brain

I visited Nick Carr’s blog Roughtype and discovered that the Charlie Kaufman scripted movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is moving from the drama category into documentary. Carr’s post Remembering to forget is worth a read:

“Slowly but surely, scientists are getting closer to developing a drug that will allow people to eliminate unpleasant memories. The new issue of Neuron features a report from a group of Chinese scientists who were able to use a chemical – the protein alpha-CaM kinase II – to successfully erase memories from the minds of mice.”

If this is the case, how will I ever be able to listen to Dino sing this without re-writing the words?

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Thanks to Daniel Pink, I took a look at a couple of interesting, if curious, items that revolve around the subjects of creativity and smarts. Apparently both sleep and boredom are used by the brain for some high falutin’ processing work. Both items are worth a look. From Scientific American:

• Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter

And from the New York Times:

• You’re Bored, but Your Brain Is Tuned In

Finally, today’s Globe and Mail had this somewhat discouraging item regarding the world of freelance:

• Freelance slackers, beware: Big Brother is watching

Monitoring a freelancer makes no sense to me. It seems to me you are paying for a project and it shouldn’t matter what someone is doing with his or her time if you get the results you’re paying for and it is delivered on time.

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I saw the headline, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and I thought, “Geez, I hope not. We’re stupid enough already.”

As evidence, we can look at some of the responses to the article. People seem to have their shorts in knots, on both sides, about our digital world. It’s either the great salvation of human life or the end of the world (less the four horsemen). Is the Internet evil or a force for good?

People have been engaged in this debate since the term “Internet” was coined and I don’t envision it petering out anytime soon. However, anytime I’ve looked at this debate it has always struck me as an utterly stupid one.

How can technology be good or bad, moral or immoral? Technology is not sentient (although the people working on artificial intelligence would like to make it so, and may even manage it one day). Technology is amoral. Indifferent.

And of course, there’s Hamlet’s observation, “… There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

How we use technology, and technology’s impact on us, now that might allow for qualifiers like “good” and “bad.”

When I read Nick Carr’s article it struck me that, rather than being a Luddite, he was simply asking the question and not necessarily putting a spin on it one way or the other, albeit he does mention his default position is to be skeptical, saying, “So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism.”

But if there is evidence that our brains are rewiring themselves, creating new connections and so on due to how we use technology (meaning, here, the Internet), surely it’s worthwhile to ask what is changing and what might its impact be?

If Carr and others are correct in their suggestion that “continuous partial attention” has an impact on reading, particularly deep reading and thinking, it also makes sense to ask what else is being gained or lost.

In almost every case, when something is lost, something is gained. The question here is, what is lost (if anything) and what is gained (if anything) and, if this can be determined, how does it balance out? Is it a good trade-off or a bad one?

Technology is not bad. Nor is it good.

We, on the other hand, are another thing altogether.

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I have a great dislike for the knee-jerk cynic. I have one residing in me and it’s often a tussle keeping him bound and gagged. But sometimes I let him have his say if only because he makes interesting observations (though not always for the right reasons).

An aspect of the tsunami tragedy in South Asia, and the ongoing tragedy of its aftermath, struck me after seeing some of the media reporting of the disaster. It has me wondering if, despite the scope of human tragedy, it would receive the attention it is getting here in North America if celebrities were not involved, if it didn’t contain the spectacle of scale. Would we care as much?

Countless tragic events occur in the world but most don’t get the media play this one has.

If it’s true we have more interest in this tsunami disaster for these reasons then I think it should also be pointed out that it doesn’t mean we are a hopelessly self-absorbed people. (Though I do despair sometimes over our obsession with celebrity and scale.)

What it means is that even with an event as horrific as this we find it difficult to be anything more than instinctively and briefly shocked by the spectacle of its scope. Most of us require relatable, human touchstones within such an event in order to connect on a visceral level. (I think this is where organizations like World Vision succeed. They have child sponsorship programs and these connect people with a bit more immediacy, putting a face to people living in places and cultures so distant from us.)

Our brain, with its moral sense, may be jogged by seeing and reading about an event like this – on the other side of the world, to a seemingly faceless people living lives we usually have no awareness of – but in order to be emotionally engaged we need something we can identify with. And crass though it may seem, celebrities and white-skinned tourists in bathing suits and shorts provides this. Scope grabs our attention. Distance (geographical and cultural) creates a disconnect.

So while part of me may see reports of celebrities and tourists and have a knee-jerk cynical response to it, I also know tragedies like this one will soon pass from sight without doing anything more than raising an eyebrow if we don’t find ways to connect people to these events and relate to them somehow. Celebrity and spectacle may not be the best, most seemly way of doing this but it is effective, to some extent at least.

And if you’re inclined to make a donation to the relief efforts, please do. Here are a few places you may want to consider:

• Red Cross — Tsunami Disaster Relief (on Amazon.com)
• World Vision – Help Tsunami Victims

UPDATE: Some of what I made a poor attempt at articulating above is touched on in David Akin’s blog entry, Reporting the disaster of our lifetime. My take regarding celebrity and spectacle is not what he discusses; rather, he looks at blogging and journalism. But his example of an article in the NY Times is what I was getting at when I referred to connecting people to an event on a visceral level. (His is an example of an excellent story, one that doesn’t rely on endangered celebrities or shocking us with spectacle but instead deals with the enormity of the event by humanizing it through individuals and their experience.)

As for the issue of blogs and journalism that he speaks to, this isn’t an issue for me. I think a blog can be a vehicle for legitimate reporting, in the right hands. But for me, this isn’t what I look to blogs for. Blogs alert me to what is happening, interesting ideas and so on. I take the blogger’s perspective with a grain of salt (though there are some exceptions). This isn’t because I distrust the blogger. Rather, I prefer to get a variety of perspectives – the traditional media, blogs and so on and then draw my own conclusions.

I know there is a debate of sorts about blogs and journalism. It strikes me as a debate over form rather than content. Both can be excellent; both can be garbage. The vehicle is irrelevant.

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