HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER
Title: Brain Decay
Competencies: decision-making, problem solving, strategic thinking, self-development, managing self
Who benefits: those who have an interest in how the brain works or the relationship between the brain and the Internet
Consultant Usage: futurists
What’s it about? I guess I have had the brain on my mind (pun intended) since I was reading up on how people often confuse their brain with their heart when making decisions (disclaimer: me included). You can look back no further than the postmortems dissections of last month’s elections in the US when apparently a majority of the voters who don’t vote the party line, voted not in some rational look at the future, but voted with their emotions based on reactions to the past. This fascinates me.
Now comes another great debate emerging big time regarding the brain. Simply put, does the Internet rewire and ruin the brain? Hmmmm. Didn’t we have that discussion in the 50s and 60s about television?
The man determined to get this debate on the front pages of publications and in the mouths of radio and televisions media pundits is Nicolas Carr. I am not familiar with N. Carr, but he has written extensively about the relationship between computers, the Internet and the mind.
He released a book in June called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. He is now doing the talk show circuit, book signings and all those other things one does to get a book read and discussed. I haven’t read it, but according to those who have, here are a few of the ideas presented in the book:
• access to knowledge is not the same as knowledge
• data and facts are not the same as wisdom
• breath of knowledge is not the same as depth of knowledge
• multitasking is not the same as complexity
• decreasing ability to concentrate
If you want to read something shorter by the author, check out Is Google Making Us Stupid?  from the 2008 July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly. Even if you don’t intend to read the entire article or the extensive number of responses, you might enjoy the first paragraph. It is a rehash of the famous final confrontation between Dave and HAL in one of the greatest movies of all time: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rereading that opening paragraph really brought back memories. I reread it five times, smiling more each time. Ah, the good old days.
If you want to look at the other side of the debate, Jonah Lehrer, a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide (previously reviewed here) and Proust Was a Neuroscientist, argues in a review of Carr’s book that there is scientific evidence that technologies actually benefit the mind.
Does it? Will it? One thing is for sure. What the Internet does to the brain will be hotly debated … on the Internet.
Catch you later.
[tags] decision-making, problem solving, strategic thinking, self-development, managing self, the brain, brain wiring, carr, nicholas carr, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]
Bill Bradley
Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.
