51–60 of 91 posts
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How do you know?
For myself, I have limited working memory and time blindness. No amount of practice can fix the brain malfunctions that cause them.
Nicholas Carr explains many different examples(wayfinding, maps, memory, etc) in his book “The Shallows”. There’s also that book “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer where the author becomes a memory champion by embodying themselves in the competition space having never practiced it prior. While we can put blame on technology for hurting our abilities to further form certain skills, it has also allowed us to le…
The other way to look at it is that there was a sixty year span when memorizing many seven to ten digit numbers was important to us, and so that's exactly what we did. I didn't lose the ability to memorize entire books like my grandfather did, I'm just not isolated for months on end in winter like he was. It's also not the babe-attracting party trick it apparently used to be.
For as long as people have existed we've built tools to remember things for us so we can remember other things better/learn other skills. It was a "complaint" about paper, that writing things down softened our memory skills. (People would lament about the lost traditions of storytellers that had to memorize entire stories and pass them down orally.) It didn't soften our species' memory skills, it externalized memories we didn't need in long term storage so that we could learn other things. We ended up with more stories, and arguably, better stories from paper.
Just like paper, modern systems externalize memories so we can focus on other stuff. That's a feature, not a bug. Knowing we've externalized those memories we move on with our brains and use the graymatter for other activities. That's also a feature, not a bug.
Memory is OK its the concentration. I just can't read a whole novel now, its too long. Sitting down and doing work is ridiculously hard to concentrate.
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No, you're missing the point. Our brains don't work like von Neumann machines with efficient architecture. What you can and cannot remember is a - still poorly understood - function of many variables, including the various neurotransmitters and hormones that get released when you browse your phone in bed, when you get a reaction to your online posts, when you get a notification,... We might be messing with our brains…
> We might be messing with our brains more than we think, that's the point of this article. That's simply always true. Since prehistory: - We eat foods we never used to eat - We live in larger groups - We discovered a whole bunch of drugs/medicines. - Artificial light - Artificial strength Now artificial information. Sure, take precautions, try to think about what you're changing. Try to understand the tradeoffs. The…
Memory is OK its the concentration. I just can't read a whole novel now, its too long. Sitting down and doing work is ridiculously hard to concentrate.
1) Read on a Kindle or any other e-ink reader. It's always just in the spot you left it in and it's light enough to carry around everywhere. I usually read while I eat and continue to the end of the chapter after I'm done eating. Try to open a book instead of Reddit/Instagram/Facebook/HN
2) Read something fun. You don't need to pick stuff that's super-deep or insightful or productive. Pick a simple "Main character is really good at $thing but doesn't know it yet" -book. Skip the 1000 page monsters. My suggestions: Bobiverse and the Murderbot series.
I don't agree with this point. We have to remember a lot more stuff these days just to exist. We retain much more information and skill than we ever did in the 80s. I remember that. Not to say there aren't other issues but for me at least it augments my capabilities rather than reduces them in any way.
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We have to remember a lot more stuff these days just to exist. We have to know more, but not necessarily remember more. You don't have to know how to take care of a horse, grow your own food, preserve different foods for the winter, how to get from a hundred places to a hundred other places, or any of the dozens of methods of mending your clothes, or how to clean various dirty things since we now have all-purpose cle…
I'm sure people back then would have loved a vast information repository on taking care of horses too, and would have farmed external storage of lots of that information off of their minds. And at the same time they were taking care of horses, they were not taking care of whatever vast information processes their job requires. Oh, and their information likely went stale much more slowly than things we deal with these…
This isn't an idea I'd just dismiss out of hand, but I would note that it is exactly the same complaint people registered about the technology of writing.