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The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

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Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

#211

Post by ssttoo »

nwatson wrote: post #3

Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I've read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. So we're the first g…

"[Mozart] heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere twice in performance, in the Sistine Chapel, and wrote it out from memory, thus producing the first unauthorized copy of this closely guarded property of the Vatican" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri)

How can anyone remember 10+ mins music piece for 9 voices is beyond me. Granted, Mozart had some music superpowers, but still...

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

#212

Post by kanzure »

polm23 wrote: post #191
kanzure wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could stripe the memory across multiple different people who are responsible for smaller fragments. Each person can be responsible for some number of shared fragments. See your issued handbook, subsection "Surviving information storage in ancient times". (They could also just write it down, they had that.)

I take it you're joking, but some vedas have features that work like error correcting codes that help them survive oral transmission unchanged. http://www.hindupedia.com/en/Mathematics_of_the_Vedas#Error_...

Not joking at all. Thank you for the link.

I recently proposed error correction codes for an entirely separate purpose: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/enzymaticsynthesis/WvDidIldm...

I would like to also add my support for some of the ideas expressed earlier in the thread regarding the questions around whether literacy negatively impacts human memory, especially in children or in studied aboriginal populations. There are even studies that show that the vividness of mental imagery is reduced in people who wear eyeglasses: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/imagery/Refractive%20e...

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

#213

Post by wruza »

holografix wrote: post #181
ekianjo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet the world did not end. Countless prophecies aboutvthe absolute apocalypse have gone and passed. So yeah it is by large irrelevant.

It's not a given that it did not end... think to yourself what would happen if Nazi Germany had developed a nuclear bomb ahead of the Americans? If even the US government couldn't resist obliterating 2 cities in Japan with Nukes can you imagine what the Nazis would have done? There would have been zero consideration for the loss of human life, possibly large areas of continental Europe and the US would have been bomb…

I don't think there was economic in massive nuclear bombing, NWs were and are mostly psychological. E.g. the absense of nuclear bombs didn't stop "even" US from grilling Tokyo urban areas with incendiaries with total death toll equal to those in Hiroshima + Nagasaki. Yeah, it could be done much faster with modern delivery systems, but we also have lots of effective non-nuclear mass- and precise-destruction weapons today.

In the end, though nazis didn't value non-arial lives, they were no idiots. Why would they destroy cities and pollute areas supposed to be the part of Reich? The end of the world is both hard and unprofitable. "Nazis would" is a scary tale nicely covering the actual face of war that always remained the same.

What is really scary today is that some countries develop supreme air/space control systems, so those in the club become immune to any sort of dialog.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

#214

Post by Splines »

ssttoo wrote: post #210
nwatson wrote: post #3

Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I've read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. So we're the first g…

"[Mozart] heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere twice in performance, in the Sistine Chapel, and wrote it out from memory, thus producing the first unauthorized copy of this closely guarded property of the Vatican" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) How can anyone remember 10+ mins music piece for 9 voices is beyond me. Granted, Mozart had some music superpowers, but still...

I would guess that if you're world class at some creative process you massively compress the amount of "raw" data you need to recreate something, just due to the sheer number of patterns you are aware of.

For example, if I asked an advanced programmer to read a professional implementation of some basic data structures and algorithms, they could likely later recreate the exact same thing. Obviously they didn't memorize the file character by character, but a sensibly written implementation is going to have the same shape and form as something the expert has done hundreds of times.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

#215

Post by jlos »

nwatson wrote: post #3

Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I've read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. So we're the first g…

The medium of communication profoundly shapes our minds and thought patterns:

- Oral communication priorotizes memory (as mentioned) but also personal trust, since knowledge is always obtained directly from another person. Hence oral cultures tend to place high value on communal social structures.

- written communication priorotizes rationality since all communication can be scrutinzed before and during reading. It also prioritizes individual assessment and independence. You could argue that the broad adoption of print as a medium of communication lead to individualism, the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, and the Reformation (i.e. the fundamental contributors to modern Western Civilization).

There are obvious merits to digit communication, but the full effects on our minds and culture are not known. A blind belief in some salvific and inevitable march of progress is unwise. We may be trading immediacy, emotivism, and impulsivity for rationality and that should give us pause.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

#216

Post by wruza »

oddgoo wrote: post #165
ekianjo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet the world did not end. Countless prophecies aboutvthe absolute apocalypse have gone and passed. So yeah it is by large irrelevant.

Their world did end for those 80 million people. If most of society dies in pain and hunger to climate change, would the survivors say "bah, just more fear mongering"? For me, humanity is the sum of human experiences, not the mere presence of the species. The end of the world being relative and analog.

This sum is already negative, btw. And it is hard to tell whether it is still negative or just negative. Few happy areas may put you into "it's everywhere like that" dream. But it's not, most species are simply present to supply to someone.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

#217

Post by samplatt »

Iv wrote: post #148
wdewind wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. Socrates absolutely did. > for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth,…

I was in high school when I first read this opinion (I did not remember it was Socrates though). Also, I learned that Gaul, pre-roman France (where I lived), had a society where the priests/judges, the druids, were forbidden to write down their knowledge. It fascinated me. The idea that books, that were more or less revered depositories of knowledge, could have been seen as anti-intellectual at one time. It pushed me…

I feel that you would adore Dan Simmons first two "Hyperion" books. They're predominantly about poetry and how it's affected the human race, far into the future.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

#218

Post by euske »

jff wrote: post #7
nwatson wrote: post #3

Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I've read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. So we're the first g…

You seem to be defending against a claim the study does not make. They're not saying "smartphones make us stupid because Google's in your pocket!" Rather, the study is saying that by having your phone on the desk or even in your pocket, you will exhibit decreased mental capacity because your brain is using some cognitive resources to monitor for notifications etc. This may be over-simplified but appears to be backed…

It kinda reminds me of learned helplessness; just knowing that you're capable of changing the situation makes people perform better, even if they actually don't use that capability. It seems that there's something opposite happening here; just knowing that there's power keeps you thinking of using it.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

#219

Post by Aeolun »

kowdermeister wrote: post #129
throwanem wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is good advice - point-and-shoot cameras are really good these days! For $90 you can get one [1] that's the equal of any smartphone camera ever made, and the better of the vast majority - you might find a >16MP sensor on a smartphone, but you'll have a very hard time finding a smartphone with a 5x optical zoom capability. Spend a few hundred dollars more and you can get one [2] with an almost absurdly broad rang…

Polaroid also launched Snap: http://www.polaroid.com/products/Z2300-instant-camera I love the style and simplicity

If I go with polaroid I go with polaroid, not a digified thingy: https://eu.impossible-project.com/collections/polaroid-600-c...

Though I have to agree it looks pretty cool.

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