The Making of the Mind: The Neuroscience of Human Nature (34 page)

Externalized memory further expands the mind by permitting collective cognition that relies on multiple individuals all sharing access to media held in common. A team of individuals can reason together and collaborate in problem solving when they all read and keep accessible a text that provides relevant data and facts. It is necessary only to refer to the location of information stored externally when communicating with each other rather than transmitting the information to each individual. Inferences can be drawn
quickly, facts checked unequivocally, and common ground achieved with a minimal degree of effort given to oral communication. Collaborative cognition is certainly possible when individuals share the same perceptual space and are working to solve a concrete problem in the here and now (e.g., in a hunt). With the aid of externalized written and visuographic symbols, the benefits of collaboration are expanded immensely to abstract realms of thought far beyond the realms of the perceptual and motor.

The drawings, paintings, and sculptures of prehistory were the starting point for visuographic symbols. Although the emphasis has been placed on the transformational power of writing with a concise alphabetic code, numerous other forms also serve as external memory systems in theoretic culture. For example, films were introduced in the twentieth century and continue to dominate as a preferred means of storing stories, events, and factual knowledge externally in digital form, whether broadcast as television, downloaded from the Internet, or played as a video disk. History is filled to the brim with the symbolic notations that complement written language, however. Maps, astronomical charts, calendars, notations for dance choreography, musical scores, directorial play or film scripts, and engineering designs are all important examples. The expanse and richness of the theoretic cultures that have flourished in human history all depended on external memory storage. It is almost impossible to imagine human culture without the visuographic symbols that are taken so much for granted by us all.

Walter Ong, in
Orality and Literacy
, strongly advocated the view that writing, and later print, altered human thought processes. The technology of writing was necessary for the logical thinking that permeates history over the past several centuries. The Renaissance, which ended Europe's Middle Ages, and the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries paved the way for the scientific and technological societies of the contemporary world, but these historical developments would not have occurred without the invention of writing. As Ong phrased it, “Philosophy and all the sciences and ‘arts’ (analytic studies of procedures, such as Aristotle's
Art of Rhetoric
) depend for their existence on writing, which is to say they are produced not by the unaided human mind but by the mind making use of a technology that has been deeply interiorized, incorporated into the mental processes themselves.”
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Logicoscientific thought was facilitated over the centuries by the capacity to extend human memory through external symbol storage in the form of written texts.

In appreciating Ong's point, it is imperative to take a broad view of literacy that includes learning how to use reading and writing through schooling. As Donald Olson put it in
The World on Paper
, “Literacy in Western cultures is not just learning the abc's; it is learning to use the resources of writing for a culturally defined set of tasks.”
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Through literacy and the schooling that goes with it, for example, one can learn to use written texts, graphs, and diagrams in the conduct of scientific investigation. It is not enough to think only about the ability to produce or decode letters when thinking about how the acquisition of writing alters the mind. Literacy in this broad sense implies the awareness that written sources can be referenced for facts that one cannot recall; it implies an awareness that writing down one's thoughts can help to shape and articulate exactly what it is that one is trying to say. Literacy, properly understood, entails an awareness that the steps of a mathematical proof, the predictions of a scientific theory, or the entailments of a system of laws can only be fully grasped through their externalization as written notations. Just try to imagine doing mathematics, science, or law without writing.

Even so, as Walter Ong reminded us, the innovation of writing was also objectionable on the grounds that it could harm the skills of memory fostered by oral culture. In Plato's
Phaedrus
, Socrates argues that “writing destroys memory,” for “those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external source for what they lack in internal sources.”
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Although writing may add to the mind, it may also subtract. External symbol storage expands our minds to a mode of logical, analytic thought and reduces reliance on internal memory at the same time. In oral cultures, knowledge must be passed down from generation to generation largely through narrative thought and spoken language. The only other means available are mimetic gestures and other nonverbal means of communication that likely preceded our capacity for oral language. Individual, internalized memory is thus essential for successful generational transmission of knowledge. Memory for oral language, therefore, is as fundamental to cultural evolution as genetic transcription and sexual reproduction are to biological evolution.

In his
Memory in Oral Traditions
, David Rubin reviewed the ways in which oral culture encouraged prodigious feats of individual internal memory. To illustrate, Avdo Medjedovi, a Slavic singer of epic poetry, was capable of recollecting poems as long as thirteen thousand lines that required sixteen hours to sing.
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He knew a total of fifty-eight epics or about five hundred thousand lines—this stands in comparison to the twenty-seven thousand lines of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
combined. Today, of course, outside of school, twenty-first-century human beings rarely memorize anything more than grocery lists and passwords to Internet accounts. Instead, we rely on the external stores of knowledge in written records, books, films, and the Internet.

Our reliance on writing as an external kind of memory has been shown in a laboratory experiment.
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College students played a game of Concentration with a deck of thirty-six cards. One side of each card was a uniform, blue color, and on the other side was a picture (e.g., a flower, a sun, or one of several abstract designs). In the deck, each picture or design had one match. To begin Concentration, all the cards are laid down, blue side up. The first player selects a card and then turns over another card in search of its match. If successful, the player removes the pair and continues play. The turn ends when the player's choices result in a nonmatch. The goal is to find all matching pairs in as few turns as possible. Although the game is generally played by at least two players, it can be played as solitaire, as was done in the experiment. In one experimental condition, participants were allowed to write notes for themselves as they played the entire game. In a second experimental condition, participants again made notes as they wished, but in the seventh round their notes were taken away from them unexpectedly. Finally, in a control condition, no note taking was allowed and participants relied solely on internal memory. The results clearly showed an advantage for the writing group. By relying on external memory, they won the Concentration game in reliably fewer moves than the other two groups. The group interrupted in their use of notes performed almost as poorly as the group not allowed to take notes, indicating that they were relying on the external memory of their notes rather than memorizing the locations.

In the Concentration game, the player could focus more attention on remembering the identity of the cards because their locations could be stored
externally. The external notes and internal memory worked together as part of a distributed cognitive system. More generally, in literate cultures, the information contained in books, magazines, maps, paintings, and film—to name just a few examples of written and other kinds of visuographic symbols—is symbiotic with internal human memory. Executive attention and the other components of working memory can be freed for a higher degree of reflective thought in such a symbiotic system. The analytic and logical thought of the literate mind is the result of freeing the mind from the narrative thought and memorization of oral culture.

THE INTERNET MIND

The way that twentieth-century science and technology transformed society is hard to grasp for anyone born in the past twenty-five years or so. Consider conditions one hundred years ago, when the automobile was just taking to the road in large numbers and competing with horses as a means of transportation. In the 1950s, when television first found its way into the homes of Americans, viewers were not infrequently treated to a test pattern occupying the screen when absolutely nothing was broadcast. With the 24/7 television of today, with its hundreds of channels, the days of three commercial networks and test patterns are as difficult to imagine as being on a wagon pulled westward by horses.

The influence of television, personal computers, cell phones, smartphones that combine the portability of a cell phone with the power of a computer, and the Internet are likely shaping the human mind into a new form, just as writing did. Unlike the introduction of writing in human culture, however, these information technologies have struck with lightning speed, on the scale of decades rather than centuries. Televisions, cell phones, and videocassette recorders (now already obsolete) saturated nearly 90 percent of US households within twenty years or so of their introduction.
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Personal computer ownership and Internet access spiked equally rapidly.

Although writing was invented five thousand years ago, the vast majority of human beings remained illiterate until well into the most recent millennium. It was not until the development of moveable print in the fifteenth
century that written texts were made available on a mass scale, and the schooling needed to learn to read inched forward only slowly even then. Although today the vast majority of the world's population is literate, it took thousands of years to get there. Thus, the manner in which writing altered the human mind was both subtle and glacially slow. Exposure to the Internet and global telecommunications, by contrast, is happening both on a massive scale and at breakneck speed. If the invention of writing created, in time, a new kind of functional mind based on literacy, then what mental organ will be forged by the telecommunications and computer revolution of our time? What will be the defining features of the twenty-first-century mind?

Color television was first introduced during President John F. Kennedy's years in the White House. But within three decades, by 1990, more than 90 percent of all US households had one or more to watch.
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Although full-color audiovisual images had been part of the industrialized world since the 1920s, television brought the media into the home. Watching images on a screen was no longer a special event consigned to a movie theater. It was instead an everyday event that could be indulged for hours at a time, if one chose. In a survey of media in the home, the Annenberg Foundation reported in 2000 that children aged two to seventeen spent almost two and half hours viewing television each day.
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Including video tapes, video games, computer use, and Internet browsing, the average amount of time spent in front of screens was over four and a half hours.
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The images of television, movies, and videogames are visually compelling to the human brain for several reasons.
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First, the continuous motion of the action triggers the orienting component of attention. Unlike executive attention, orienting attention serves momentary perception rather than the sustained thought of working memory. Constant orientation to the environment directs attention to the external world of perception rather than the inward world of thought. Second, the brevity of events, interactions among people, and even the commercials in visual media enhance this focus on the external. Special effects heighten its perceptual allure. Scenes fade and dissolve into the next scene; montage combines disparate elements to guide the viewer through changes in place and time; music and lighting heighten emotional engagement; split-screen images, slow motion, and instant replay create a
visual world unlike any encountered in real life. All this is well suited for portraying concrete actions that can be processed as visual-spatial images. In fact, it is so well suited as to be almost hypnotic in arresting and holding human attention within a fantasy world of images.

Whereas visual media give us images to enhance or even supplant the perceptual world of everyday experience, information technologies give us access to an essentially infinite number of electronic texts as well as images. The term Internet will be used in here as the proxy for all the related information technologies, such as personal computers and smartphones. The Internet links human beings with one another and with the images and text stored in external memory systems, and that is what matters most. Its superconnectivity is what affords the potential to shape the twenty-first-century mind. Even the division between television and the Internet is blurring: hypertext links within television programming make it more like surfing the Web, just as online video clips, movies, and other streams of imagery make our experience of the Internet more like television. The sheer quantity of texts and images available to human consciousness, and the ease with which they can be accessed, is revolutionary.

While providing massive external memory to augment the human brain, the associative links of the Internet use a similar associative structure to that found within our own internal semantic memory. The facts and concepts of semantic memory are linked together in a web of associations that allow one to jump from one idea to an entirely remote idea in just a few steps of associative thought. The Internet allows the same, but in a far deeper and richer database than any single human mind can contain. Besides providing access to an essentially infinite amount of information in the form of Web pages, the Internet offers the person-to-person connection of social networks. It offers a global virtual social world that is not constrained by the limitations of geographical proximity. By connecting people anywhere in the world, the Internet builds on the advanced social intelligence of human beings. For example, psychologists have asked whether mental and physical well-being can be enhanced through virtual social networks.
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