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Monday 29 February 2016

Recent essays and cognitive science studies have documented the effect on our thinking of the many hours we spend each day staring at computer screens. Attention spans appear to have decreased, and our productivity might even have plateaued after decades of strong gains. Sophie McBain's recent essay in New Statesman looks specifically at the changes in our memory. Here is the outline for an essay that connects that article to fields beyond cognitive science.

1. Uploading our memories to a cloud of networked computers changes the way we perceive our life experiences.

Not only our recollection of them, but also our attitude "in the moment" is affected, when we distance ourselves from the event in order to assess its potential for going viral, getting "liked" or retweeted.
Even our recollections are no longer as malleable as they were before digital artifacts, copied endlessly with perfect fidelity, could confirm or refute the tiniest details of our memories.
The speed of looking up facts online reinforces the overconfidence bias, and we esteem ourselves as knowing more than in fact we do.

2. Jordan Ellenberg, in How Not to Be Wrong, likens mathematics to a prosthetic limb, engineered to have more lifting power than the human muscles endowed by our genetic heritage.

Viewing the world through a mathematical lens allows us to make connections across disparate subjects, connections that would never occur to us without the language of mathematics.
Naive intuitions about quantity and chance can be put on firmer footing with a grasp of basic mathematics.
Like the Promethean discovery of fire or eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, this gift of expanded human capacity cannot be returned to the gods.

3. Questions

By asking our students to view the world through a mathematical lens, are we reshaping their inborn cognitive processes as dramatically as the online sharing and tweeting of everyday life is reshaping their sense of narrative and memory?
In several centuries, will the idea of distributed memory seem just as essential to our civilization as mathematical reasoning seems to us today?
What would be the counterpart of the Asimov short story "The Feeling of Power" in a world where distributed memory is the norm, not just for basic facts of arithmetic, but even for the very events of our day-to-day lives?