The Rack

Researchers Give Up Google and Discover Single Tasking

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You know it’s August when The New York Times makes front pages news out of five brain researchers taking a rafting trip in Glen Canyon, Utah. It was really a working vacation, as these high-powered scientists, accompanied by a Times’ reporter (great gig, Matt Richtell), pondered how our brain changes when disconnected from Google, email, and the whole darn Internet.

Leave it to brain scientists to discover that they feel different and better after three days of vacationing with nothing to do but row, chat, and drink Tecate beers in the evening.  Of course, this group’s idea of hanging around the camp fire involves light banter about  brain chemicals in the bloodstream, the neuroeconomic value of information, and a famous University of Michigan study showing that people are better learners after a walk in the woods than maneuvering a busy urban street.

Fortunately, Nick Carr was not on vacation and read the same article.

It seemed that even the skeptics among these scientists—those who believe that multi-tasking with multiple gadgets is benign— think that this off-line vacation led to clearer thoughts and new perspectives.

Mr. Kramer, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois and a skeptic, informally and unscientifically discovered that maybe he can’t listen and type on his laptop at the same time.

Non-brain researcher Nick Carr, who has just written The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, is obviously way ahead of these guys, and in his blog post he picked up on the scientists talking about “working memory.”  That’s the small collection of neurons getting saturated by email, twitter, and Facebook.

More memory taken up by tweets, leaves less for storing and integrating ideas— it’s basic neuro-arithmetic.

Considering there have been so many breakthroughs made by scientists relaxing —Newton under a tree, Heisenberg hiking, etc.—it’s a little surprising the skeptics are having problems with the idea that the Internet may not be entirely beneficial.

Carr has an even more disturbing follow-up post on Google —yeah, I’m a little down on Voozle lately— discussing their plans to  simply take over all our short-term thinking and decision making.

Here’s the money quote from CEO Eric Schmidt:

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.
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