the Age Feb 7th 2016

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DUMB AND DUMBER

Technology may not be to blame.
Michael Coulter reports.

The jurys out on whether outsourcing our memory to technology is a smart choice, types Michael Coulter.
Quick quiz. When was the last time you ... a) wrote a letter by hand; b) used a street directory or other paper map;
c) multiplied two large numbers in your head;
d) memorised a phone number that wasnt your own.
Chances are its been a while, and theres a simple reason: technology means we hardly ever need to. With nine in
10 Australians carrying a smartphone in their pocket, skills that society once considered essential have become
redundant.
There are two ways of looking at this. One is that outsourcing the mundane tasks of day-to-day life has liberated our
creativity and made the seemingly impossible possible. The other is that gadgets are eating our brains and making us
foolishly dependent, as in the family of tourists who followed their GPS down an impassable mountain track and
eventually had to be rescued by police.
There are persuasive advocates for either case.
Prominent British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, for instance, has long argued that technology is fundamentally
altering our brains, and not always for the better. She worries about a world confined to two dimensions, where
audiovisual entertainment delivered via screens becomes so prevalent that it leaves no time to develop other senses,
and where our attention spans are so shattered by a torrent of information that we can no longer appreciate the
beauty of a good story or enjoy a conversation.
One of the things in common with what were losing is theyre all three-dimensional things, she says. Whether its
reading a map or seeing a persons face or making a clay model, its all the real world. What people tend to forget is
the screen is not the real world. Its a twodimensional representation, but its not reality.
If you spend a lot of time in this other place, then all the values and experiences that the real world has to offer will
be denied you smelling flowers, fine motor control, hopping, skipping and jumping, painting a picture. It ranges from
fine motor skills I dont know where were going to find the next generation of surgeons from to social skills like
reading body language and all the benefits of bonding.
What you have to work out is what you want from this technology. It can help you appreciate the real world more,
enrich your life, save you routine tasks. Obviously it can be be a huge help, but in the context of the real world, not as
an alternative.
On the other hand, influential Australian philosopher Dave Chalmers believes we have so thoroughly incorporated
technology into our thinking processes that it can now be considered part of our brain a concept dubbed the
extended mind.
The cyborg, part-man and partmachine, has long been a sciencefiction staple. But in Chalmers view weve been on
the road to becoming cyborgs since we first picked up a tool and expanded the capacities of our bodies and minds.
Smartphones are now our personal hard drives, radically increasing memory and processing power. And if an
invitation that would once have come in the post with a Melway reference now arrives via email with a link to Google
maps, have we actually lost anything?
Technology is increasing our capacities and providing us with newly sophisticated ways of thinking, Chalmers says.
In a way, its automating work we used to have to do for ourselves painstakingly. Its taking stuff we had to do
consciously and slowly and making it happen fast and automatically.
Theres two ways of looking at it that the tools are now doing stuff that the mind used to, so your mind is doing
less, or that tools are becoming part of your mind so your mind is doing more. As your tools become more and more
closely coupled, they become part of us. Maybe the biological core is doing a little bit less, but the extended system is
doing things that wouldnt have been possible.
Greenfield wonders if this process is actually working in reverse, turning people into second-rate computers (You
might have enhanced information-processing skills, but information isnt knowledge), but for Chalmers its a natural
response to the world we live in.
My phone is always with me, its just one big system, he says. The brain is opportunistic it picks up whatevers
going on around it and incorporates it. As the universe changes the skill set we need to deal with it changes. Its
appropriate to develop as the world develops.
The internet is always in reach, unless theres an earthquake or such. Once your tools let you down youre in
trouble, but thats just the way with any technology. If the tech is reliably present, were going to do pretty well. There
havent been a whole lot of retrogressions.
As you develop some parts of yourself youre potentially not going to develop others but thats been happening for a
long time. If you a drive a car youll be a lot less physically fit, but youll go a lot more places.
The brain is a resilient, adaptable beast. Neuroscientist Penelope McNulty is a daily witness to the adaptability of the
human brain. In her work with stroke patients she sees brains rewire themselves to cope with damage, and she has
few doubts that technological change is pushing us in new directions. We know its affecting people, she says. For
example, our memory is shorter and we remember smaller chunks of things. Think of how many phone numbers you
used to remember 20 years ago and how many you can remember now. We just dont need to any more, so were

changing the skills we have. We know how to find information much faster than we ever used to and we possibly have
faster filters. We all know a lot more information about a lot more things than we used to, because we dont have to
remember some of those other things like times tables. Learning occurs when neurons set up networks that fire
together, McNulty explains. The more you use a skill the more developed those networks are, until eventually it
becomes automatic, changing from something you think to something you do.
Conversely, when you dont use a skill, the networks decay.
Not everyone is sanguine about the arts we are losing. The apparently terminal decline of handwriting, for instance,
has caused angst in many quarters. (Chalmers misses it not at all: The last time I wrote cursive I remember thinking
thank god we dont need to do this any more.) Some researchers, however, believe there is an essential link
between the movement of the hand and the creation of thoughts and memories that typing simply cannot replicate,
while others lament the rushed and impersonal nature of electronic communication.
Melbourne handwriting analyst Ingrid Seger-Woznicki is one of the latter. She sees the care and attention that went
into writing legibly as a mark of respect between author and reader, and believes the discipline of writing made for
clearer thinking.
The lack of writing is reflective of our lack of clarity of communication, she says. We dont see communication as
an art as we used to. Writing by hand forces you to stop and think a bit, and it makes you more aware of how you
affect others. Poor handwriting used to be seen as a lack of consideration.
When you write cursive you are wanting to connect with peoples minds at a deeper level, and as a society we dont
want to do that any more.
This is anything but a new debate. Melbourne philosopher Neil Levy refers to Phaedrus, Platos tale of a king of a
preliterate culture who is offered the gift of writing but refuses it, saying: For this invention will produce forgetfulness
in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory ... You offer your pupils the
appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to
know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with.
Leaving aside the irony of Plato using writing to rant against writing, it shows that the older generation has ever
fretted about the younger generations lack of education, morals and respect. Reassuringly, we dont seem to have
bottomed out yet, and the flipside of a degraded memory is the ability to access knowledge at any time in almost any
place.
Plato was right in one way, Levy says. Memory does get worse. Once you start writing things down you dont have
to remember. But the benefits are in terms of capacity to think. Im not a doomsday person. There will be losses, and
there will be enormous gains.
The difference now is the speed of change. From one day to the next, technology enhances or replaces another
human function. In one way it draws us further into Greenfields two-dimensional existence, but in others it liberates
our time and imagination.
So for every pensioner muttering about their baristas inability to add up the price of two coffees, there is a Millennial
cursing a Baby Boomers helplessness in the face of the app store. Neurons go to where the action is, and our brains
are ruthlessly practical survival mechanisms, adapted to the needs of today and not much worried about the world that
was or might be. Sentimental musings on what we have lost along the way, they leave to us.

British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield believes technology is altering our brains, and not always for the better.
Photo: Josh Robenstone