Is technology harming our brains?
uxdesign.cc
uxdesign.cc
It’s because technology is harming our brains.
I sympathize with the author and feel this to an extent, but maybe this has more to do with aging than it does using apps and addictive social media. Memorization is a lot easier when you're young versus when you're older.
Though I'm sure it does play a part--spending most of your time on social media leads to not using some parts of your brain. You've got to use it to keep it working properly, just like muscle.
Chronic stress, reduced physical activity and subclinical depression is quite the cocktail for attention and memory difficulties.
Then sometimes I have to wonder though, do we have realistic expectations on memory? There's just so many systems (at work) and so much stuff, maybe we're overloading ourselves past realistic expectations?
Its like saying a books are only cheesy romantic 5 penny books...
Do you want me really to write down some books were you should not be relaxed?
That's quite different that 45 seconds of outrage the on to the next click-bait, isn't it?
The attention span required seems quite different between the two. I assume that's why people are concerned that things like social networks may be detrimental to focused thinking.
EDIT: I agree that a book like "It", full of suspense, would not ordinarily be considered relaxing to read.
The ‘mild cognitive impairment’ now being observed in younger generations may manifest in, among other things, not reading articles and books because they require a longer attention span and it feels too burdensome compared to reading and writing 1-2 sentence blurbs on social media...
What if we apply this to a more macro scope? Human evolution. It would be bad if we stopped relying on our brains (hey, we have great AI!), brainpower stopped developing over time, brainpower languishes, humans lose intelligence.
"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-goog...
I refer to it in my post: https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back...
"And in this instance, you who are the father of letters [i.e., the Egyptian god Thoth], from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours [i.e., writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
Attributed to Socrates, from Phaedrus, circa 370 BC.
People are getting worse in these kind of trivia questions...
Because why should you even remember them?
If all the internet shuts down then the least of your problems are trivia questions...
I’ve heard stories of cricketers in the 80s getting hammered drunk in the nights during test matches yet nursing their hangover and bowling 100s of deliveries the day after
But technology is a seemingly harmless and way more accessible vice. It’s much easier to lose track of time on TikTok on your bed I’d say
Could it be that the decrease in attention and memory is a reasonable adaption? If there are way more things to pay attention to, because we're all now much more aware of everything that's going on around us, it kind of warrants having shorter attention span by default, with moments of intense focus in rare circumstances.
Same for memory, part of the reason why we invented computers is to be able to store and retrieve information better than us, and we succeeded. Now our brains are delegating to those external systems and focusing on things that truly require our intelligence.
I know this is controversial, but I think there's something to it. I think that what is happening right now is justifiable evolutionary pressure on human species.
Back in the days when people got easy access to books people were thinking that kids reading all day the newest novel would make them only want to live in a dream world...
The avg. human these days is way way smarter then 50 or 100 years ago...
People always fill there brains with junk... Even in ancient Rome they were drawing penises on walls...
Maybe the questions in schools an co. suck for the modern times? Maybe its an problem of the write of the article not a general problem?
They have more information in their heads and know more ideas, facts, figures, and so on.
But the wetware is still the same it’s been since ancient civilization. We haven’t changed, only stuffed our heads with more information that hasn’t been given any time for processing. Very few have any real free time to allow their brains to wonder and to begin integrating what their senses have collected.
Dare I say this makes us less wise.
If Native Americans had an IQ test it might encompass being able to navigate and understand geography, weather, and animal and plant behavior without being aided by tools. In that case, most of us would qualify as handicapable and be sorted out by primitive career matching into nothing more than offerings to nature and the cycle of life.
I think by definition the more stable and ingrained globalized culture becomes… the more likely we will select and refine for the attributes it requires to succeed. And by this virtue, we’ve made a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Nutrition is better than centuries ago. People are stronger. They live longer. All around on that time scale, tech has improved human lives. One would expect that to be reflected in brain health, too.
No one can agree about what "intelligence" actually means. Using synonyms for intelligence but claiming they mean something subtly different (e.g. "wise") is part of that phenomenon.
But there is the Flynn Effect.
I spend a lot of time looking at my phone. I’ve been getting neck cramps!
All of us are being exposed to the poorly studied effects of electromagnetic radiation and how that may effect cognition.
I am not taking one side or the other, but the effects of 5G EMFs are not being investigated.
Your microwave also uses wifi 2.4GHz to heat water because the power is many orders of magnitude higher.
5G is just one issue. We’re constantly bombarded with electromagnetic radiation from various sources at various frequencies.
It also becomes difficult to get a real control group, without numerous confounding lifestyle factors, because we’re all being exposed to it, so the real long-term effects will most likely not be known. The only thing gleamed is that an increase in 2.4Ghz EMFs leads to further psychological disturbance.
Books promote deep, linear thinking. TV made us shallow and visual. Social media took it to the next level, turning us all into helpless Pavlovian mutts.
You can have the same message on all of those mediums, but only one is really effective.
TV has scripts. Those are written.
As far as depth, that really depends what you're reading/watching. I can find shallow books and deep TV. I can find both books and TV that get us to merely consume and also that get us to think, ask questions, talk about the content, and even dress up in costumes and go to conventions.
I'll give you TV being visual. So are graphic novels, though.
> That is not what "message vs the medium" means. This refers to how the medium affects how we think.
Marshall McLuhan (Mr. "the medium is the massage") talked about the amount of engagement demanded by different media in Understanding Media, making claims similar to yours. Common criticisms of that stance are that it's oversimplified and distorted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media#Critiques_...
it's so different, you have a limited time (→ stress), digital device (→ eye strain), limited space
I often take my eyes off a book to ponder and process a passage. Who pauses the TV to process a scene? The pace is dictated for you. The images flicker forward and your brain needs to quickly discard previous information to catch up with the new one.
Books generally demand prolonged, fixed attention to a single organized subject matter or narrative, and do not interrupt the subject matter or narrative with random interjections of completely unrelated content. This, however, is precisely the sort of interjection TV performs through the means of the advertisement.
Social media in all its forms (twitter, facebook, instagram, et al) is essentially just TV if TV were only advertisements—a random collection of bite-sized, completely unrelated clips that bombard the viewer and gradually erode one's ability to devote continuous attention to a single subject matter. It's no wonder "influencers" are a dominant mode of advertising—they are the natural progression from TV ads. Social media already had the structure of the TV advertisement (a short burst of random information) all the big wigs had to do was convince influencers to start selling stuff directly.
Worse, if you watch TV today, you likely have access to social media on a smart phone. No one wants to watch TV ads so the temptation to fill that space with social media consumption is constant, which leads you to basically fill ad time with even less related or relevant info that has the same level of fragmentation as TV ads but even more extreme.
It's no wonder nobody can focus or remember anything when we've trained our brains to not only be used to but to actively expect random bursts of totally unrelated content at rapid rates. I've been getting worse and worse at being disciplined myself lately and at times quite literally feel like I've unintentionally given myself adhd.
Those that are not harmed suffer from survivor bias.
Technology makes it so that anyone can create anything, and creating things is the epitome "making the brain work" in my opinion. If you want to create art, you no longer need to buy canvas/paint/pens/whatever, same with music and many other things that technology has lowered the barrier too.
There are so many video games that make your brain work. Not most of the garbage on mobile, but "real" games (for a lack of a better word). Even if it's not explicitly a puzzle game, any sufficiently difficult game forces you to practice and be patient to beat it. When you finally master it, you get that great delayed dopamine hit.
I'm pretty sure the reason I can sit for hours and bash my head against a difficult problem/bug is because I spent my youth failing at video games for hours.
tl;dr yes, some aspects of technology are bad. The solution isn't to blame technology, but to discourage the harmful parts of it and encourage the positive aspects of it.
We are offloading work away from our brains.
After the arrival of smartphones and instant access to information, there's no need to remember anything when you can look it up instantly.
Before, you'd memorize facts such as the longest river, highest mountain, etc, now you just query your phone.
Before, you'd look at a map and memorize the street names where you have to turn, now you just open you maps on your phone.
Before, you'd have to learn a foreign language. Now we have instant translation tools.
Before, you'd have to learn the names of each plant and insect, now you have your smartphone lenses.
Before, we would look up the manual for a library function call, now we have AI powered code generation tools...
The point is that we are offloading many tasks away from our brains, and then filling them up with garbage, such as this comment.
/s
Same with goes with communication. We're probably thousands of km away from each other and we can communicate but we can't bond, that why people are more lonely than ever.
1. Tiktok, youtube and instagram with a constant feed of < 5 minute videos that are perfectly targeted at your interests
2. 24 hr news with constant tragedy and rage inducing narratives
3. Instant access to pornography
4. Instant access to high fat / sugar food
Having more valuable knowledge instantly available isn't the problem. It's the distractions that get us to waste our lives away swiping at a screen are the problem.
Are we not doing alternative work?
Memorizing or just learning information gives us better operation over data and still has use. Consider that we might just be better prioritizing memory usage. Besides, smartphone lookup incurs latency.
Did you really? Huh. I'd look that kind of stuff in the Guinness book of world records. Not sure that's the knowledge to defend memorization of... True. Again, not the highest priority information to memorize.
Yes, and with that tool the risk of hopelessness by immersion is lower, effectively reducing the barrier to learning a new language.
I think what you wrote is that we know have increased access to the actual names of plants, insects, etc. Whether we then learn and memorize them or not is separate.
Some do but even those still need to consider the correctness of the code. Of course, I've worked with lots of engineers who didn't consider their stack overflow copypasta either.
It's not clear and certainly not universally the case that we are replacing our brain processing and focus with garbage. As before with books and other technologies we choose how we use them. Perhaps you have an unexamined reaction to all of these tools as subtracting from some static pool. It is just as possible to view them as taking low value work off your plate to enable you to do higher value work. I would recommend removing or ignoring the low return tools and adopting those that effectively increase your scope. As with all things responsibility and consideration are required for maximal outcomes.
It is not only the fact that we are getting mentally lazy by having on demand access to all of human knowledge and opinion, but it is also that it takes the magic out of certain social interactions. For example, having a discussion with a friend over coffee, where both of you might be trying to remember the details of a specific topic. Previously, you might have spent 10-15 minutes digging into the topic, exercising each other's memory until you both arrived at the 'aha' moment where suddenly you remember the key detail/fact that you both were looking for. Anecdotally, when that happened, it was a deeply rewarding moment (dopamine hit, but you had to work for it!). With all of this knowledge at our fingertips, those moments are gone. I wonder if the lack of that mental 'sparring' and the ensuing reward that it brings is causing us to miss out on a key social/mental feedback loop that could not only allow you to exercise your mind, but also to get you used to moments of frustration and disagreement with another person (which is a useful skill to develop when you are contending with someone on a topic in which the answer is unknown).
Anyway, more relevant to the parent comment, we have faced this challenge before in the physical domain (i.e. our ability to move ourselves vs transportation technology). We have bikes, cars, trains, and planes (and now cybertrucks!), yet we still recognize the necessity for physical exercise (although Ozempic and other weight loss drugs may change this dynamic). Ultimately, with the introduction of technology that makes our lives easier (at least initially), the natural capabilities that we've developed over billions of years to serve those functions become vestigial if not used.
Even before smartphones and before the web, there was the Internet. I rejoiced! More information than I could store in my personal library available to me - wonderful! It meant that I could still focus on how things fit together and not frustrate myself with memorization.
> The point is that we are offloading many tasks away from our brains, and then filling them up with garbage, such as this comment.
My point is that certainly a lot of that memorization was garbage too. Garbage out, garbage in?
There's also the added social advantage in not being branded an egghead for knowing obscure facts. Now we can just point to them on a phone.
We massively abuse legal "speed" to focus and downers to fall asleep, and all you have to do is get off the phone.