves, the one that comes down to united states through philosophy from Plato, through Descartes, to mid-twentieth century cerebral scientific discipline, a person is an autonomous locus of decision-making and action. We perceive; we stand for the world in our heads; we make plans; and we human action.

The sense-represent-plan-act flick is a heroic one, merely it is biologically implausible. I don't need to memorize the layout of the physical environs around me — this desk, this room, this city, this land. Later all, the desk, room, city are there before me and we are built — through evolution — to have ready sensory access to it.

Close your optics. Can you lot think the detailed layout effectually you? It turns out that beyond the broad outlines — the basic schematic arrangement of what is where — yous probably cannot. Just this is no cause for warning. We have quick and piece of cake access to the globe effectually us, through eye movements, head movements, body movements.

Does it actually even seem to you as if y'all have a detailed model of the world around you in your head? Be careful. Yes, it seems to yous as if the world is there for you lot. Simply not in your head. It's there. Around y'all. In accomplish. And we are made — through development — to get the information we demand, when nosotros need information technology.

Nosotros have evolved not to be representers-of-the-earth, but to lock-in and go on runway of where we find ourselves. We use landmarks and street signs to detect our way around; arithmetical notation makes information technology possible for usa to calculate with large numbers; nosotros wear wrist watches so that we can know the time without needing to know the fourth dimension; and we build libraries so that nosotros have access to what we need to know, when we need to know information technology.

The so-called Google effect is merely the latest expression of a cognitive strategy that is almost equally certainly as ancient every bit our species.

There is no question that the new technologies are irresolute our lives. But here we demand to remember: The more things change, the more they stay the same. All tools extend what we tin can do, and so, all tools have the potential to extend our minds. Are the changes wrought past the new media of the last 15 years equally profound and far-reaching equally those brought virtually by before technological and media revolutions such as, to name only a few, the invention of writing, or telegraphy, the telephone or the Goggle box? Fourth dimension will tell.

Is Google making yous stupid? Is information technology ruining your memory? No. Only a biologically unrealistic conception of ourselves and our relation to the world around u.s. could lead us to give an affirmative answer to this question.

Nosotros should look elsewhere for the sources of our feet.

You lot can go along upwards with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2011/09/20/140625802/google-is-not-making-you-stupid

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