- PowerPoints make you productive (Wikipedia)
Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker took up the mantle for twitter-reading, YouTube-watching, blog-scanning, email-reading multi-taskers in an Op-Ed in last Friday’s New York Times. In what amounts to a direct critique of Nicholas Carr’s recent remarks on hyperlinks and his new book, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Pinker says that claims that our cerebellums are being re-wired to think less and react more are overblown.
Pinker scores valid points with familiar arguments from this camp. The move to the written word from an oral tradition, for example, was thought by the ancients to be a memory crutch and would inhibit good conversations and interactions. Sound familiar?
I can’t talk about whether there is a permanent rewiring of the brain, but I don’t see how Pinker and his cohorts can deny the productivity draining aspect of too much digital interactivity.Continue reading