Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  and i do not think i would even know it myself when that happens.

  that is quite a scary thought.

  By Changing My Behavior

  Seirian Sumner

  Research fellow in evolutionary biology, Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London

  I was rather stumped by the Edge question, because I have little experience of work or play without the Internet. My interests and the way I think, work, and play have evolved alongside it. I thought it might help if I could work out what life would be like for me without the Internet. But abstaining from it is not a feasible experiment, even on a personal level. Instead, I exploited the very resource we are evaluating and asked my friends on Facebook what they thought their lives would be like without the Internet. If I could empathize with my alter ego in a parallel offline universe where there was no Internet, perhaps I could understand how the Internet has influenced the way I think.

  Initial impressions of an Internet-free life from my Facebook friends were of general horror. The Internet plays a crucial role in our personal lives: My friends said they would be “lost,” “stressed,” “anxious,” and “isolated” without it. They were concerned about:

  “No 24/7 chats?”

  “How would I make new friends/meet new people?”

  “How would I keep in touch with my friends abroad?”

  “I’d actually have to buy things in person from real people!”

  We depend on the Internet as our social network, to connect with friends, or strangers, and to access resources. Sitting at my computer, I am one of the millions of nodes making up the network. Whereas physical interactions with other nodes in the network are largely impossible, I am potentially connected to them all.

  Caution and suspicion of the unfamiliar are ancestral traits of humans, ensuring survival by protecting against usurpation and theft of resources. A peculiar thing about the Internet is that it makes us highly receptive and indiscriminate in our interactions with complete strangers. The other day I received a message inviting me to join a Facebook group for people sharing “Seirian” as their first name. Can I resist? Of course not! I’ll probably never meet the seventeen other Seirians, but I am now a node connected to a virtual network of Seirians. Why did I join? Because I had nothing to lose, there were no real consequences, and I was curious to tap into a group of people wholly unconnected with my current social network. The more friendly connections I engage in, the greater the rewards I can potentially reap. If the Facebook Seirians had knocked on my real front door instead of my virtual one, would I have signed up? No, of course not—too invasive, personal, and potentially costly (they’d know where I live, and I can’t unplug them). Contrary to our ancestral behaviors, we tolerate invasion of privacy online, and the success of the Internet relies on this.

  Connectivity comes at the cost of privacy, but it does promote information acquisition and transfer. Although the initial response from my Facebook friends was fear of disconnection, more considered responses appreciated the Internet for the enormous resource it is, noting that it could never be replaced with traditional modes of information storage and transfer:

  “How do I find things out?”

  “Impossible to access information.”

  “You mean I have to physically go shopping/visit the library?”

  “So slow.”

  “Small life.”

  The Internet relies on our craving for knowledge and connections but also on our astonishing online generosity. We show inordinate levels of altruism on the Internet, wasting hours on chat room sites giving advice to complete strangers or contributing anonymously to Wikipedia just to enrich other people’s knowledge. There is no guarantee or expectation of reciprocation. Making friends and trusting strangers with personal information (be it your bank details or musical tastes) is an essential personality trait of an Internet user, despite being at odds with our ancestral natural caution. The data we happily give away on Facebook are exactly the sort of information that totalitarian secret police seek through interrogation. By relaxing our suspicions (or perception) of strangers and behaving altruistically (indiscriminately), we share our own resources and gain access to a whole lot more.

  I thought I had too little pre-Internet experience to be able to answer this question. But now I realize that we undergo rapid evolution into a different organism every time we log on. The Internet may not necessarily change the way we think, but it certainly shapes and directs our thoughts by changing our behavior. Offline, we may be secretive, miserly, private, suspicious, and self-centered. Online, we become philanthropic, generous, approachable, friendly, and dangerously unwary of strangers. Online behavior would be selected out in an offline world, because no one would cooperate; people don’t want unprompted friendship and generosity from complete strangers. Likewise, offline behavior does badly in an online world: Unless you give a little of yourself, you get restricted access to resources. The reason for our personality change is that the Internet is a portal to lazy escapism: At the twitch of the mouse, we enter a world in which the consequences of our actions don’t seem real. The degree to which our online and offline personas differ will, of course, vary from one person to another. At the most extreme, online life is one of carefree fantasy: live vicariously through your flawless avatar in the fantastical world of Second Life. What better way to escape the tedium and struggles of reality that confront our offline selves?

  Is the change from offline to online behavior adaptive? We ultimately strive to maximize our individual inclusive fitness. We can do this using our communication skills (verbal and written) to persuade other people to alter their behavior for mutual benefits. Early hominid verbal communication and hieroglyphs were the tools of persuasion used by our ancestors. The Internet is the third great breakthrough in human communication, and our behavioral plasticity is a necessary means for exploiting it. Do we need to moderate these shifts in behavior? One of my Facebook friends said that life would be “relaxing” without the Internet. Is our addiction to the Internet leaving us no time or space to think and process the complex stream of interactions and knowledge we get from it? Sleep is essential for “brain sorting”—maybe offline life (behavior) is, too.

  To conclude: The Internet changes my behavior every time I log on and in so doing influences how I think. My daring, cheeky, spontaneous, and interactive online persona encourages me to think further outside my offline box. I think in tandem with the Internet, using its knowledge to inspire and challenge my thoughts. My essay is a testament to this: Facebook inspired my thoughts and provoked this essay, so I couldn’t have produced it without the Internet.

  There Is No New Self

  Nicholas A. Christakis

  Physician and social scientist, Harvard University; coauthor (with James H. Fowler), Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

  Efforts to change the way we think—and to enhance our cognitive capacity—are ancient. Brain enhancers come in several varieties. They can be either hardware or software, and they can be either internal or external to our bodies. External hardware includes things such as cave paintings, written documents, eyeglasses, wristwatches, wearable computers, and brain-controlled machines. Internal hardware includes things such as mind-altering substances, cochlear implants, and intracranial electrical stimulation. Internal software includes things such as education, meditation, mnemonics, and cognitive therapy. And external software includes things such as calendars, voting systems, search engines, and the Internet.

  I’ve had personal experience with most of these (save cave painting and the more esoteric forms of hardware), and I think I can say with confidence that they have not changed my brain.

  What especially attracts my attention, though, is that the more complex types of external software—including the Internet—tend to involve communication and interaction, and thus they tend to be specifically social: They tend to involve the thoughts, feelings, and actions of many i
ndividuals, pooled in some way to make them accessible to individuals, including me. The Internet thus facilitates an age-old predilection of the human mind to benefit from our tendency as a species to be Homo dictyous (network man)—an innate tendency to connect with others and be influenced by them. In this regard, the Internet is both mind-expanding and atavistic.

  The Internet is no different from previous, equally monumental brain-enhancing technologies, such as books or telephony, and I doubt whether books and telephony have changed the way I think, in the sense of actually changing the way my brain works (which is the particular way I am taking the question before us). In fact, it is probably more correct to say that our thinking gave rise to the Internet than that the Internet gave rise to our thinking. Another apt analogy may be mathematics. It has taken centuries for humans to accumulate mathematical knowledge, and I learned geometry and calculus in high school in a way that probably would have astonished mathematicians just a few centuries ago. But, like other students, I did this with the same brain we’ve all had for millennia. The math surely changed how I think about the world. But did it change the way I think? Did it change my brain? The answer is mostly no.

  To be clear, the Internet is assuredly changing quite a few things related to cognition and social interaction. One widely appreciated and important example of both is the way the Internet facilitates hive-mind phenomena, like Wikipedia, that integrate the altruistic impulses and the knowledge of thousands of far-flung individuals. To the extent that I participate in such things (and I do), my thinking and I are both affected by the Internet.

  But most thinking serves social ends. A strong indicator of this fact is that the intellectual content of most conversation is trivial, and it certainly is not focused on complex ideas about philosophy or mathematics. In fact, how often—unless we are ten-year-old boys—do we even think or talk about predators or navigation, which have ostensibly been important topics of thought and conversation for quite some time? Mostly we think and talk about each other. This is probably even true for those of us who spend our lives as scientists.

  Indeed, our brains likely evolved their capacity for intelligence in response to the demands of social rather than environmental complexity. The evolution of larger social groups among primates required and benefited from the evolution of a larger neocortex (the outer, thinking part of our brain), and managing social complexity in turn required and benefited from the evolution of language. Known as the social-brain hypothesis, this idea posits that the reason we think at all has to do with our embeddedness in social life.

  What role might technology play in this? Very little, it turns out. Consider, for example, the fact that the size of military units has not changed materially in thousands of years, even though our communication technology has, from signal fires to telegraphy to radio to radar. The basic unit in the Roman army (the maniple) was composed of 120 to 130 men, and the size of the analogous unit in modern armies (the company) is still about the same.

  The fact that effective human group size has not changed very substantially—even though communication technology has— suggests that it is not the technology that is crucial to our performance. Rather, the crucial factor is the ability of the human mind to track social relationships, to form mental rosters that identify who is who, and to develop mental maps that track who is connected to whom and how strong or weak, or cooperative or adversarial, those relationships are. I do not think the Internet has changed the ability of my brain to do this. While we may use the word friends to refer to our contacts online, they are decidedly not our friends in the truly social, emotional, or biological sense of the word.

  There is no new self. There are no new others. And so there is no new brain and no new way of thinking. We are the same species after the Internet as before. Yes, the Internet can make it easy for us to learn how to make a bomb or find a willing sexual partner. But the Internet itself is not changing the fundamental reality of my thinking any more than it is changing our fundamental proclivity to violence or our innate capacity for love.

  I Once Was Lost but Now Am Found, or How to Navigate in the Chartroom of Memory

  Neri Oxman

  Architect, researcher, MIT; founder, Materialecology

  “I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began,” he said to me. And also: “My dreams are like other people’s waking hours.” And again, toward dawn: “My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.”

  —“Funes el memorioso,” Jorge Luis Borges

  “Funes, His Memory ” tells the evocative tale of Ireneo Funes, a Uruguayan boy who suffers an accident that leaves him immobilized along with an acute form of hypermnesia, a mental abnormality expressed in exceptionally precise memory. So vivid is Funes’s memory that he can effortlessly recall the exact appearance of any physical object at each time he saw it. In his perpetual present, images unfold their archaeology as infinite wells of detailed information: “He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30th, 1882.” Funes’s memories are intensely present, as muscular and thermal sensations accompanying every visual record. He can reconstruct every event he has ever experienced. His recollections are so accurate that the time it takes to reconstruct an entire day’s worth of events equals the duration of the day itself. In Funes’s world, reflection makes no sense at all, as there is simply no time or motive to reflect or interpret.

  As a consequence, Funes is unable to suppress details, and any attempt to conceive of, or manage, his impressions—the very stuff of thought—is overridden by relentlessly literal recollections (“We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine”). Funes is not able to generalize or to deduce or induce anything he experiences. Things are just what they are, scaled one-to-one. Cursed with meticulous memory, he escapes to remoteness and isolation—a “dark room”—where new images do not enter and where, motionless, he is absorbed in the contemplation of a sprig of artemisia.

  Hypermnesia appears to have been to Funes what the World Wide Web is today to the human race. An inexhaustible anthology of every possible thing recorded at every conceivable location in any given time, the Internet is displacing the role of memory, and it does so immaculately. Any imaginable detail about the many dimensions of any given experience is either recorded or consumed as yet another fragment of reality. There is no time to think, it seems. Or perhaps this is just a new kind of thinking. Is the Web yet another model of reality, or is reality becoming a model of the Web?

  In his “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges carries on with similar ideas, describing an empire in which the craft of cartography attained such precision that its map has emerged as large as the kingdom it depicts. Scale, or difference, has been replaced by repetition. Such a map embodies the dissimilarity between reality and its representation. It becomes the territory itself, and the original loses authenticity. It achieves the state of being more real than real, as there is no reality left to chart.

  The Internet, no doubt, has become such a map of the world, both literally and symbolically, as it traces in almost 1:1 ratio every event that has ever taken place. One cannot afford to get lost in a space so perfectly detailed and predictable. Physical navigation is solved, as online maps offer even the most exuberant flaneur the knowledge of prediction. But there are also enormous mental implications to this.

  As we are fed with the information required, or desired, to understand and perceive the world around us, the power of perception withers, and the ability to engage in abstract and critical thought atrophies. Models become the very reality we are asked to model.

  If one believes that the wetware source of intellectual production, whether in the arts or sciences, is guided by the ability to critically model reality, to scale information, and to engage in abstract thought, where are we heading in the age of the Internet? Are we being victimized by our own inventions? The Internet may well be considered an oracle, the b
uilder of composite and hybrid knowledge—but is its present instantiation inhibiting the cognitive nature of reflective and creative thought?

  Funes is portrayed as an autistic savant, with the gift of memorizing anything and everything. This gift eventually drives him mad, but Borges is said to have constructed Funes’s image to suggest the “waste of miracle” and point at the vast and dormant potential we still encompass as humans. In letting the Internet think for us, as it were, are we encouraging the degeneration of our mental capacities? Is the Internet making us obliviously somnolent?

  Between the associative nature of memory and the referential eminence of the map lies a blueprint for the brain. In the ambience of future ubiquitous technologies looms the promise of an ecstasy of connectivity (or thus is the vision of new consciousness à la Gibson and Sterling). If such a view of augmented interactivity is even remotely accurate (as it must be), it is the absence of a cognate presence that defies the achievement of transforming the Internet to a new reality, a universally accessible medium for enhanced thinking. If the Internet can become an alternative medium of human consciousness, how can a cognate presence inspire the properties of infinite memory with the experiential and the reflective, all packaged for convenience and pleasure in a Mickey Mouse–like antenna cap?

  In Borges’s tale, Funes cites a revealing line from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia in the section on memory. It reads, “Ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum”: “So that nothing that has been heard can be retold in the same words.”

  The Greatest Pornographer

  Alun Anderson

  Senior consultant and former editor in chief and publishing director of New Scientist; author, After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic