The basic genetic make-up of Homo sapiens has been essentially unchanged for a quarter of a million years. Yet 5, years ago humans discovered how to write and read; 3, years ago they discovered logic; years ago, science. These revolutionary advances in the capacity of the human mind occurred without genetic change. They were products of the "plastic" potential of human brains to learn from their experience and reinvent themselves.
At its best, the internet is no threat to our minds. It is another liberating extension of them, as significant as books, the abacus, the pocket calculator or the Sinclair Z Just as each of those leaps of technology could be and were put to bad use, we should be concerned about the potentially addictive, corrupting and radicalising influence of the internet.
But let's not burn our PCs or stomp on our iPads. Let's not throw away the liberating baby with the bathwater of censorship. Colin Blakemore is professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford. The key contextual point here is that the brain is a social organ and is responsive to the environment. All environments are processed by the brain, whether it's the internet or the weather — it doesn't matter. Do these environments change the brain?
Well, they could and probably do in evolutionary time. The internet is just one of a whole range of characteristics that could change the brain and it would do so by altering the speed of learning. But the evidence that the internet has a deleterious effect on the brain is zero. In fact, by looking at the way human beings learn in general, you would probably argue the opposite. If anything, the opportunity to have multiple sources of information provides a very efficient way of learning and certainly as successful as learning through other means.
It is being argued that the information coming into the brain from the internet is the wrong kind of information. It's too short, it doesn't have enough depth, so there is a qualitative loss.
It's an interesting point, but the only way you could argue it is to say that people are misusing the internet. It's a bit like saying to someone who's never seen a car before and has no idea what it is: "Why don't you take it for a drive and you'll find out? But that's because your experience has yet to inculcate what a car is. I don't think you can argue that those latent processes are going to produce brain pathology.
I think the internet is a fantastic tool and one of the great wonders of the world, if not the greatest. Homo sapiens must just learn to use it properly. Ian Goodyer is professor of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. I am an apologist for the reading brain. It represents a miracle that springs from the brain's unique capacity to rearrange itself to learn something new. No one, however, knows what this reading brain will look like in one more generation. No one today fully knows what is happening in the brains of children as they learn to read while immersed in digitally dominated mediums a minimum of six to seven hours a day Kaiser report, The present reading brain's circuitry is a masterpiece of connections linking the most basic perceptual areas to the most complex linguistic and cognitive functions, like critical analysis, inference and novel thought ie, "deep reading processes".
But this brain is only one variation of the many that are possible. Therein lies the cerebral beauty and the cerebral rub of plasticity. Understanding the design principles of the plastic reading brain highlights the dilemma we face with our children. It begins with the simple fact that we human beings were never born to read. Depending on several factors, the brain rearranges critical areas in vision, language and cognition in order to read.
Which circuit parts are used depends on factors like the writing system eg English v Chinese ; the formation eg how well the child is taught ; and the medium eg a sign, a book, the internet. For example, the Chinese reading brain requires more cortical areas involved in visual memory than the English reader because of the thousands of characters.
In its formation, the circuit utilises fairly basic processes to decode and, with time and cognitive effort, learns to incorporate "deep reading processes" into the expert reading circuit. The problem is that because there is no single reading brain template, the present reading brain never needs to develop.
With far less effort, the reading brain can be "short-circuited" in its formation with little time and attention either in milliseconds or years to the deep reading processes that contribute to the individual reader's cognitive development. The problem of a less potentiated reading brain becomes more urgent in the discussion about technology. The characteristics of each reading medium reinforce the use of some cognitive components and potentially reduce reliance on others.
Whatever any medium favours eg, slow, deep reading v rapid information-gathering will influence how the reader's circuit develops over time. In essence, we human beings are not just the product of what we read, but how we read. For me, the essential question has become: how well will we preserve the critical capacities of the present expert reading brain as we move to the digital reading brain of the next generation?
Will the youngest members of our species develop their capacities for the deepest forms of thought while reading or will they become a culture of very different readers — with some children so inured to a surfeit of information that they have neither the time nor the motivation to go beyond superficial decoding?
In our rapid transition into a digital culture, we need to figure out how to provide a full repertoire of cognitive skills that can be used across every medium by our children and, indeed, by ourselves. Answer the question? Sure, but in what way? With multiple perspectives?
They want to answer it in a way that appeals to you or benefits them. If, like many others, you tend to get your news from Facebook, the effect is in full swing. Your newsfeed is personalized regarding your interests and therefore biases. You see what Facebook thinks you want to see, not what you need to see. You come to exist in an ideological bubble. This past election was a prime example. Facebook is under fire for allowing fake news to propagate throughout its feeds.
Yet people believed it, shared it, and used it to reinforce current biases. Rarely will our Facebook comfort zones expose us to opposing views, and as a result we eventually become victims to our own biases. Its goal is to show you more of what you like, I doubt they want to get into the muddy water of defining what is true and enforcing a standard upon what people share. People want free speech. The app had made both the pregnancy and the loss seem somehow more concrete.
Sure, I get that headlines speak in shorthand and that personification implies imprecision. Increasingly, as we all become more aware of this, people are taking protective measures see, for example, the rapid rise in the use of ad blockers —which is really an effort to limit the tracking and collection of personal information.
For example, some scholars and technologists have been discussing for years the possibility of putting expiration dates on information available on the web.
The Internet needs to think a little harder. The analysis system is fairly basic: the searchterm is used in English sentences, which are arranged into three categories of connotation: negative, positive and indifferent. The sentences are double quoted, to make sure the search-engine searches for occurrences of the whole sentence.
These results represent a very global impression of connotations positive, negative or indifferent for said search term, so they should not be taken too seriously. However, the more results hits are returned for a search, the more accurate the percentages can become.
Some obvious searches such as beer, bad breath, parking tickets, sex, etc are probably not far off — or perhaps even in-sync — with the result you had in mind. Everything boils down to connotation. To read more on this, in relation to the website, we highly recommend reading this very nice article on whatdoestheinternetthink by Velar Trill , which is spot on and explains why some results seem to be 'wrong'. Between Bing was the only one left, since april Google using Custom Search was reintroduced to the system and Bing was eventually removed december , as the API is no longer free.
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