Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  E-mails that supplanted telephone calls were sometimes misunderstood, because vocal modulations were missing. The number of requests to do X, Y, or Z began to increase exponentially, because (for example) it was far easier for the requesters to shoot me a question than to spend the time digging up the answers themselves, even on the Internet. The lit search I performed on the supposedly infinite database failed to bring up that reference I needed—and knew existed, because I read it a decade ago but didn’t save it, because I figured I could always bring it up again.

  This Internet relationship was supposed to enable all my needs to be met. How did it instead become the source of endless demands? How did it end up draining away so much time and energy? The Internet seemed to have given me a case of attention deficit disorder. Did it really change the way I think or just make it more difficult to have the time to think? Most likely the latter, because judicious use of the off button allowed a return to normalcy.

  Which brings me to the armed truce—an attempt to appreciate the positives and accept the negatives, to set personal boundaries and refuse to let them be breached. Of course, maybe it is just this dogmatic approach that prevents the Internet from changing the way I think.

  More Efficient, but to What End?

  Emanuel Derman

  Professor of financial engineering, Columbia University; principal, Prisma Capital Partners; former head, Quantitative Strategies Group, Equities Division, Goldman Sachs and Co.; author, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

  An engineer, a physicist, and a computer scientist go for a drive. Near the crest of a hill, the engine sputters and stops running.

  “It must be the carburetor,” says the engineer, opening his toolbox. “Let me see if I can find the problem.”

  “If we can just push it to the top of the hill, gravity will let us coast down to a garage,” says the physicist.

  “Wait a second,” says the computer scientist. “Let’s all get out of the car, shut the doors, open them again, get in, turn the key in the ignition, and see what happens.”

  I like programming, and when I do it, I’m often unable to stop, because there is always one more easy thing you can try before you get up, one more bug you can try to fix, one more attempt you can make to find the cause of a problem, one more shot at incrementally improving something. Because of the interactivity of programming—edit, compile, run, examine, repeat—you can always take a quick preliminary whack at something and see if it works. You can try a solution without understanding the problem completely.

  If, as I do, you spend most of your day in front of a computer, then the Internet brings this endless micro-interactivity into your life by providing you with a willing co-respondent. It abhors a vacuum. It can fill up all your available time by breaking it up into smaller and smaller chunks. If you have a moment, you can reply to an e-mail, check Wikipedia, look at the weather, scan your horoscope, read a movie review, watch a video, suffer through an ad. All hurriedly.

  One unmitigatedly good thing is the associative memory this facilitates. If you can’t remember the name of the abstract expressionist you read about in an article fifteen years ago in the New York Times, an artist who used to live on Old Slip in New York in the 1950s with his then-wife, a French actress who (you recall) was in Last Year at Marienbad, you can go to IMDb, look up the movie, find her name, look her up on Wikipedia, and discover that her husband was Jack Youngerman. When I do this a second time now, for verification, I go off on a tangent and discover that she acted with Allen Ginsberg in Pull My Daisy. And that she is buried in Cimetière du Montparnasse, one of the more restful places to be buried, not far from where Hemingway used to drink and write at the . . .

  But I digress.

  Some people say the Internet has made us more efficient. I waste many hours each day being efficient. Efficiency should be a means, not an end. The big question, as always, is: How shall I live?

  The Internet hasn’t changed the way I think about that. What’s changed the way I think about big things (as always) are the people I talk to and the books I read.

  I Have Outsourced My Memory

  Charles Seife

  Professor of journalism, New York University; former journalist, Science; author, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

  The process was so gradual, so natural, that I didn’t notice it at first. In retrospect, it was happening to me long before the advent of the Internet. The earliest symptoms still mar the books in my library. Every dog-eared page represents a hole in my memory. Instead of trying to memorize a passage in the book or remember an important statistic, I took an easier path, storing the location of the desirable memory instead of the memory itself. Every dog-ear is a meta-memory, a pointer to an idea I wanted to retain but was too lazy to memorize.

  The Internet turned an occasional habit into my primary way of storing knowledge. As the Web grew, my browsers began to bloat with bookmarked Websites. And as search engines matured, I stopped bothering even with bookmarks; I soon relied on AltaVista, HotBot, and then Google to help me find—and recall—ideas. My meta- memories, my pointers to ideas, started being replaced by meta-meta-memories, by pointers to pointers to data. Each day, my brain fills with these quasi-memories, with pointers, and with pointers to pointers, each one a dusty IOU sitting where a fact or idea should reside.

  Now when I expend the effort to squirrel memories away, I store them in the clutter of my hard drive as much as in the labyrinth of my brain. As a result, I spend as much time organizing them and making sure I can retrieve them on demand as I do collecting them. My memories are filed in folders within folders within folders, easily accessible—and searchable, in case my meta-memory of their location fails. And when a file becomes corrupt, all I am left with is a pointer, a void where an idea should be, the ghost of a departed thought.

  The New Balance: More Processing, Less Memorization

  Fiery Cushman

  Postdoctoral fellow, Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, Harvard University

  The Internet changes the way I behave, and possibly the way I think, by reducing the processing costs of information retrieval. I focus more on knowing how to obtain and use information online and less on memorizing it.

  This tradeoff between processing and memory reminds me of one of my father’s favorite stories, perhaps apocryphal, about studying the periodic table of the elements in his high school chemistry class. On their test, the students were given a blank table and asked to fill in names and atomic weights. All the students agonized over this assignment, except for one. He simply wrote, “The periodic table can be found inside the back cover of our textbook, including the full name and atomic weight of each element.”

  What the smart-aleck ninth grader probably didn’t realize was that he manipulated one of the most basic trade-offs that governs the performance of brains, computers, and other computational systems. The teacher reckoned that the most efficient way to solve chemistry problems was a memory-intensive solution, holding facts about elements in a brain. The student reckoned that it was more efficient to solve chemistry problems with a process-intensive solution, retrieving facts about elements from books.

  In a world where chemistry books are hard to obtain (i.e., processing is expensive), the teacher has the right solution. In a world where chemistry books are easy to obtain (i.e., processing is cheap), the student has the right solution. A few decades ago, you would walk to the library for encyclopedias, books, and maps. Today I access them from my pocket. This fact is easy to recite, but it’s important to emphasize just how different the costs of processing are in these two cases. Suppose it takes about twenty minutes to walk to the library and about five seconds to pull out an iPhone and open up the Web browser. The processing demands on me are 1/240 as great as they were for my father. By analogy, my computer has a 2.4 gigahertz processor. A processor 1/240 as powerful operates at 10 megahertz—just a touch faster than the original Macintosh, released in 1984.
Computers today operate very differently because of their vastly increased processing power. It would be surprising if I didn’t, too.

  How has the Internet changed my behavior? When I walk out the door with my suitcase, I usually don’t know what airline I’m flying on, what hotel I’ll be staying in, how to get to it, where or when my first meeting will be, where a nearby restaurant is for dinner, and so on. A few years ago, I would have spent a few moments committing those details to memory. Now, I spend a few moments finding the “app for that.”

  After I see a good talk, I forget many of the details—but I remember to e-mail the author for the slides. When I find a good bottle of wine, I take a picture of the label. I don’t have to skim an interesting-looking paper as thoroughly before I file it, as long as I plug a few good keywords into my reference manager. I look up recipes after I arrive at the supermarket. And when a friend cooks a good meal, I’m more interested to learn what Website it came from than how it was spiced. I don’t know most of the American Psychological Association rules for style and citation, but my computer does. For any particular “computation” I perform, I don’t need the same depth of knowledge, because I have access to profoundly more efficient processes of information retrieval.

  So the Internet clearly changes the way I behave. It must be changing the way I think at some level, insofar as my behavior is a product of my thoughts. It probably is not changing the basic kinds of mental processes I can perform but it might be changing their relative weighting. We psychologists love to impress undergraduates with the fact that taxi drivers have unusually large hippocampi. But today’s taxi drivers have GPS systems. This makes it relatively less important for drivers to memorize locations, and relatively more important for them to quickly read maps. It is a reasonable guess that GPS changes the way that taxi drivers’ brains weight memory versus processing; it seems like a reasonable guess that the Internet changes the way my brain does, too.

  Often the transformational role of the Internet is described in terms of memory—that is, in terms of the information the Internet stores. It’s easy to be awed by the sheer magnitude of data available on Wikipedia, Google Earth, or Project Gutenberg. But what makes these Websites transformative for me is not the data. Encyclopedias, maps, and books all existed long before their titles were dressed up in dots and slashes. What makes them transformative is their availability—the new processes by which that information can be accessed.

  The Enemy of Insight?

  Anthony Aguirre

  Associate professor of physics, University of California, Santa Cruz

  Recently I wanted to learn about twelfth-century China—not a deep or scholarly understanding, just enough to add a bit of not-wrong color to something I was writing. Wikipedia was perfect! More regularly, my astrophysics and cosmology endeavors bring me to databases such as arXiv, ADS (Astrophysics Data System), and SPIRES (Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System), which give instant and organized access to all the articles and information I might need to research and write.

  Between such uses and an appreciable fraction of my time spent processing e-mails, I, like most of my colleagues, spend a lot of time connected to the Internet. It is a central tool in my research life. Yet what I do that is most valuable—to me, at least—is the occasional generation of genuine creative insights. And looking at some of those insights, I realize that essentially none of them has happened in connection with the Internet.

  Given the quantity of information and understanding I imbibe online, this seems strange and—because the Internet is omnipresent—worrisome. Insight is surely like happiness and money: You’ll get a certain amount through a combination of hope, luck, and effort. But maximizing it requires the more deliberate approach of paying careful attention to whatever increases or decreases it and making judicious decisions on that basis.

  In this spirit, I undertook a short exercise. Looking back, I identified ten ideas or insights important to me and for which I could remember the context in which they arose. According to my tally, two were during conversation, one while listening to a talk, one while walking, two while sitting at a desk researching and thinking, and four while writing. None occurred while I was browsing the Web, reading online articles, e-mailing, et cetera. This raises two obvious questions: Why does the Web seem to be the enemy of insight, and what, if anything, should I do about it?

  After examining my list, several possibilities come to mind in answer to the first question. One is that information input from the Internet is simply too fast, leaving little mental space or time to process that information, fit it into existing schema, and think through the implications. This is not a fault of the Internet per se. But the Internet, by dint of its sheer volume of information (generally short treatments of individual topics and powerful search capabilities), strongly encourages overly rapid information inhalation. Most talks or lectures, in contrast, have the dubious virtues of being wildly inefficient as information transmitters and containing chunks either boring or unintelligible enough to give one’s mind some space to think.

  A second possible problem is that, in general, communication with the Web is just about as one-way as reading a book. My insight tally clearly favors active, laborious construction of a train of thought or argument.

  A third possibility relates to the type of thinking the Internet encourages. The ability to instantly access information is wonderful for spinning a web of interconnections among ideas and pieces of data. Yet for deep understanding—in particular, the sort that arises from the careful following of one thread of thought—the Internet is not very helpful. I often find the Web’s role is more to tempt me from the path and off to the side than to aid in the journey.

  Finally, but perhaps most crucially, my experience is that real, creative insights or breakthroughs require prolonged and concentrated time in the wilderness. There are lots of things I don’t know, and I get excited when I uncover something I don’t know. I’ve come to think it’s important to cultivate a “don’t know” mind—one that perceives an interesting enigma and is willing to dwell in that perplexity and confusion. A sense of playful delight in that confusion and a willingness to make mistakes—many mistakes—while floundering about is a key part of what makes insight possible for me. And the Internet? The Internet does not like this sort of mind. The Internet wants us to know, and it wants us to know right now; its essential structure is to produce knowing on demand. I worry not only that the Internet goads us to trade understanding for information but also that it makes us too accustomed to instant informational gratification. Its bright light deprives us of spending time in the fertile mystery of the dark.

  Others might, of course, have different experiences of the causes and conditions of insight—and also of the Internet. But I’d bet that mine are not uncommon. So, what should be done? A first reaction—to largely banish the Internet from my intellectual life—is both difficult (like most, I’m at least a low-level addict) and counterproductive: Information is important, and the Internet is a unsurpassable tool for discovering and assembling it.

  But the exercise suggests to me that this tool should be used in its rightful place and time and with a bit more separation from the creative acts of thinking, deeply conversing, working through ideas, and writing. Perhaps we should think of the Internet not as an extra part of our brain but as a library—somewhere we occasionally go to gather raw materials that we can take away somewhere else, where we have time and space to be bored, to be forced into nondistraction, and to be bewildered, so that we can create an opportunity for something really interesting to happen.

  The Joy of Just-Enoughness

  Judith Rich Harris

  Independent investigator and theoretician; author, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality

  The Internet dispenses information the way a ketchup bottle dispenses ketchup. At first there was too little; now there is too much.

  In between, there was a halcyon interval of just-enoughness. Fo
r me, it lasted about ten years.

  They were the best years of my life.

  The Rise of Internet Prosthetic Brains and Soliton Personhood

  Clifford Pickover

  Writer; associate editor, Computers and Graphics; editorial board, Odyssey, Leonardo, and YLEM; author, Archimedes to Hawking

  With increasing frequency, people around the globe seek advice and social support from other individuals connected via the Internet. Our minds arise not only from our own brains but also from Internet prosthetic brains (IPBs)—those clusters of people with whom we share information and advice through electronic networks. The simple notion of “you” and “me” is changing. For example, I rely on others to help me reason beyond the limits of my own intuition and abilities. Many of my decisions in life are shaped by my IPBs around the globe, who provide advice on a wide range of topics: software, computer problems, health issues, emotional concerns. Thus, when a decision is made, who is the me making it?

  The IPBs generated by social network connectivity can be more important than the communities dependent on geographic locality. Through the IPBs, we exchange parts of minds with one another. By the information we post on the Web and the interactions we have, we become IPBs for others. In some ways, when we die, a part of us survives as an IPB in the memories and thoughts of others and also as trails we’ve left on the Internet. Individuals who participate in social groups, blogs, and Twitter and deposit their writings on the Web leave behind particles of themselves. Before the Internet, most of us rarely left marks on the world, except on our immediate family or a few friends. Before the Internet, even your family knew nothing of you outside four generations. In the “old days,” your great-grandchildren might have carried some vestigial memory of you, but it faded like an ember when they died—often you were extinguished and forgotten. I know nothing about my great-grandparents.