Short Video: How is the Internet Changing Your Brain?

Just last night I caught myself looking up something I know I googled last week. It set off a few alarm bells. Ni needs information to draw from. If I'm not putting that info into my long-term memory, I'm wasting time. It would make more sense to learn the thing than to constantly look it up.

I notice that when I'm doing research--I get a lot of issue specific knowledge, but it goes away once the project is done. And I wonder if I had to work more slowly, and data were harder to find, if I mightn't remember my own conclusions better.

I don't know, though. When written knowledge was first becoming more common among the wealthier Greeks, people like Plato, if I recall rightly, complained that it would lead to no one working to reason things out as hard because they would just get the finished answer from a book without having to go through the process themselves.

On the flip side, access to so much knowledge eventually means that instead of wasting time on the basic processes, people could take tons of conclusions accumulated through the saved wisdom of ages, and then use that to make even more advanced conclusions which otherwise they could not have done because they would have been busy rediscovering the basics.

I think that this has some relevance to the internet debate. It has a lot of bad, but I think it can be good as well. It could accelerate the rate of discovery if education is adapted to fit the new paradigm.