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Mind Over Mass Media
Steven Pinker
Warning: The media here referred to is International Media and not Indian Media.
Please don't get confused. - A Thoughtful Article: Author
New forms of media have always caused moral panics: newspapers, paperbacks and television were all denounced as threats to thier consumers' brainpower and moral fibre. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we're told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.
But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 50s, crime was falling to record lows. The decades of television, radios and rock videos were also decades in which IQ scores rose continuously.
For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their email, rarly touch paper and can't lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing.
Critics sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how "experience can change the brain". But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes, but the existence of neural plasticity doesn't mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience.
Experience does not revamp the basic information-processing capacities of the brain. Speed-reading programs have long claimed to do just that, but the verdict was rendered by Woody Allen after he read War and Peace in one sitting: "It was about Russia." Genuine multitasking, too, has been exposed as a myth.
Moreover, as the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons show in their new book The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Out Intuitions Deceive Us, the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves. If you train people to do one thing (recognise shapes, solve math puzzles), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else.
Accomplished people don't bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science.
The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes. As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.
The constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, but it is not a new phenomenon. The solution is to develop stategies of self-control. Turn off email or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time.
And to encourage intellectual depth, don't rail at PowerPoint or Google. It's not as if habits of deep reflection came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the internet.
The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage our collective intellectual output at different scales. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “The Stuff of Thought.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/op...0Pinker&st=cse
Steven Pinker
Warning: The media here referred to is International Media and not Indian Media.
Please don't get confused. - A Thoughtful Article: Author
New forms of media have always caused moral panics: newspapers, paperbacks and television were all denounced as threats to thier consumers' brainpower and moral fibre. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we're told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.
But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 50s, crime was falling to record lows. The decades of television, radios and rock videos were also decades in which IQ scores rose continuously.
For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their email, rarly touch paper and can't lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing.
Critics sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how "experience can change the brain". But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes, but the existence of neural plasticity doesn't mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience.
Experience does not revamp the basic information-processing capacities of the brain. Speed-reading programs have long claimed to do just that, but the verdict was rendered by Woody Allen after he read War and Peace in one sitting: "It was about Russia." Genuine multitasking, too, has been exposed as a myth.
Moreover, as the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons show in their new book The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Out Intuitions Deceive Us, the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves. If you train people to do one thing (recognise shapes, solve math puzzles), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else.
Accomplished people don't bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science.
The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes. As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.
The constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, but it is not a new phenomenon. The solution is to develop stategies of self-control. Turn off email or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time.
And to encourage intellectual depth, don't rail at PowerPoint or Google. It's not as if habits of deep reflection came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the internet.
The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage our collective intellectual output at different scales. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “The Stuff of Thought.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/op...0Pinker&st=cse
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