Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  “The way you think” is nicely ambiguous. It could be a worldview. The way I think about climate change, for example, certainly has been changed by the access to knowledge and ideas afforded by the Internet. There is no way that I could have gotten up to speed in climate science without the Web. It has changed my view of the world and its future prospects.

  But, being a physiologist, I first assumed that “the way you think” was asking about process (changing one sort of stuff into another) and how my thought process had been changed by the Internet. And as it happens, I can sketch out how that might work.

  A thinking process can pop up new ideas or make surprising new connections between old thoughts. So in order to explore how the Internet changes the thinking process, consider for a moment how thought normally works.

  Assembling a new combination (“associations”) may be relatively easy. The problem is whether the parts hang together, whether they cohere. We get a nightly reminder of an incoherent thought process from our dreams, which are full of people, places, and occasions that don’t hang together very well. Awake, an incoherent collection is what we often start with, with the mind’s back office shaping it into the coherent version we finally become aware of and occasionally speak aloud. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, William James said a century ago, only “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”

  To keep a half-dozen concepts from blending together like a summer drink, you need some mental structuring. In saying, “I think I saw him leave to go home,” with its four verbs, you are nesting three sentences inside a fourth. We also structure plans (not just anticipation but with contingencies), play games (not just a romp but with arbitrary rules), create structured music (not just rhythm but with harmony and recursion), and employ logic (in long chains).

  And atop this structured capability, we have a fascination with discovering how things hang together, as when we seek hidden patterns within seeming chaos—say, doing crossword and jigsaw puzzles, doing history, doing science, and trying to appreciate a joke. Our long train of connected thoughts is why our consciousness is so different from what came before. Structuring with quality control made it possible for us to think about the past and speculate about the future, in far more depth than if we were ruled by instinct and memory alone.

  I’ll use creating a novel sentence for my examples, but it’s much the same for new thoughts and action plans. Quality is a matter of the degree of coherence, both within a sentence and within an enlarged context. Quality control without a supervising intelligence occurs in nature. On a millennial time scale, we see a new species evolving to better fit an ecological niche. It’s a copying competition biased by the environment, making some variants reproduce better than others. On the time scale of the days to weeks after our autumn flu shot, we see the immune response shaping up a better and better antibody to fit the invading molecule. Again, this is a Darwinian copying competition improving quality. My favorite creative process, operating in milliseconds to minutes, can create a new thought that is spot-on, first time out.

  All are examples of the universal Darwinian process. Though often summarized by Darwin’s phrase, “natural selection,” it is really a process with six essential ingredients. As far as I can tell, you need:

  1. A characteristic pattern (A, the stand-in for the long form—something like a bar code) that can

  2. Be copied, with

  3. Occasional variations (A') or compounding, where

  4. Populations of A and A' clones compete for a limited territory, their relative success biased by

  5. A multifaceted environment of, say, memories and instincts under which some variants do better than others (Darwin’s natural selection), and where

  6. The next round of variants is primarily based on the more successful of the current generation (Darwin’s inheritance principle)

  Such recursion is how you bootstrap quality, why we can start with subconscious thoughts as jumbled as our nighttime dreams and still end up with a sentence of quality or a chain of logic—or anticipate the punch line of a joke.

  You need a quality bootstrapping mechanism in order to figure out what to do with leftovers in the refrigerator; with successive attempts running through your head as you stand there with the door open, you can often find a “quality” scheme (that is, one that doesn’t require another trip to the grocery store).

  So how has the Internet’s connectedness changed the Darwinian creative process? For the data-gathering stage, it affords us more variants, which others have already checked for quality. Search engine speed provides them faster, so that a number can be gathered within the time constraints of working memory—say, ten minutes. When we think we have a good enough assembly, we can do a quick search to see what others have said about near-fits to our candidate. Typically, we will be forced to conclude that our candidate isn’t quite right, and further Internet searches will guide us in creating new variant formulations.

  We can do all of this without the Internet, but it takes time—often much longer than the time span of working memory. To then think about the modified situation requires refreshing working memory with the old stuff. The sheer speed of checking out possibilities can minimize the need for that. Even if one is working from a library carrel, getting a PDF of an article by Wi-Fi is a lot faster than chasing around in the stacks.

  I recall how envious I was when the Berkeley astronomer Rich Muller described how they worked out the comet problem for explaining the timing of mass extinctions. He said that it wasn’t a good week if they couldn’t kill off one or two possibilities for how comets from the Oort cloud might achieve orbits sufficient to strike the Earth. A candidate would either turn out to be physically impossible or make predictions that conflicted with observations. Nothing in brain research can possibly work that fast. It takes us decades to discover better explanations and move on. They could do it in a week.

  And that’s how I have been feeling about the Internet’s expansion of quick access to knowledge and ideas. You can stand on the shoulders of a lot more giants at the same time.

  Brain Candy and Bad Mathematics

  Mark Pagel

  Professor of evolutionary biology, University of Reading, United Kingdom; external professor, Santa Fe Institute

  The Internet isn’t changing the way I or anybody else thinks. We know this because we can still visit some people on Earth who don’t have the Internet, and they think the same way we do. My general-purpose thinking circuits are hardwired into my brain from genetic instructions honed over millions of years of natural selection. True, the brain is plastic, and it responds to the way it is brought up by its user, or to the language it has been taught to speak, but its fundamental structure is not changed this way, except perhaps in extremis—maybe eight hours per day of computer games.

  But the Internet does takes advantage of our appetites, and this changes our thoughts, if not the way we think. Our brains have appetites for thinking, learning, feeling, hearing, and seeing. They like to be used. It is why we do crossword puzzles and brainteasers, read books and visit art galleries, watch films, and play or listen to music. Our brain appetites act as spurs to action, in much the same way our emotions do, or much the same way our other appetites—for food and sex—do. Those of us throughout history who have acted on our world—even if just to wonder why fires start, why the wind blows out of the southwest, or what would happen if we combined heat with clay—will have been more successful than those of us who sat around waiting for things to happen.

  So the Internet is brain candy to me and, I suspect, to most of us—it slakes our appetite to keep our brain occupied. That moment when a search engine pops up its 1,278,000 search results to my query is a moment of pure injection of glucose into my brain. It loves it. That’s why so many of us keep going back for more. Some think that’s why the Internet is going to make us lazy, less literate, and less numerate, that we will forget what lovely things books are, and so on. But even as brain candy
, the Internet’s influence on these sorts of capabilities and pleasures is probably not as serious as the curmudgeons and troglodytes would have you believe. They will be the same people who grumbled about the telegraph, trains, the motorcar, the wireless, and television.

  There are far more interesting ways that the Internet changes our thoughts, and especially the conclusions we draw, and it does this also by acting on our appetites. I speak of contagion, false beliefs, neuroses (especially medical and psychological neuroses), conspiracy theories, and narcissism. The technical point is this: The Internet tricks us into doing bad mathematics; it gets us to do a mathematical integration inside our brains that we don’t know how to do. What? In mathematics, integration is a way of summing an infinite number of things. It is used to calculate quantities like volumes, areas, rates, and averages. Our brains evolved to judge risks, to assess likelihood or probabilities, to defend our minds against undue worry, and to infer what others are thinking, by sampling and summing or averaging across small groups of people, most probably the people in my tribe. They do this automatically, normally without us even knowing about it.

  In the past, my assessment of the risk of being blown up by a terrorist, or of getting swine flu, or of my child being snatched by a pedophile on the way to school was calculated from the steady input of information I would have received mainly from my small local group—because these were the people I spoke to or heard from, and these were the people whose actions affected me.

  What the Internet does, and what mass communication does more generally, is to sample those inputs from the 6.8 billion people on Earth. But my brain is still considering that these inputs have arisen from my local community, because that is the case its assessment circuits were built for. That is what I mean by “bad mathematics.” My brain assumes a small denominator (that is, the bottom number in a fraction), and therefore the answer to the question of how likely something is to happen is too big.

  So when I hear every day of children being snatched, my brain gives me the wrong answer to the question of risk: It has divided a big number (the children snatched all over the world) by a small number (the tribe). Call this the “Madeleine McCann effect.” We all heard months of coverage of this sad case of kidnapping—as of this writing, still unresolved—and it has caused us undue worry, although trivial compared with what the McCanns suffered. The effects of the bad mathematics don’t stop with judging risks. Doing the integration wrong means that contagion can leap across the Internet. Contagion is a form of risk assessment with an acutely worrying conclusion. Once it starts on the Internet, everyone’s bad mathematics make it explode. So do conspiracy theories: If it seems that everyone is talking about something, it must be true! But this is just the wrong denominator again. Neuroses and false beliefs are buttressed. We all worry about our health; in the past, we would look around us and find that no one else was worrying or ill. But consult the Internet and 1,278,000 people (at least!) are worrying, and they’ve even developed Websites to talk about their worry. The 2009 swine flu pandemic has been a damp squib, but you wouldn’t have known that from the frenzy.

  The bad mathematics can also give us a sense that we have something useful to say. We’d all like to be taken seriously, and evolution has probably equipped us to think we are more effective than we really are; it seeds us with just that little bit of narcissism. A false belief, perhaps, but better for evolution to err on the side of getting us to believe in ourselves than not to. So we go on the Internet and make Websites, create Facebook pages, contribute to YouTube, and write blogs, and—surprise!—it appears that everyone is reading them, because look at how many people are leaving comments! Another case of the wrong denominator.

  The maddening side of all this is that neither I nor most others can convince ourselves to ignore these worries, neuroses, narcissistic beliefs, and poor assessments of risk—to ignore our wrong thoughts—precisely because the Internet has not changed the way we think.

  Publications Can Perish

  Robert Shapiro

  Professor emeritus of chemistry and senior research scientist, New York University; author, Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth

  The Internet has made it far easier for professionals to access and search the scientific literature. Unfortunately, it has also increased the chances that we will lose part or all of that literature.

  When I was young, I imagined that everything I wrote would be preserved forever. Future biographers would seek out every letter, diary, and memorandum to capture the essence of my creativity. My first laboratory notebook still reflected the same emotions. On page 1, I had printed, very legibly, the following preface: “To Posterity: This volume contains the authentic record of ingenious and original chemical research conducted by Robert Shapiro, currently a graduate student of organic chemistry at Harvard University.”

  Reality gradually whittled down my grandiosity, and I recognized that my published papers had the best chance of survival. The New York University library carried bound journals that dated from the nineteenth century, and the articles they contained had obviously outlived their authors. As the number of my own published works grew, curiosity prompted me to select one of them and track its effect. I deliberately picked one of minor importance.

  A generation ago, a persistent PhD student and I had failed in an effort to synthesize a new substance of theoretical interest. We had, however, prepared some other new compounds and improved some methods, so I wrote a paper that was published in 1969 in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. Had our results ever mattered to anyone? Using new computer-driven search tools, I could quickly check whether it had ever been noticed. To my surprise, I found that eleven papers and some patents had cited our publication, up to 2002. In one instance, our work provided a starting point for the preparation of new tranquilizers. I imagined that in the distant future other workers might pull the appropriate volume off a library shelf and find my work to be some help. I did not foresee that such bound volumes might no longer exist.

  The Journal of Organic Chemistry started in 1936 and continues to the present. Its demands on library shelf space have increased over time: The first volume contained only 583 pages, whereas the 2009 edition had 9,680. The arrival of the Internet rescued libraries from the space crisis created by the proliferation of new journals and the vast increase in the size of existing ones. Many paper subscriptions were replaced by electronic ones, and past holdings were converted to digital form. It is not hard to imagine a future time when paper copies of the scientific literature will no longer exist. Many new journals are appearing only in digital form.

  This conversion has produced many benefits for readers. In the past, I had to leave my office, ride an elevator, walk several blocks, take another elevator, and make my way through a maze of shelves to find a paper I needed. Occasionally the issue I wanted was being used by someone else or had been misplaced and I had traveled in vain. Now I can bring most papers that I want onto a computer screen in my office or at home in a matter of minutes. I can store the publication in my computer or print out a copy if I wish. But with this gain in the accessibility of the literature of science has come an increase in its vulnerability.

  Materials that exist in one or a few copies are inherently at greater risk than those that are widely distributed. A Picasso painting might be destroyed, but the Bible will survive. Alexander Stille, in The Future of the Past, reported that the works of Homer and Virgil survived from antiquity because their great popularity led them to be copied and recopied. On the other hand, only 9 of Sophocles’ 120 plays have survived. Before the Internet, I could take pride that each of my papers was present in hundreds or thousands of libraries across the globe. Their survival into the future seemed assured by the protection afforded by multiple copies. The same applied, of course, to the rest of the scientific literature.

  Thousands of paper copies of the literature have now been replaced by a few electronic records stored in computers. Furthermore,
the storage medium is fragile. Some paper manuscripts have survived for centuries. The lifetimes of the various disks, drives, and tapes currently used for digital storage are unknown but are commonly estimated in decades. In some cases, works available only in electronic form have disappeared much more rapidly for another reason—lack of maintenance of the sites. One survey found that 12 percent of the Internet addresses cited in three prestigious medical and scientific journals were extinct two years after publication.

  Such difficulties are unlikely to affect such prestigious sources as The Journal of Organic Chemistry. But material stored only on the Internet is far more vulnerable to destruction than the same material present in multiple paper copies. Electrical breakdown can disrupt access for a time, while cyberterrorism, civic disturbances, war, and a variety of natural catastrophes could destroy part or all of the storage system, leading to the irretrievable loss of sections of the scientific literature. Anton Zeilinger wrote in answer to a previous Edge question that a nuclear explosion outside Earth’s atmosphere would cause all computers, and ultimately society, to break down.

  How has this changed my thinking? I no longer write with the expectation of immortality in print. I am much more tempted to contribute to Internet discussion forums, blogs, and media that may not persist. I seek my reward from the immediate response my efforts may bring, with little thought to the possibility that some stranger may see my words centuries from now and wonder about the life that was led by the person who wrote them.

  Will the Great Leveler Destroy Diversity of Thought?

  Frank J. Tipler

  Professor of mathematical physics, Tulane University; author, The Physics of Immortality

  The Internet first appeared long after I had received my PhD in physics, and I was slow to use it. I was trained in library search techniques: look up the subject in Science Abstracts (a journal now made defunct by the Internet), then go to the archived full article in the journal shelved nearby. Now I simply search the topics in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and then go to the journal article, available online.