Friday, July 15, 2011

If internet use is decreasing our memory, is it necessarily a bad thing?

Here's an article that been making the rounds this week. So internet use is dramatically reducing our internal memory (as opposed to our offloaded memory) and perhaps even shrinking our hippocampi. Should we look at this as an alarming new fact about life in the 21st century? Or should we think of this in evolutionary business as usual? Given that computers are here to stay, there's no reason to think computers and humans aren't going to co-evolve in the same way millions of other animals have co-evolved, except in this case computers aren't evolving through natural selection.

3 Comments:

Blogger GMSoccerPicks said...

Objectively bad, it won't matter much though. As you stated, computers, smartphones, etc are here to stay, so i guess people with access wont notice the change at all.

11:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The human mind will always adapt as long as its "user" wants it to adapt. In this case, in a philosophical to theological language, the flesh wants us to adapt to new things that may be in jeopardy to our natural born abilities to do what we are ought to do. We as human beings must use our intellectual abilities to figure out things on our own in a balanced manner, it's our nature.

10:05 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://cartoondnbt.blogspot.com/

5:01 PM  

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