Sunday, November 1, 2009

Cognitive Revolution

It's amazing how a powerful thought can be delivered in a humble and calm tone, as Frank Schirrmacher does in this edge talk.
He rightly quotes Daniel Dennett - "We have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them."

"Here European thought is quite interesting, our whole history of thought, especially in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, starting from Kant to Nietzsche. Hegel for example, in the nineteenth century, where you said which thought, which thinking succeeds and which one doesn't. We have phases in the nineteenth century, where you could have chosen either way. You could have gone the way of Schelling, for example, the German philosopher, which was totally different to that of Hegel. And so this question of what survives, which idea survives, and which idea drowns, which idea starves to death, is something which, in our whole system of thought, is very, very known, and is quite an issue. And now we encounter this structure, this phenomenon, in everyday thinking.
It's the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news. But now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn't important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it's in Facebook. And others say, well, it's on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it's very hard to say it's somewhere in my life, in my lived life."

Important hidden fact in what Dennett said is we have more than enough humans on this planet but their brains aren't used optimally. Best analogy I could think of is using a super computer exclusively to play solitaire. With the talk of coming cloud computing age, it would fantastic if the unused "Space" and RAM of the human brain(s) can shared optimally so that the "cognitive surplus" can be re-cycled and avoid the cognitive flush.

"Gerd Gigerenzer, to whom I talked and who I find a fascinating thinker, put it in such a way that thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else.
The European point of view, with our history of thought, and all our idealistic tendencies, is that now you can see — because they didn't know that the Internet would be coming, in the fifties or sixties or seventies — that the whole idea of the Internet somehow was built in the brains, years and decades before it actually was there, in all the different sciences. And when you see how the computer — Gigerenzer wrote a great essay about that — how the computer at first was somehow isolated, it was in the military, in big laboratories, and so on. And then the moment the computer, in the seventies and then of course in the eighties, was spread around, and every doctor, every household had a computer, suddenly the metaphors that were built in the fifties, sixties, seventies, then had their triumph. And so people had to use the computer. As they say, the computer is the last metaphor for the human brain; we don't need any more. It succeeded because the tool shaped the thought when it was there, but all the thinking, like in brain sciences and all the others, had already happened, in the sixties, seventies, fifties even."

"Now, in the twenty-first century, you have all the same issues, but now with the brain, what was the adaptation of muscles to the machines, now under the heading of multitasking — which is quite a problematic issue. The human muscle in the head, the brain, has to adapt. And, as we know from just very recent studies, it's very hard for the brain to adapt to multitasking, which is only one issue. And again with calories and all that. I think it's very interesting, the concept — again, Daniel Dennett and others said it — the concept of the informavores, the human being as somebody eating information. So you can, in a way, see that the Internet and that the information overload we are faced with at this very moment has a lot to do with food chains, has a lot to do with food you take or not to take, with food which has many calories and doesn't do you any good, and with food that is very healthy and is good for you.
The tool is not only a tool, it shapes the human who uses it. We always have the concept, first you have the theory, then you build the tool, and then you use the tool. But the tool itself is powerful enough to change the human being. God as the clockmaker, I think you said. Then in the Darwinian times, God was an engineer. And now He, of course, is the computer scientist and a programmer. What is interesting, of course, is that the moment neuroscientists and others used the computer, the tool of the computer, to analyze human thinking, something new started.
The idea that thinking itself can be conceived in technical terms is quite new. Even in the thirties, of course, you had all these metaphors for the human body, even for the brain; but, for thinking itself, this was very, very late. Even in the sixties, it was very hard to say that thinking is like a computer."

With over abundance of (great) information to be processed, I sometimes go blank, annoyed, incapacitated and overwhelmed with the lack of time and inefficient parallel processing by my brain. Clay Shirky is right when says there is never abundance of information but inability to filter information. Filtering information is not an easy task. It needs practice and patience. Trying to devour every available information will lead to insanity and exhaustion. I initiated the process of deleting some of book marks. It took a lot of courage since I deleted a major news site and swore never to visit on a daily basis.

Alternatively, dopamine might be someday driven to correct this imbalance. My loathing for dopamine had subsided after reading Jonah Lehrer's blog on this great article - A molecule of Motivation Dopamine Excels at its Task. Dopamine drives us to enjoy sex, food, drugs and other rewards but these neurotransmitter's are also responsible for the intellectual pursuits and great ideas. What if dopamine is made to focus on fueling the intellect instead of sports and sugar? Isn't this one of the greatest benefits of "neural plasticity"?
Finally, I think what propels an "informavore" is the drive to pack as many "Aha" moments in life as possible.

"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding." - Leonardo da Vinci.

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