The Fluid Shift from Brain to Machine

Kevin showed me this article once, I believe it was in the Sun, which is a damn fine reliable smart magazine. The article was about me, well, it was about my brain. Not really my brain in particular but the brain I have that other people have as well, and that is a brain formed and shaped by computers.

It cited a study where a group of people, one group computer savvy the other non and got them to explore the internet as scientists studied their brain waves. the group more computer literate would predictable flip from screen to screen and the part of the brain illuminated was the decision making part, the frontal cortex and the group without much experience tended to use the part of their brain reserved for learning, for reading and reflecting. After a few days of study the second group developed the same kind of brain responses as the first group, decision-making, browsing rather than reading.

We are needing our brains less and less. The question in the article was, "are computers rewiring our brains?"

As an observer of my own experiences, hell yes. My spelling is shit. When someone asks me a question I think, "where on the internet can I access this information?" rather than racking my brain for the answer.

Once, when I was about eightish I went to Christian church located in a shopping center in Hillsboro close to Skyliner with my friend Holly. When mass started (sorry, I call it mass, old Catholic habit) the kids were sectioned off and divided into their various age category classes. In our class their was lecture about technology and how someday humans will be asked to have computer chips in their brains, and this and that and it wasn't to far in the future but Christians will resist it and protest and they will be persecuted and pressured.

The Christian resistance movement went right over my head as I excitedly imagined the possibilities of having a computer chip in my brain.

"Will I be able to listen to music?" I thought. "Will I be able to write notes to myself in my brain and print them out later for further assessment?" "Will all my memories be stored so I can access them at any time?"

Perhaps we will have computers chips in our brains. What will that mean? What does it mean right now?

My spelling has become shit. I used to laugh inwardly at my coworkers struggling to spell such words as fettucini and even real doozies like "couldn't" and "brain." Now I find myself second guessing some of my spelling. Every time I spell restaurant I have to pause. It's awful. And I write restaurant almost every single day. I got the word "immediately" spelled wrong on an application writing "immediantly." What the hell?

So, this article, it tells us how we assimilate the information that is out there, taking note of it's location on the web rather than storing the information in our brains. We are getting better at finding information than recalling it and I wonder, is this for the best?

My first reaction is to be critical, no it's not good, the internet is not natural, we are tearing ourselves from the raw natural functions of our brains, stripping away the learning part of our experience and getting straight to the quick answer, where to find it. But it's how I have been learning so much from the internet. . .

For instance, I raped wikipedia in my study of the Bosnian War and believe I squeezed every bit of information out of Youtube videos of a BBC2 documentary on Yugoslavia. I could have never got such concise information searching through a book, exploring the internet was like a injection of information straight to the cortex rather than the slow rubbing of ointments (the act of studying) into the skin. It was wonderful and horrible and easy and awesome.

Do you think Montessori thought of the internet when he considered the his method of learning? Where a child is not required to learn anything but explores the world with a guided hand; learning to read books by handling them and wondering about them and having a guide show them what it is? The internet is a grand Montessori school, it a library with the information of the world resting in it, a library the size of a country if we could see it in a tangible form. A library in almost perfect order.

And I am majorly plugged in. I network on all the major networking sites. I even twitter. I even visit second life from time to time (which is really really lame). My brain feels like it is being reprogrammed. I find myself less patient with reading, satisfied with being surrounded by several sources of information rather than reading one single book. The internet is made for me. It doesn't allow me to become bored. It doesn't allow me to lose interest. When I do there is always something else to look at. Some other part of my mind which selfishly wants to get information.

I don't know what to think of the whole mess actually. I like it. I hate it. I could never live without it. I don't want to live without it. What am I missing? What is happening, really?