Motley Moose – Archive

If you knew you were damaging your brain….would it help if you were having a blast while doing so? (Let’s ask some crackheads for their opinion!) (Yes! Yes, it does help!) Is it possible that our time spent online is actually weakening our abilities to concentrate and solve complex problems? Or is that not the case after all? Maybe we’re actually strengthening our minds in this fast-paced, virtual world. Perhaps it’s a bit of both. It’s a puzzle scientists have been trying to solve for years, and researchers are sharply divided…but I find the idea that we are altering our brains on a cellular level with our high tech, fast-paced lifestyles to be mad cool (and, if being honest….a bit creepy). I want to touch on a couple of the more recent studies on the topic…and perhaps test the limits of Moose distractibility while at it. /grin

[Warning: If you are epileptic or have any other kind of seizure disorder, you need not view this diary.

No, really….not kidding.

People with dial-up should also be wary, as it is image heavy.

All others…make sure you’ve allowed flash…buckle your seatbelts…and join me below the fold!]

(Are ya twitchin’ yet?)

You may think this is just a bunch of Kysen silliness and not worth reading further….but, I promise I’m addressing a serious topic here…and may actually make a point or two (shocking, I know). Whatever you may believe about the Internet’s effect on our brains, the fact remains that it is distracting. This diary may be, in some ways, more aesthetically challenged and displeasing than most, but do a Google image search…go to a site with pop-ups…allow alerts for your email…set your phone for Twitter and Facebook updates…hell, read a Kysen diary! The types of distractions found on the Intertubes (and in this very diary) are seemingly limitless. If we accept that neurological pathways in our brains can be changed, then doesn’t it reasonably follow that changing our primary source of information from books to the Interwebs would have some sort of lasting impact on our minds? I’m leaning towards ‘YES’, but, you must decide for yourself (if you can find the time to do so).

Is there any question that the rise of the Internet (and teh Googles!) has changed the way we view and interact with the world? Information is everywhere, albeit not always accurate (especially on Yahoo! answers), and it’s instantly accessible with the click of a mouse or a touchpad (unless, of course, you forgot to pay your ‘Net bill). There is no dearth of things to do…places to go…people to ‘socialize’ with — things to entertain us. Our options myriad. Amazingly, people still get bored enough to need sites like bored.com (or milkandcookies.com or peopleofwalmart.com). Type “bored” into Google, and you’ll get enough search results  to keep you busy for months. And if you still can’t find a website to tickle your fancy…..you can always create your own (motleymoose.com?? / grin) — and hell, learning to do so will eat some time, won’t it? But one of the questions that comes to mind is… what price are we paying for infinite information, freedom, options, stimulation and fun? Another is…how is it that superman can deflect bullets…yet he ducks when the villain throws the gun at him?

Is it zonking us out? Damaging our attention spans? Eating away at our ability to focus? That’s an argument that’s long been used to condemn everything from books to television to video games….but is it valid?

Socrates started what may have been the first technology scare. In the “Phaedrus,” he lamented the invention of books, which “create forgetfulness” in the soul. Instead of remembering for themselves, Socrates warned, new readers were blindly trusting in “external written characters.” The library was ruining the mind.

Needless to say, the printing press only made things worse. In the 17th century, Robert Burton complained, in “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” of the “vast chaos and confusion of books” that make the eyes and fingers ache. By 1890, the problem was the speed of transmission: one eminent physician blamed “the pelting of telegrams” for triggering an outbreak of mental illness. And then came radio and television, which poisoned the mind with passive pleasure. Children, it was said, had stopped reading books. Socrates would be pleased.  

The Frontal Cortex – Jonah Lehrer, image added

The Myth of Multitasking

People who spend time online are immersed in endless stimulation, often switching quickly between tasks and applications. Whether it’s friending your waiter on Facebook, Tweeting madly, checking email incessantly, adjusting iTunes, downloading files (probably illegally…you sneaky bastards!), or refreshing your favorite websites in a compulsive need to check for new articles and comments….we often find ourselves doing many things at once. Our spidey sense might be telling us that this is a good thing — after all, isn’t it a valuable skill to be able to juggle jobs and multitask? Possibly. But the evidence doesn’t seem to bear that out ….just because we do a lot of switching around and multitasking doesn’t mean we have grown particularly adept at it.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist.

New York Times, emphasis and image(s) added

Is it possible, even, that our Internet use is altering our very personalities?

Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cellphones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.

“More and more, life is resembling the chat room,” says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford. “We’re paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle.”

We do spend a lot of time with our devices, and some studies have suggested that excessive dependence on cellphones and the Internet is akin to an addiction. Web sites like NetAddiction.com offer self-assessment tests to determine if technology has become a drug. Among the questions used to identify those at risk: Do you neglect housework to spend more time online? Are you frequently checking your e-mail? Do you often lose sleep because you log in late at night? If you answered “often” or “always,” technology may be taking a toll on you.

New York Times, emphasis and image(s) added

Does this entertain you half as much as it does me? If so, you might have a problem:

Yeahhhhhh… you should probably get that checked out…

Advances in computer technology and the Internet have changed the way America works, learns, and communicates.  The Internet has become an integral part of America’s economic, political, and social life. – Bill Clinton

The scientific community has been asking for years now whether the Internet makes us smarter or dumber, and there are good arguments on both sides of the issue. Undoubtedly our use of the Internet has increased certain skills and abilities as we are forced to rapidly adjust to a wealth of incoming information and stimuli. Maybe there is no simple answer to this question. Evidence of Internet users’ distractibility and use of scanning techniques on websites has been documented for over a decade, and now more and more emerging research points to the conclusion that the Internet is rewiring our brains, to the detriment of some of our most valued abilities as a species. Recent research indicates that our use of the Web is making us increasingly distractible and less capable of effectively processing and absorbing what we read. In other words, we are creating a sort of attention deficit in ourselves, which is slowly deteriorating our ability to engage in complex thought processes that don’t involve a multitude of attention-grabbing stimuli. Righteous!

2008 saw the publication of an article describing changes in the way ‘Net surfers read and process.

. . .a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

The Atlantic, emphasis and image(s) added

Ooph. Don’t look at that too long.

This one’s mo’betta…

Damn… feeling a little car sick over here…

Anyhoooo… continuing on…

The crux of the argument rests on the idea that the endless distractions provided by the Internet — from popups to links to pictures to…to…to… sorry, got distracted… But this seemingly infinite array of sparkly (S H I N Y ?!?) stimuli enables us to fuel the natural human tendency toward distractibility.

The picture emerging from the research is deeply troubling, at least to anyone who values the depth, rather than just the velocity, of human thought. People who read text studded with links, the studies show, comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text. People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner. People who are continually distracted by emails, alerts and other messages understand less than those who are able to concentrate. And people who juggle many tasks are less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time.

The common thread in these disabilities is the division of attention. The richness of our thoughts, our memories and even our personalities hinges on our ability to focus the mind and sustain concentration. Only when we pay deep attention to a new piece of information are we able to associate it “meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory,” writes the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. Such associations are essential to mastering complex concepts.

Wall Street Journal, emphasis and image(s) added

So in other words, we’re becoming superficial, distractible…

Oh, that’s messed up. Now…what was I saying? Methinks it had something to do with… reptiles? No?

Nevermind, I was talking about attention span.

It looks like there’s a trade-off, or quid pro quo of sorts, for our speedy digital lifestyles.

Ms. Greenfield concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of screen-based media, she said, has strengthened visual-spatial intelligence, which can improve the ability to do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of simultaneous signals, like air traffic control. But that has been accompanied by “new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes,” including “abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination.” We’re becoming, in a word, shallower.

Wall Street Journal, emphasis and image(s) added

Back to that Multitasking Myth….

Even though it may seem as though multitaskers would be better at juggling tasks and processing numerous bits of information at once, it turns out that some of them are pretty incompetent. Maybe practice doesn’t make perfect???  

In another experiment, recently conducted at Stanford University’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, a team of researchers gave various cognitive tests to 49 people who do a lot of media multitasking and 52 people who multitask much less frequently. The heavy multitaskers performed poorly on all the tests. They were more easily distracted, had less control over their attention, and were much less able to distinguish important information from trivia.

The researchers were surprised by the results. They had expected that the intensive multitaskers would have gained some unique mental advantages from all their on-screen juggling. But that wasn’t the case. In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren’t even good at multitasking. They were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more infrequent multitaskers. “Everything distracts them,” observed Clifford Nass, the professor who heads the Stanford lab.

Wall Street Journal, emphasis and image(s) added

And according to these researchers, it’s not like these negative effects just go away when we turn our attention to something else. When we walk away from our computers, our brief (cuz god knows we can’t leave the poor Interwebs all alone by itself for long!) departure doesn’t change the fact that the neurological structure of our brains has been altered. Yup, you read that correctly (well, you did if you did not scan past it)…our brains are being altered. Holla!

It would be one thing if the ill effects went away as soon as we turned off our computers and cellphones. But they don’t. The cellular structure of the human brain, scientists have discovered, adapts readily to the tools we use, including those for finding, storing and sharing information. By changing our habits of mind, each new technology strengthens certain neural pathways and weakens others. The cellular alterations continue to shape the way we think even when we’re not using the technology.

The pioneering neuroscientist Michael Merzenich believes our brains are being “massively remodeled” by our ever-intensifying use of the Web and related media. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Merzenich, now a professor emeritus at the University of California in San Francisco, conducted a famous series of experiments on primate brains that revealed how extensively and quickly neural circuits change in response to experience. When, for example, Mr. Merzenich rearranged the nerves in a monkey’s hand, the nerve cells in the animal’s sensory cortex quickly reorganized themselves to create a new “mental map” of the hand.

Wall Street Journal, emphasis and image(s) added

I don’t know that we’re getting “stupider,” but according to this research, some of us are certainly losing our ability to concentrate in low-stimuli environments (ie: the real world).

Reading a long sequence of pages helps us develop a rare kind of mental discipline. The innate bias of the human brain, after all, is to be distracted. Our predisposition is to be aware of as much of what’s going on around us as possible. Our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were once crucial to our survival. They reduced the odds that a predator would take us by surprise or that we’d overlook a nearby source of food.

To read a book is to practice an unnatural process of thought. It requires us to place ourselves at what T. S. Eliot, in his poem “Four Quartets,” called “the still point of the turning world.” We have to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter our instinctive distractedness, thereby gaining greater control over our attention and our mind.

It is this control, this mental discipline, that we are at risk of losing as we spend ever more time scanning and skimming online.

Wall Street Journal, emphasis and image(s) added

Wanna test YOUR Focus and your ability to juggle tasks quickly?:  Click HERE for a brief test.

Believe it or not…it seems Kysen can focus very well (but, admittedly SUCKS at juggling tasks).

Much like we are what we eat (arugula, anyone?), one researcher posits that we are what — and how — we read.

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

[. . .]

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”-the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities-we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

The Atlantic, original emphasis, image(s) added

(If the contents of this diary haven’t distracted you yet…relax… you’re safe… nothing will…)

Hmmmm…..makes me think of THIS song.

(Yeah, Kysen’s head is noddin’.)

And it’s not just the way we’re rewiring ourselves — for a lot of us, part of the issue is how much we’re stressing ourselves out. It’s impossible these days not to become dependent on technology, and to an extent, it’s tough not to become flat out addicted. But how can we not check our email or answer our phones? What if something important were to happen???

While most Americans say devices like smartphones, cellphones and personal computers have made their lives better and their jobs easier, some say they have been intrusive, increased their levels of stress and made it difficult to concentrate, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.

Younger people are particularly affected: almost 30 percent of those under 45 said the use of these devices made it harder to focus, while less than 10 percent of older users agreed.

[. . .]

People seem to find it hard to shut down after work. Almost 40 percent check work e-mail after hours or on vacation.

Some people can’t imagine living without their computers. About a third of those polled said they couldn’t, while 65 percent said they either probably or definitely could get along without their PCs. The people who are most computer-dependent tend to be better educated and more affluent.

New York Times, emphasis and image(s) added

Maybe we’re not yet headed for this level of stupidity:

Or hell, even this one:

(Who’re the bigger fools, the parents or the kids? I vote for the cameraman!)

Look! Elvis!

Even if we haven’t yet descended into full blown stupidity, I think the argument that we’re changing our brains is fairly credible. Not everyone agrees with me (I know! go figure?)…

But neuroscience author and blogger Jonah Lehrer is unimpressed with Carr’s scientific rigor, and with his respect for the brain. Sure, Lehrer says in his New York Times review of the book, we bounce around the Internet, distracted at every turn:

But this isn’t really the fault of the Internet. The online world has merely exposed the feebleness of human attention, which is so weak that even the most minor temptations are all but impossible to resist. Carr extends these anecdotal observations by linking them to the plasticity of the brain, which is constantly being shaped by experience. While plasticity is generally seen as a positive feature – it keeps the cortex supple – Carr is interested in its dark side.

In addition, Lehrer says, Carr may have cherry-picked studies to support his argument, but the science is not nearly so one-sided:

What Carr neglects to mention, however, is that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind. For instance, a comprehensive 2009 review of studies published on the cognitive effects of video games found that gaming led to significant improvements in performance on various cognitive tasks, from visual perception to sustained attention. This surprising result led the scientists to propose that even simple computer games like Tetris can lead to “marked increases in the speed of information processing.”

The key to the Carr argument, then, is not so much scientific rigor as it is an appeal to an extremely enticing romantic appeal. Even among the many Web-savvy people who responded with derision toward what feels like a reactionary attack on the modern way of life, there is the basic longing to disconnect now and then.

Discover Magazine, emphasis and image(s) added

I’d originally intended to do more to outline the other side of the argument — that our use of the internet makes us smarter. At least I think that was my intent….but to be honest…? I don’t have the patience or attention span for it. Oops.

Are we getting dumber?

Should we be worried?

Should I be more concerned that I find this soooooo pleasing:

And how’s this for trippy??

[poll id=”

55

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