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How good software makes us stupid

2010-09-12 10:19:09

By Dave Lee BBC World Service

Imagine for a moment that you have thumbed a ride in one of London's iconic

black cabs.

"Where to, guv?" he asks, in typical cockney-twang. You tell him.

"No problem - let me just enter that into my sat-nav "

It sounds unnatural, almost deceitful, that any self-respecting London cabbie

would ever utter those words.

Continue reading the main story

Start Quote

In many ways I admire Google, but I think they have a narrow view of the way we

should be using our minds.

End Quote Nicholas Carr

After all, a taxi driver's ability to know every twist and turn of the

capital's streets is the stuff of legend.

It's not optional - unless drivers pass a formidable test - called "The

Knowledge" - they are not allowed to head out onto the roads in one of the

iconic vehicles.

But with satellite-navigation technology now well established as a cheap,

reliable way of being shown the way ahead, one expert has warned that we could

actually lose the intellectual capacity to remember vast amounts of information

- such as tricky routes through the capital city.

"The particular part of our brain that stores mental images of space is

actually quite enlarged in London cab drivers," explained Nicholas Carr, author

of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

"The longer you've been a cab driver the larger that part of your brain is."

Mr Carr explained to Gareth Mitchell on BBC World Service's Digital Planet that

one study revealed concerns over technology use for cabbies.

"Almost certainly we'll see a diminishment, or even an eradication, of that

special quality of their brains."

Altered activity

It could be argued that if a sat-nav can save months of studying for The

Knowledge, while, in theory at least, making travelling around easier, then

that can only be a good thing.

Not so, argues Mr Carr. Technology, particularly the web, has been found to

have lasting effects on our brains, altering our ability to carry out certain

tasks.

A hand types in front of a Google logo Mr Carr says the simpler that sites like

Google get, the less able we are to learn

"The most interesting [study] had people who hadn't had experience with the web

begin to use Google, for just an hour a day, and begin searching and surfing."

The results showed how even just a small amount of use triggered varying

patterns of brain activity.

"On the one hand, a lot of their decision-making parts of their brain were

activated which means it can help keep a mind sharp, for instance, as we get

older.

"But it also seemed to indicate the kind of patterns of activity that would

make it hard for you to concentrate. If you're always solving problems and

making decisions you can't have the calm mind you get when you read a book."

The key to making us concentrate, Mr Carr suggests, is perhaps to make tasks

difficult - a theory which flies in the face of software designers the world

over who constantly strive to make their programs easier to use than the

competition.

Industrial view

Google is the prime culprit, Mr Carr says.

"In many ways I admire Google, but I think they have a narrow view of the way

we should be using our minds.

"They have this very much of an industrial view that everything's about how

efficiently you can find that particular bit of information you need - and then

move on to the next."

He argues that this even applies to projects like Google Books - designed to

bring literacy to a bigger audience, and to make the world's knowledge more

accessible.

"They're scanning these books, I think, with a view that will not take in the

whole books, but they'll become more content for its search engine.

"What it's purveying is this view of all information being delivered as

snippets. When you go to a Google Books page, you're not engaged in a long

narrative in the book."

In his book, Mr Carr cites an article on this website written by technology

commentator Bill Thompson.

The article described a simple experiment where a puzzle needed to be solved

using a computer program. One half of participants were given a 'good' program

- it gave hints, was intuitive and generally helped the user to their goal.

The other half took on the same puzzle, but with software which offered little

to make the task easier.

"The people who had the weakest software, who had to struggle with the problem,

learned much more than the people with the most helpful software," Mr Carr

explained.

"Months later - the people who had the unhelpful software actually could

remember how to do the puzzle, and the people with the helpful software

couldn't."

Mr Carr says that this simple experiment could suggest that as computer

software becomes easier to use, making complicated tasks easier, we risk losing

the ability to properly learn something - in effect "short-circuiting" the

brain.

"When you think about how we're coming to depend on software for all sorts of

intellectual chores, for finding information, for socialising - you need to

start worrying that it's not giving us, as individuals, enough room to act for

ourselves."