Your Brain and the Internet, Redux
This Mark McGuinness gentleman is the anti-Nick Carr:
….Pick up just about any book on Buddhist meditation, and you’ll find a similar description. Texts often refer to the ‘monkey mind’ hopping from thought to thought like the branches of a tree. And considering they are all based on the 2,500-year-old teachings of the historical Buddha, it seems a little premature to blame the internet for our monkey minds.
When Nicholas Carr writes “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory”, it’s as though the internet were imposing some alien thought patterns on him. But all the internet is doing is exaggerating the natural tendency of the mind to keep skipping from thought to thought.
What is unnatural is the habit of spending “hours strolling through long stretches of prose”. The internet may be changing our brain, but books changed it first.
October 6th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
This is a great post. I really enjoy the debate about the way that the internet is changing our brains. I think that the idea that the monkey brain flits from thought to thought is only accentuated, and not created, by the internet.
Great post. Looking forward to reading the full article.
October 6th, 2010 at 11:51 pm
And all this time I thought my skipping around & spending little time on any one item was due to the fact that most of what’s available to read is rubbish.
October 7th, 2010 at 1:05 am
CGW, Most is "rubbish." Thank goodness for zenpundit! Had a large response from my email network about this link yesterday.
October 7th, 2010 at 3:27 am
Gracias! Much appreciated gentlemen!
October 9th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Thanks for the link Mark!
I think that surfing the internet is more in tune with the natural human trait to be hunter-gatherers and explorers, rather than single-track cloistered bookworms.
Internet surfing is true Boydian; always observing and orienting ourselves in a target rich environment before deciding on which subject warrants the act of absorbing, before moving on to the next target of interest.
October 10th, 2010 at 12:55 am
Act of absorbing, huh?
October 10th, 2010 at 12:57 am
Whoa! Whoa! Here, just think of what you are absorbing, first.
October 10th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
If it is Boydian, then you enter the subjects OODA loop, but you absorb nothing. After all, it was the way you oriented yourself in the environment that you and your subject observed that enabled you to enter their OODA loop in the first place (you have the advantage). Of course it is hard to avoid a little feedback now and then
If you have participated in hunting, you know that there is an absorption of the observation’s of one’s environment that you orient yourself to, but there is also a certain single-track mind-set of the cloistered bookworm to the actual hunting process, of surfing another OODA loop. Targeting comes from Observing and Orientation, not in Decision or Acting, which it sounded to me like you meant the final Act is absorbing. You build a quantum across the gap from decision to action, then you release the kinetic energy from the potential of your orientation to Action. If your Decision is to absorb the information, then it is they who entered your loop, the final Act, the pulling of the trigger, the judgment call. You have simply gone along with the call, you have changed your orientation without observing your environment. This is why it is just simpler to love your enemy, same thing, same outcome, a lot better for business, no absorption.