“Plasticity and the human brain” was my original draft headline for this post. Seemed like a catchy enough way to draw readers in.
But before I could write this column with such a punchy “hed,” I had to do a bit of research. On the Internet from my desk, of course. That’s when I got distracted. Which is rather the story of the Internet. They don’t call it the World Wide Web – with the emphasis on web – for nothing.
Sharon Begley, senior health and science correspondent at Reuters, was the science editor and the science columnist at Newsweek from 2007 to April 2011. In the Jan. 8, 2010 issue of she had an interesting piece called, “Your Brain Online: Does the Web change how we think?” Begley was commenting on Edge Foundation Inc.’s 2010 annual question by John Brockman to 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and other scholars, which four years ago was: “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” Not so much, argued some scholars, including neuroscientist Joshua Greene and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, both of Harvard.
Others held a dystopian view. Communications scholar Howard Rheingold argued the Internet fosters “shallowness, credulity, distraction” and as a result that minds struggle “to discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu.” Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, who studies the political effects of the Internet, says, “Our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely detached even from the most recent of the pasts … our ability to look back and engage with the past is one unfortunate victim.”
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University writes that the ubiquity of information makes us “less likely to pursue new lines of thought before turning to the Internet.” The information is de-contextualized and satisfies our immediate research needs at the expense of deeper understanding, Csikszentmihalyi argues.
This is not exactly a new argument. Nicholas Carr wrote a similar piece in the July/August 2008 issue of Atlantic magazine with the genuinely catchy title: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He argued the online world has made it much harder to engage with difficult texts and complex ideas.
Carr wrote: “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.”
Carr followed up that 2008 magazine article with a book two years later, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain.
I could go on, but truth is I got distracted around this point in my research. That happens with the Internet – a lot. My mind was soon enough recalling Quantum Leap, starring Dean Stockwell, as Al Calavicci, and Scott Bakula, as Dr. Sam Beckett, a scientist who becomes lost in time following a botched experiment.
It aired from March 1989 to March 1993 originally, a quick detour to Wikipedia confirmed for me. “I thought it was quite good at the time for the sociology more than the science,” I was soon explaining in an e-mail. “Interesting though because it is one of the last shows of its type to air before the Internet was just about to take off in a big way. There was e-mail in 1993 and a very early World Wide Web (WWW), but few people were ‘wired.’”
That might have been OK if that was as far as it went. But soon I was doing some comparative research on Wikipedia for the mid-1980s to mid-1990s sci-fi era. “I also quite enjoyed some of the episodes of Sliders, starring Jerry O’Connell as Quinn Mallory, which ran from from 1995 to 2000, focusing on alternate histories and social norms as the group of travellers “slide” between parallel parallel worlds by use of a wormhole referred to as an “Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge,” I helpfully added after my brief mention of Quantum Leap.
“There was also a series called Max Headroom that aired briefly in 1987 and 1988. Edison Carter, played by Matt Frewer, who actually grew up in Peterborough, was a hard-hitting reporter for “Network 23,” who sometimes uncovered things that his superiors in the network would have preferred to keep private. Eventually, one of these instances required him to flee his workspace, upon which he was injured in a motorcycle accident in a parkade. Bryce Lynch downloaded a copy of his mind into a computer, giving birth to the character Max Headroom, as the last words seen by Carter before impact were “Max Headroom”, specifying vehicle clearance height in the parkade.
“Max Headroom also appeared as a stylized head in some TV ads against primary colour rotating-line backgrounds. He was known for his jerky techno-stuttering speech, delivering the slogan “Catch the wave!” (in his trademark staccato, stuttered digital sampling playback as “Ca-ca-ca-ca-ca-catch the wave”) in the rather disastrous Coca-Cola venture in the mid-to-late-1980s with “New Coke.”
An hour or so has now passed.
I agree heartily with Carr that the web “has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes … a few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.”
But the fact is that at about this point in reading Carr’s thoughtful treatise, Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s magic Google search engine somehow transported me to Don Terry’s article, “Lou and Me: ‘We work at a newspaper, a real newspaper’” in the January/February 2010 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, which you can be transported to as well via http://www.cjr.org/feature/lou_and_me.php?page=all.
Ah, yes. Lou Grant, the character played by actor Ed Asner in the show of the same name. Editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune. Moved from television news in Minneapolis, after being laid off supposedly after 10 years as Mary Tyler Moore’s boss on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, back into newspapers. But on another television show, if you can follow the thread. Debuted Sept. 20, 1977, Terry helpfully reminds me. That’s good to know since time can play tricks and get telescoped with age, I find.
By now, I’m thoroughly absorbed in the reverie of memory and have to remind myself I’m writing a column based on the plasticity of the human brain and how technology can change the very act of how we think and construct reality.
Take typewriters, like I used in journalism school. Friedrich Nietzsche bought a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball typewriter in 1882 and his style of writing changed, long before the World Wide Web and Google.
His already terse prose became even tighter and more telegraphic. “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts,” Nietzsche observed.
How do I know this? I “Googled” it.
soundingsjohnbarker 