January 21, 2009
Is Google Making Us Smarter?
An article in the February 2009 Discover Magazine takes up the argument against the July/August 2008 article in The Atlantic that claims that Google is making us stupid. The Atlantic article posed that the Internet is damaging our brains and robbing us of our memories and deep thoughts and that texting and YouTube make us illiterate and shallow.
Discover points out that these "ominous warnings" about the Internet are based on misconceptions about how the mind works and that "we imagine information trickling into our senses and reaching our isolated minds, which then turn that information into a detailed picture of reality. The author states that it "does a bad job of explaining a lot of recent scientific research. In fact, the mind appears to be adapted for reaching out from our heads and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.
Two philosophers, Andy Clark (University of Edinburgh) and David Chalmers (Australian National University), first raised the concept of the extended mind in a 1998 paper called "The Extended Mind" in which they asked a simple question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Most people might answer, “At the skull.” But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.
This argument continues to trigger a debate among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. There is no doubt that the extended mind is a weird concept. One reason it seems so strange is that our minds feel as if they are really totally self-contained.
The Discover article gives several examples of research in this area and describes how we use tools such as a monitor or mouse to create a connection with our brains to facilitate the learning process. "The eagerness with which the brain merges with tools has made it possible to create some stunning mind-machine interfaces. For instance, Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University and his colleagues put electrodes in the brains of monkeys to link them to a robot arm. The monkeys quickly learned how to move the arm around with pure thought; their neurons reorganized, establishing a new feedback loop between brain and robot arm.
Humans are proving just as good at this merger of mind and machine. The U.S. Navy has developed a flight suit for helicopter pilots that delivers little puffs of air on the side of the pilot’s body as his helicopter tilts in that direction. The pilot responds to the puffs by tilting away from them, and the suit passes those signals on to the helicopter’s steering controls. Pilots who train with this system can learn to fly blindfolded or to carry out complex maneuvers, such as holding the helicopter in a stationary hover. The helicopter becomes, in effect, part of the pilot’s body, linked back to his or her mind.
Results like these, Clark argues, reveal a mind that is constantly seeking to extend itself, to grab on to new tools it has never experienced before and merge with them. Some people may be horrified by how passionately people are taking to their laptops and GPS trackers. But to Clark it would be surprising if we didn’t. We are, in Clark’s words, “natural-born cyborgs.”
The extended mind theory doesn’t just change the way we think about the mind. It also changes how we judge what’s good and bad about today’s mind-altering technologies. There’s nothing unnatural about relying on the Internet—Google and all—for information. After all, we are constantly consulting the world around us like a kind of visual Wikipedia. Nor is there anything bad about our brains’ being altered by these new technologies, any more than there is something bad about a monkey’s brain changing as it learns how to play with a rake.
The Discover article concludes that "there’s no point in trying to hack apart the connections between the inside and the outside of the mind. Instead we ought to focus on managing and improving those connections. For instance, we need more powerful ways to filter the information we get online, so that we don’t get a mass case of distractibility. Some people may fear that trying to fine-tune the brain-Internet connection is an impossible task. But if we’ve learned anything since Clark and Chalmers published 'The Extended Mind,' it’s not to underestimate the mind’s ability to adapt to the changing world."
Posted by rsk at January 21, 2009 11:28 AM