---------------------------------- This is your Brain on the Internet ---------------------------------- -Ian! D. Allen - idallen@idallen.ca - www.idallen.com A set of references for those of us who spend a lot of time online. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" [excerpts] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/ "Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. [...] The faster we surf across the Web-the more links we click and pages we view-the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link-the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction. [...] I'm haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer's emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut-"I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid"-and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL's outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they're following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence." "The Autumn of the Multitaskers" "Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy." http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/the-autumn-of-the-multitaskers/6342/ "Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires-the constant switching and pivoting-energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on. What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects' brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus-which stores and recalls information-to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction-but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they'd been sorting once the experiment was over. Even worse [...]" This essay is a real gem, with many examples related to student learning. "The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They're the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. "I get bored if it's not all going at once," said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They're the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it. [...] It begins by giving us more tasks to do, making each task harder to do, and dimming the mental powers required to do them. It finishes by making us forget exactly how on earth we did them (assuming we didn't give up, or "multi-quit"), which makes them harder to do again." Google search terms: your brain on computers http://horizonsaftermath.blogspot.com/ "In a seventy-five-minute class that permits students to be "plugged in," a student with an open laptop takes electronic notes just as much as he social networks: 34 minutes with a margin of error of 5 minutes. Looking at websites that are relevant to class is only slightly more common than looking at websites that are irrelevant to class: 36 as opposed to 32 minutes. A student with an open laptop spends, on average, 27 minutes sending and receiving email and 11 minutes reading an electronic newspaper. That these numbers sum to more than the seventy-five class minutes hints at the prevalence of in-class, electronic multitasking." http://slowknowledge.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/multitasking-in-the-classroom/ "I disagree about the efficiency argument that was just made. It may be more efficient but the ability to multitask can divide your attention to the point where you may get things done but you may not be doing them to the best of your ability. For example, last year I was planning an (extracurricular) event and I had at least one hundred emails to take care of. I did it during one of my favorite classes and I really didn’t get much out of it that day. It was efficient because I planned the event and attended class, but both my emails and my notes suffered." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid? - an overview of the problem of remembering what we search for "Wolf expressed her grave concern that the development of knowledge in children who are heavy users of the Internet could produce mere "decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes", and cautioned that the web's "immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge". http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Technology-Making-Your/66128/ - by Marc Parry, July 2010 - review of "The Shallows - What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" by Nicholas Carr" Carr's original article was "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" - people who multi-task don't transfer information from short term to long term storage - they don't remember what they do "Studies pretty clearly show that when our attention is divided, it becomes much more difficult to transfer information from our short-term memory, which is just the very temporary store, to our long-term memory, which is the seat of understanding." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg - by Philip Zimbardo - playing video games for thousands of hours has changed perceptions http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#BrainAlteration "The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About Technologies in Education" "Brain Alterations Caused by the World Wide Web" - a list of quotes and pointers to articles about brain changes http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1 "Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains" - using web rewires brain; switching tasks makes us forget "The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind's filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind. [...] Psychologists refer to the information flowing into our working memory as our cognitive load. When the load exceeds our mind's ability to process and store it, we're unable to retain the information or to draw connections with other memories. We can't translate the new material into conceptual knowledge. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains weak. That's why the extensive brain activity that Small discovered in Web searchers may be more a cause for concern than for celebration. It points to cognitive overload. The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There's the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There's also the fact that numerous studies—including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases—show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online. Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the cognitive penalty can be severe. [...] But it would be a serious mistake to look narrowly at such benefits and conclude that the Web is making us smarter. In a Science article published in early 2009, prominent developmental psychologist Patricia Greenfield reviewed more than 40 studies of the effects of various types of media on intelligence and learning ability. She concluded that "every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies, she wrote, has led to the "widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills." But those gains go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacity for the kind of "deep processing" that underpins "mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection." [...] Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are "suckers for irrelevancy," says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. "Everything distracts them." Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/in-multitasking-more-than-two-tasks-do-not-compute.ars - multitasking makes learning worse http://www.seekersdigest.org/?p=795 - by AJ Jacobs "My colossal task burden" - trying to live one day without multitasking http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB - forget what you know about good study habits "With many students, it's not like they can't remember the material" when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. "It's like they've never seen it before." "When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem," said Dr. Rohrer. "That's like riding a bike with training wheels." With mixed practice, he added, "each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure - just like they had to do on the test." http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/timestopics/series/your_brain_on_computers/index.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/technology/25brain.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/garden/10childtech.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brainside.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brainpoll.html "Technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas." -- | Ian! D. Allen - idallen@idallen.ca - Ottawa, Ontario, Canada | Home Page: http://idallen.com/ Contact Improv: http://contactimprov.ca/ | College professor (Free/Libre GNU+Linux) at: http://teaching.idallen.com/ | Defend digital freedom: http://eff.org/ and have fun: http://fools.ca/