Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  All else being equal, it is a virtue to know true things. But there is also the virtue of assigning accurate degrees of confidence to the things we think we know. There are some things I have studied personally and in depth, such that I have acquired some expertise; there are other things I’ve read somewhere, or heard from a friend, that sound pretty reasonable. And there are still other things that wouldn’t sound at all reasonable to an objective observer but that line up with my cherished beliefs. Distinguishing between these categories is a major part of being intellectually honest.

  Engaging with ideas online—stating what I believe, arguing in favor of it to the best of my ability, and stretching my mind by reading things outside my comfort zone—is immensely helpful in separating well-established facts from wishful thinking. The thing about the Internet is, people will call you on your crap. Even if I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about, somebody out there does. On discussion boards, in blog comment threads, on Websites of colleagues or students on another continent, if I say something that manages to be interesting but wrong, chances are someone will set me straight. Not that everyone necessarily listens. It’s my responsibility to be open enough to listen to the critiques and improve my position—but that’s always been my job. The Internet merely helps us along.

  The distinction is not only between the Internet and sitting around a table having a bull session with your friends; it applies to conventional print media as well, from books to newspapers and magazines. Sure, someone can write a book review or pen a strident letter to the editor. But time scales matter. If I put up a blog post in the morning and get several comments before lunchtime along the lines of “That’s about as wrong as anything I’ve ever seen you write” or “What were you thinking?” complete with links to sources that set me straight, it’s difficult to simply pretend I don’t notice.

  I once heard, as an example of how online communication was degrading our discourse by drowning us in lies and misinformation, the crazy claim that Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have been cared for under the United Kingdom’s National Health Service—which, of course, is exactly what did care for him, thus offering an unusually juicy self-refutation. But bringing up this example as a criticism of the Internet is equally self-refuting. The initial lie didn’t appear online but in a good, old-fashioned newspaper. Twenty years ago, that’s as far as it would have circulated after making a brief impression in the minds of its readers. But today countless online sources leapt to make fun of the ridiculous lengths to which opponents of health care reform were willing to go. Perhaps next time the editorial writers will be more careful in their choice of colorful counterfactuals.

  All of which is incredibly small potatoes, of course. The Internet in its current configuration is only a hint of what we’ll have a hundred years from now; feel free to visualize your own favorite chip-in-your-head scenario. Cutting down on the noise will ultimately be just as great a challenge as connecting to the signal. But even now the Internet is a great help to those of us who prefer to be kept honest—it’s just up to us to take advantage.

  How I Think About How I Think

  Lera Boroditsky

  Assistant professor of psychology, Stanford University

  Consider a much earlier piece of technology than the Internet: the fork. When I take a fork (or any tool) in my hand, the multimodal neurons in my brain tracking my hand’s position immediately expand their receptive fields. They start to keep track of a larger part of space, expanding their view to include perhaps that succulent morsel of lamb that is now within my fork’s reach. My brain absorbs the tool in my hand into the very representation of my physical self; the fork is now, in an important neural sense, a part of my body. (In case absorbing a fork into your sense of self seems strange, it may help to note that this phenomenon was discovered by a former dentist who ingeniously trained rhesus monkeys to search for food with tools suspiciously resembling dental endoscopes.) If grabbing a humble fork can expand my neurons’ receptive fields, imagine what happens when I grab a mouse and open a Web browser.

  Indeed, research in the last decade has shown that our brains change, grow, and adapt dramatically as we engage with the world in new ways. London taxi drivers grow larger hippocampi (a part of the brain heavily involved in navigation) as they gain knowledge maneuvering through the maze of London streets. Playing video games significantly improves people’s spatial attention and object-tracking abilities, giving a regular schmo the attentional skills of a fighter pilot. At this rate, we’ll be lucky if the list of basic drives controlled by the hypothalamus—the famous four F’s: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and how’s your father?—doesn’t soon need to be augmented with a fifth, Facebook. This, by the way, is the reason I give for not joining social networking sites. My hypothalamus has more important business to attend to, thanks!

  My favorite human technologies are the ones we no longer even notice as technologies—they just seem like natural extensions of our minds. Numbers are one such example, a human-invented tool that, once learned, has incredible productive power in the mind. Writing is another. It no longer seems magical, in the literate world, to communicate a complex set of thoughts silently across vast reaches of time and space using only a cocktail napkin and some strategically applied stains. Yet being able to write things down, draw diagrams, and otherwise externalize the contents of our minds into some stable format has drastically augmented our cognitive and communicative abilities. By far the most amazing technological marvels that humans ever created (and what I spend most of my time thinking about) are the languages we speak. Now, there’s an immensely complex tool that really changed things for us humans. You think keeping up a correspondence with friends was hard before e-mail? Well, you should have tried it before language! Importantly, the particulars of the languages we speak have shaped not only how we communicate our thoughts but also the very nature of the thoughts themselves.

  There are, of course, facile or insipid ways of construing the nature of human thought such that “the way you think” isn’t, and can’t, be changed by technology. For example, I could define the basic mechanisms of thought as “neurons fire, at different times, some more than others, and that is how I think.” Well, all right, that’s technically true, and the Internet is not changing that. But on any more interesting or useful construal of human thought, technology has been shaping us for as long as we’ve been making it.

  More than shaping how I think, the Internet is also shaping how I think about how I think. Scholars interested in the nature of mind have long relied on technology as a source of metaphors for explaining how the mind works. First the mind was a clay tablet, then an abacus, a calculator, a telephone switchboard, a computer, a network. These days, new tools continue to provide convenient (perhaps in the 7-Eleven sense of convenient, as in nearby but ultimately unsatisfying) metaphors for explaining the mind. Consciousness, for example, is not unlike Twitter—millions of mundane messages bouncing around, all shouting over one another, with only a few rising as trending topics. Take that, Dan Dennett! Consciousness explained, in 140 characters or less!

  I Am Not Exactly a Thinking Person— I Am a Poet

  Jonas Mekas

  Filmmaker, critic; cofounder, Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Film- Makers’ Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives

  I am a farmer boy. When I grew up, there was only one radio in our entire village of twenty families. And, of course, no TV, no telephone, and no electricity. I saw my first movie when I was fourteen. In New York, in 1949, I fell in love with cinema. In 1989, I switched to video. In 2003, I embraced computer/Internet technologies.

  I am telling you this to indicate that my thinking is now only entering the Internet Nation. I am not really thinking yet the Internet way—I am only babbling.

  But I can tell you that the Internet has already affected the content, form, and working procedures of everything I do. It’s entering my mind secretly, indirectly.

  In 2007, I did a 365 Day Project. I put o
ne short film on the Internet every day. In cinema, when I was making my films, the process was abstract. I could not think about the audience; I knew the film would be placed in a film distribution center and eventually someone would look at it. In my 365 Day Project, I knew that later, the same day, I would put it on the Internet and within minutes it would be seen by all my friends—and strangers, too—all over the world. So I felt as if I were conversing with them. It’s intimate. It’s poetic. I am not thinking anymore about problems of distribution; I am just exchanging my work with some friends. Like being part of a family. I like that. It makes for a different state of mind. Whether a state of mind has anything or nothing to do with thinking, that’s unimportant to me. I am not exactly a thinking person. I am a poet.

  I would like to add one more note about what the Internet has done to me. And that is that I began paying more attention to everything the Internet seems to be eliminating. Books, especially. But also nature. In short, the more it all expands into virtual reality, the more I feel a need to love and protect actual reality. Not because of sentimental reasons, no—from a very real, practical, almost a survival need, from my knowledge that I would lose an essential part of myself by losing actual reality, both cultural and physical.

  Kayaks Versus Canoes

  George Dyson

  Science historian; author, Darwin Among the Machines

  In the North Pacific, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts and their kayak-building relatives lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beachcombed wood. The Tlingit and their dugout-canoe-building relatives built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rain forest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.

  The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results—maximum boat, minimum material—by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unnecessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.

  I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don’t will be left paddling logs, not canoes.

  The Upload Has Begun

  Sam Harris

  Neuroscientist; chairman, Project Reason; author, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

  It is now a staple of scientific fantasy, or nightmare, to envision that human minds will one day be uploaded onto a vast computer network like the Internet. While I am agnostic about whether we will ever break the neural code, allowing our inner lives to be read out as a series of bits, I notice that the prophesied upload is slowly occurring in my own case. For instance, the other day I recalled a famous passage from Adam Smith that I wanted to cite: something about an earthquake in China. I briefly considered scouring my shelves in search of my copy of The Wealth of Nations. But I have thousands of books spread throughout my house, and they are badly organized. I recently spent an hour looking for a title, and then another skimming its text, only to discover that it wasn’t the book I had wanted in the first place. And so it would have proved in the present case, for the passage I dimly remembered from Smith is to be found in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Why not just type the words “adam smith china earthquake” into Google? Mission accomplished.

  Of course, more or less everyone has come to depend on the Internet in this way. Increasingly, however, I rely on Google to recall my own thoughts. Being lazy, I am prone to cannibalizing my work: Something said in a lecture will get plowed into an op-ed; the op-ed will later be absorbed into a book; snippets from the book may get spoken in another lecture. This process will occasionally leave me wondering just how and where and to what shameful extent I have plagiarized myself. Once again, the gates of memory swing not from my own medial temporal lobes but from a computer cluster far away, presumably where the rent is lower.

  This migration to the Internet now includes my emotional life. For instance, I occasionally engage in public debates and panel discussions where I am pitted against some over-, under-, or miseducated antagonist. “How did it go?” will be the question posed by wife or mother at the end of the day. I now know that I cannot answer this question unless I watch the debate online, for my memory of what happened is often at odds with the later impression I form based upon seeing the exchange. Which view is closer to reality? I have learned to trust the YouTube version. In any case, it is the only one that will endure.

  Increasingly, I develop relationships with other scientists and writers that exist entirely online. Jerry Coyne and I just met for the first time, in a taxi in Mexico. But this was after having traded hundreds of e-mails. Almost every sentence we have ever exchanged exists in my Sent folder. Our entire relationship is therefore searchable. I have many other friends and mentors who exist for me in this way, primarily as e-mail correspondents. This has changed my sense of community profoundly. There are people I have never met who have a better understanding of what I will be thinking tomorrow than some of my closest friends do.

  And there are surprises to be had in reviewing this digital correspondence. I recently did a search of my Sent folder for the phrase “Barack Obama” and discovered that someone had written to me in 2004 to say that he intended to give a copy of my first book to his dear friend Barack Obama. Why didn’t I remember this exchange? Because at the time I had no idea who Barack Obama was. Searching my bitstream, I am reminded not only of what I used to know but also of what I never properly understood.

  I am by no means infatuated with computers. I do not belong to any social networking sites; I do not tweet (yet); and I do not post images to Flickr. But even in my case, an honest response to the Delphic admonition “Know thyself” already requires an Internet search.

  Hell if I Know

  Gregory Paul

  Independent researcher; author, Dinosaurs of the Air: The Evolution and Loss of Flight in Dinosaurs and Birds

  Being among those who have predicted that humans will be uploading their minds into cybermachines in the not too distant future, I’m enthusiastic about the Internet. But the thinking of my still-primate mind about the new mode of information exchange is more ambiguous.

  No doubt the Internet is changing the way I operate and influence the world around me. Type “gregory paul religion society” into Google and nearly 3.5 million hits come up. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it looks impressive. An article in a British newspaper on my sociological research garnered more than seven hundred comments. Back in the twentieth century, I could not imagine my technical research making such an impression on the global sociopolitical scene, because the responsible mechanism—publishing in open-access online academic journals—was not available. The new communication environment is undoubtedly altering my research and publicity strategy relative to what it would be in a less digital world. Even so, I am not entirely sure how my own actions are being modified. The only way to find out would be to run a parallel-universe experiment, in which everything is the same except for the existence of Internet-type communications, and see what I do.

  What is disturbing to this human raised on hard-copy information transmission is how fast the Internet is destroying a large part of it. My city no longer has a truly major newspaper, and the edgy, free City Paper is a pale shadow of its former self. I’ve enjoyed living a few blocks from a major university library, because I could browse through the extensive journal stacks, leafing through assorted periodicals to see what was up in the latest issues. Because the search was semi-random, it was often pleasantly and usefully serendipitous. Now that the Hopkins library has severely cut back on paper journals as the switch to online continues, it is less fun. Looking up a particular article is often easier online (and it’s nice to save trees), but checking th
e contents of the latest issue of Geology on the library computer is neither as pleasant nor as convenient. I suspect the range of my information intake has narrowed, and that can’t be good.

  On the positive side, it could be amazingly hard to get basic information before the Web showed up. In my teens, I was fascinated by the destruction of the HMS Hood in 1941 but unable to get a clear impression of the famed vessel’s appearance for a couple of years, until I saw a friend’s model, and I did not see a clear image until well after that. Such extreme data deprivation is over, thanks to Wikipedia et cetera. But even the Internet cannot fill all information gaps. It’s often difficult to search out obscure details of the sort found only in books, which can look at subjects in depth. Websites reference books, but if the Internet limits the production of manuscript-length works, then the quality of information is going to suffer.

  As for the question of how the Internet is changing my thinking, online apps facilitate the statistical analyses that are expanding my sociological interests and conclusions, leading to unanticipated answers to some fundamental questions about popular religion that I am delighted to uncover. Beyond that, there are more subtle effects, but exactly what they are I am not sure, sans the parallel-world experiment. I fear that the brevity favored by screen versus page is shortening my attention span. It’s as if one of Richard Dawkins’s memes had altered my unwilling mind like a bad science fiction story. But that’s a nonquantitative, anecdotal impression; perhaps I just think my thinking has changed. It may be that the new arrangement is not altering my mental exertions further than it is because the old-fashioned mind generated by my brain remains geared to the former system.