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Little did we know that
anyone today can purchase a compact version with one thousand times the memory,
a terabyte, or one thousand gigabytes, for under five-hundred dollars. Few knew
what tera meant in those days other than math teachers and engineers. I possess
such a laptop and enjoy the luxury of not just the storage capacity (I
presently use about one-hundred gigabytes on the hard drive) but also the
processing speed, a decent two gigahertz.
That newspaper has
several high functioning processors throughout their departments today and does
the layout with a program designed for publications and no longer with the
old-fashion typeset process. They have a well-organized website accommodating
the market that no longer subscribes to the newspaper.
This recent boom in
computer technology and availability has transformed the world much like the
invention of the Gutenberg press in 1439. There
is a new way to retrieve written information and it is both portable and
graphic. Most of us are on board with the apps and are essentially addicted to
the screen all day. I have observed people peering at the iPhone not just on
buses or schools but also at social engagements, and how many of us have
attended a religious ceremony or even a funeral when a phone chimes? I've
conversed with people who divide their attention between me and the device,
often stopping in mid-sentence so they could check who was calling and even
taking the call!
While the proliferation
of reading in the 15th Century caused a shift in the way people obtained
information from oral to visual, the manipulation of icons on smartphones and
computers, in general, has led to a transformation that has neurological
consequences. The slow and deliberate eye movement reading a book has given
over to frequent shifts in attention as information flashes across a screen
with diminished assimilation.
The Web today
What is peculiar about the Internet is the two-way
communication afforded the user and richness of resources: it sends information
to a receiver who can forward it to any number of locations. It is much more
than a telephone, allowing us to visit a host of sites by touching a hyperlink,
download images and narrative to your hard drive, send a brief message to a
blog or individual, or watch a movie. It serves as a camera and video recording
device as well. It has apps for every need. It is an information retrieval
system like no other and most users are quite good at using its many options.
We are validated by being 'online'
all the time.
Books, newspapers,
radio, and television do not hold the same
interest level as the handheld Apple iPhone, Motorola Droid, and the Google
Nexus One along with their versatility in every venue: home, automobile,
shopping, work, airports, airplanes, and coffee shops. You are basically taking
the entire world with you wherever you go! You no longer must watch television in your living room
or make a trip to the neighborhood library or wait for the next edition of the
newspaper to get information about home repairs, recipes, weather, local and
international events, movies, and just about anything. Information is at your
disposal 24/7. Most of us have become quite proficient dancing around the Net
and are addicted to this style of 'learning'. It contains a social context
never experienced by humanity as well, allowing us to record videos of anything
and post them on YouTube. The brain gets quite a workout in speed processing
and information overload. People find it preferential to reading a book because
of the novelty, which for many is a thrill.
Schools are now
requiring in many cases e-versions of texts rather than the purchase of clunky
and expensive books. Libraries are being reconfigured to make computer
terminals more abundant as book shelves are not center stage.
Publishers are also
scaling down their articles in hard print magazines to accommodate the skimming
public with newspapers using large font summary statements within their
articles because readers like to skim first and then decide whether to read the
article in depth. We have been trained to look at print media as a capsulation
of news events and shun the slow in-depth perspective.1
Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows comments:
It's that the
Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli – repetitive,
intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to
result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. With
the exceptions of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single
most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At
the very least, it's the most powerful that has come along since the book.2
(p.116)
Basically, we have
created a means to socialize through texting frequently and craft personal
profiles that are out there for everyone to see. We communicate our spontaneous thoughts on anything
from sports to politics to acquaintances, at times, regretting what we put on
the Net an hour later after getting a range of criticism. Youth are compulsive
in this regard, texting or instant-messaging multiple times per hour using less
than one hundred forty letter statements, abbreviations, and images. Validation of our worth in this
regard in this complex world is at an all-time high in human history.
Communicating with retailers and our health providers has become quite
efficient with responses often coming within an hour.
The brain's
response when we surf the Web
Texting is replacing
reading and composition, or the neurological processing we were accustomed to
using for many generations, altering them. Gary Small, director of the Memory and Aging Center
at UCLA, found that computer-savvy individuals use the left dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex much more than
minimal users. Though both groups had similar brain scans while book reading,
where language, memory, and visual processing areas are stimulated, Internet sophisticated users
demonstrate broad brain activity while web surfing, a healthy practice to keep
the mind sharp, like doing crossword puzzles.3
The transfer of memory
from the short term (hippocampus) to the long-term (cerebral cortex) is a key element in nurturing depth of intelligence.
Reading and writing provide the proper pace for this
transfer fostering rich associations or long-term schemas. Breezing on the
Internet, on the other hand, bombards the brain in a way that minimizes the
smooth flowing acquisition of knowledge for long-term storage. When this
happens, the information stream exceeds the brain's cognitive load or capacity
to retain and process the information.
Essentially our ability
to learn and comprehend is reduced and people that skim the Net frequently,
experience this overload, becoming addicted to it as well. You must discipline
yourself to sustain the reading mode because the brain is accustomed to this online
addiction as the fast pace web views are distracting, particularly texting
while talking to friends, and worse yet, driving.
An example of such
distraction was noted in a study when Miall and Dobson asked two groups to read
the short story "The Demon Lover", one the linear text version, the other with the
familiar hyperlink blue-underlined words that you see when you are on the Web.
The latter group took longer to read the story and three-quarters of them
reported they had difficulty following the text and experienced confusion and
uncertainty about what they read. Only one in ten expressed this concern from
the linear text group. They contend that
…at the
present moment, the market forces that are now set to take over and control the
electronic world seem to have little interest in literary study. Much bigger
goals are in prospect: interactive, Internet-based television and other high-resolution digitized forms of
entertainment.4
Another team
investigated the effects of graphics and news crawls as people watched four
news stories on CNN as you and I see them on television. The group that saw the program had less memory for the
facts on a later test than a group that saw the stories without the graphics
and news crawls. The authors concluded that the multi message format exceeded
the viewers' attention capacity:
…we understand
that there are intense competitive pressures on cable and broadcast news organizations
that require them to attract and hold the prime demographic group sought after
by advertisers. That said, there seems to be no explanation that justifies
using a presentational format that seems to make it more difficult for viewers
to learn from the news than it already is.5
Task interruptions are
studied extensively by The Environmental and Occupational Health (EOH) Department to
examine the long-term effects of these areas on health. One reported that
office workers will stop work-related responsibilities to view and respond to
emails up to forty times per hour. Their conclusions are that interruptions, in
almost all instances, are disruptive to performance, generate tension, and
induce errors. The concern is especially important in high-risk workplace
environments such as aviation, medicine, and vehicle operation in which human
error can have serious, potentially disastrous consequences.6,7
Deep thinking
versus skimming
The Internet is a massive data
source that is almost limitless in its range of topics and content, and this
has changed our motivation to retain knowledge.
The Net is now our memory with personal records and numbers immediately
available and cookies to fill in the blanks whenever we complete an
application. Our inherent capacity to retain knowledge ranges from the factual
to the creative and the Internet has made us
relinquish the neuroplasticity of this once sacred
memory acquisition in favor of waltzing through links.
David Brooks, New York Times columnist, in this regard
states:
I had thought
that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but
then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know
less. It provides us with external
cognitive servants, silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms
and network knowledge. We can burden
these servants and liberate themselves.9
Carr adds:
It is true
that the web is itself a network of connections, but the hyperlinks that
associate bits of online data are nothing like the synapses in our brain.
The web's links aren't just addresses, but simple software tags that
direct a browser to load and another discrete page away of information. They have none of the organic richness or
sensitivity of our synapses.2 (p. 195)
My experience as a
student through graduate school, research endeavors, and observing my students
through the years has led me to conclude that long-term retention is created
through attentiveness, repetition, and motivation. Diligence in these areas over an entire school year would
improve the speed of memorization and consequently achievement in a course.
Famed neuropsychiatrist
Eric Kandel states:
For a memory
to persist the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply
processed. This is accomplished by attending
to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with
knowledge already well established in memory.
If we are unable then to attend to the information in our working
memory, the information is retained only if the neurons maintain their electric charge – a few seconds
at best. Then it is gone, leaving little
or no trace in the mind.10
There is rapid neural
activity when we engage with the Internet for sustained
visits, like many of us do today. The subject of stimulating thinking and
motivation is dealt with in this book, and they are
altered a bit surfing the Net, imposing an information overload that minimizes
the control of memory enhancement, hampering the development of the neuronal
pathways in the frontal lobes associated with
memory. Diverting attention while bouncing around the Internet circumvents the
natural path from the new memory (hippocampus) to the long-term memory (prefrontal cortex lobes) in favor of
the minimal skill needed to navigate. Essentially, then, we train the brain to
do this information processing without deriving the benefit of remembering it
very long.
The Web is a form of
empowerment, but one that can be addicting and distract us from the
concentration, repetition, and motivation needed to patiently
master a subject. The Internet was extremely
helpful in my acquiring the notes and vast resources to write this book that
would have been agonizing slow by visiting many libraries and taking notes.
Instead, navigating online, skimming, copying, and pasting created my own
library. I am grateful for this technology.
Use the Web’s
speed and resources in a deliberate manner
However, in the end, I
had to read monograms and books, annotate extensively, make decisions,
prioritize, and then write, correct, and write again. It was difficult because
writing to an audience needs to be relevant, and that makes it even more
difficult. I found that reading and annotating demanding because my brain was
used to processing in the hurried manner described above. I was motivated,
however, and carefully read those many resources, and annotated in the margins
and in a notebook, and when I sat down in earnest to write a chapter, that part
of my cognition composed sentences
and did something that is key to this discussion: sustained my concentration
for long intervals to get it done. I made the distinction between web surfing
and scrutinizing whole documents and avoided (I hope) the characterization Carr calls shallow
thinking. I depended on the Web but recognized the value of reading and writing
to create a meaningful document. I felt a surge of gratification during the
writing, and that is the essence of this book: nurturing joy of learning and
creativity in the academic
realm in children. I wanted to write and did not mind spending hours staying on
task to reach my goal.
Do apps assist
learning? Christof van Nimwegen, a Dutch cognitive scientist, divided a
group of volunteers into two groups to find out how well people can transfer
colored balls between boxes. One group used software that provided visual cues
to help the participants, the other used a scaled down version with no cues. At
first, the group with the helpful software made appropriate moves quickly but
was outdone by the other group as they gained proficiency. van Nimwegen
concluded that the group without hints learned to plan and developed
strategies, but the software-assisted individuals relied on the program to
assist them and clumsily went through the motions to solve the puzzle.
Interestingly eight
months later van Nimwegen brought the two groups together to solve colored
balls puzzles using a variation of the original task. People that had initially used the unhelpful
software solved the new puzzles at twice the speed as the aided group.
The difference in speed
was based on performance and learning because van Nimwegen controlled for
variations in the participants' skill level at the start of the
experiment. The main observation was
that the bare-bones software people revealed "more focus, more direct
economical solutions, better strategies, and better imprinting of
knowledge."
His conclusion was that we are
accustomed to "externalizing" problem solving and mental tasks to our
computers, thereby lessening our brain's ability "to build stable
knowledge structures that can later be applied to new situations."11
Human validation is different in this
technological world. Computer programmer Thomas Lord contends that software has
reduced the personal and intimate aspects of life into dull rituals
"encoded in the logic of web pages".12 Understand that
your students' brain wiring is different from what you experienced in your
foundational years and sit in your classroom with neuronal activity primed for
immediate stimulation. Having their attention requires a pedagogy that diverts that neuronal spontaneity to one
that promotes deeper analysis of the facts and skills taught in your classroom.
*******
The Gutenberg Press
|
The labor to create books before
Gutenberg invented his press was expensive because the
copying was done on parchment, animal skins that required sufficient scraping
to make a clean and smooth surface. The Gutenberg press required less effort
and could produce books comparatively quickly, at a reduced cost, which
allowed an audience of millions across Europe and eventually the world to
procure.
Essentially the clergy was privy to
books and education was limited, but the proliferation of books, written in
Latin at first, resulted in the middle class being educated and stimulated
the production in the languages of the nations. The masses wanted variety and
saw the publication of almanacs, travel books, romance novels, and poetry.
Book trade became an enormously
successful business venture and the industries related to it such as
papermaking, thrived and the consequence was a more literate populace and a
stronger economy.
Furthermore, widespread reading allowed
populations to become aware of the new philosophy of humanism, which rivaled
and eventually exceeded the Church writings and thoughts about salvation and
afterlife. In time, the writings of the classics from 2,000 years earlier in
their Greek and ancient Latin forms came about with the discovery of the
original manuscripts.
These included writings on scientific
matters, government, rhetoric, philosophy, and art and the masses were
influenced by the knowledge of the Greek and Roman civilizations and the
emphasis of human intellect and life on earth in those ancient years.
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References
1. Shafer, J.,
(April 1, 2008). The Times New Welcome Mat, Slate.
2. Carr, N.,
(2011). The Shallows, What the Internet
Is Doing to Our Brains, W. W. Norton & Company.
3. Small, G.,
Moody, T., Siddarth, P., (2009). Your Brain on Google: Patterns of Cerebral.
Activation during Internet Searching. American
Association for Geriatric Psychiatry 17, no. 2, 116-126.
4. Miall, D.,
Dobson, T., (2001). Reading hypertext and the experience of literature, Journal of Digital Information 2.1.
5. Bergen, L.,
Grimes, T., Potter, D., (July 2005). How
Attention Partitions Itself During Simultaneous Message Presentations, Human Communication Research, Volume 31, Issue 3, 311–336.
6. Trafton, G.,
Monk, C., 1 (March 2007). Task Interruptions. Reviews of Human Factors and Ergonomics 3 (1): 111–126.
7. Latorella, K.,
October (1998). Effects of Modality on
Interrupted Flight Deck Performance: Implications for Data Link. Proceedings of the Human Factors and
Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 42 (1): 87–91.
8. Jackson, M.,
(2009). Distracted: The Erosion of
Attention and the Coming Dark Age Paperback, Prometheus Books.
9. Brooks, D., (Oct
26, 2007). The Outsourced Brain, The New York Times
10. Kandel, E.,
(2007). In Search of Memory: The
Emergence of a New Science, W. W. Norton & Company.
11. Christof van
Nimwegen, (2008). The paradox of the guided
user: assistance can be counter-effective, SIKS Dissertation Series,
Utrecht University.
12. Thomas Lord,
(November 9, 2008). Tom Lord on ritual,
knowledge and the web, Rough Type.
From http://www.roughtype.com/?p=1194
