Socrates felt the same way about books actually a lot of big thinkers in that era felt that writing and reading would lead to the degradation of the human memory. However the argument that kids shouldn't have books in school seems laughable. I would say they aren't wrong. Humans really can't remember entire books any more, but then they also don't need to.
Precisely. It's another form of off-loading some of our cognitive processes.
While books reduced the frequency at which we practiced memorization, and thus diminished the average effectiveness of that process in man, they also paved the way for new developments and enabled us to devote further cognitive resources to other kinds of processes (e.g. pattern recognition, experimentation, etc.).
Smart phones, I'd wager, have a similar effect, in a perhaps more extreme fashion.
In spite of this, memory remains incredibly important...somehow taking the effort to memorize something, perhaps because it requires approaching the material repeatedly, also often leads to a richer understanding of the material--at least that's what I find.
I'm constantly shocked and embarrassed at the frequent fragility of my own memory, and my own susceptibility to distraction--and I spend no time on the common distraction centers of our epoch (facebook, twitter, etc.)--still, constant, reliable, and immediate access to the internet is enough to hold your attention hostage.
Another unfortunate side effect, I think, is a general decline in the practice of self-reflection. The most impressive people I know make a point to spend some amount of time in their day doing nothing more than thinking or reflecting--i.e. engaging with their thoughts alone--an endeavor that's ever more difficult to undertake when we're constantly bombarded with alerts and entertainment. There's some merit to those old disciplines of prayer and meditation--even if some of their attendant metaphysics seem antiquated.
It's true that there's a double-edge to it. The new advantage being that books became an extension of ourselves. Having access to printed knowledge meant we didn't have to memorize every line (and after all, we've come to learn that understanding certainly does not equate with wrote memorization). We can have a working memory of what we need to know on a regular basis, while retaining "pointers", or knowledge of where knowledge is, for the rest of it. I'd wager (without doing any proper research on the subject) that we're largely more effective, and cooperative this way.
The difference between books and smart phones is such that there are a theoretically limited number of ways you could use the book. You can partake of its knowledge, memorize it as an exercise, rip it up, burn it, draw all over it, etc etc. But for the most part its main purpose is its primary purpose.
Phones as they are called, aren't so much phones anymore. They're a complete mobile computing system. All of publicly accessible human knowledge is at the fingertips of whoever has one with a live connection to the internet. You can do just about anything with them, abilities dependent.
I remind my girlfriend of this all the time as she's lying curled up on the couch playing candy crush :P
I think there's a lot of value in having self-aware conscious behavior, it's important that you're doing what you want with your life. You only have one. People have definitely wasted their lives away, from their own opinion deep in a book. The vehicle by which people waste their lives is a lot less important than the awareness of what you're doing with your life, and that it's something that you actually wanted to do.
Very true. Also astute re: reading. I'm sure by now we all've heard the twilight zone trope of the isolate fellow who only wants to spend his time deep in his books, being of little value to anything or anyone else.
Also just going to say, if you had taken away my smartphone/internet in highschool I would have just dropped out, moved out, and probably would have been better for it. Most of the profitable skills I know are self-taught, from the internet. It's very bizarre to me that we're having this discussion on hnews.
You gotta know that not all people are like you, hell, I would say most people aren't. Like yourself, I'm also mostly self-taught. All the useful and profitable skills I have I mostly have learned on my own thanks to the internet. I did go to school and have a CS degree, but I did that because I pushed myself to get better, and managed to pull my self away from all the distractions. But, like I said, most people don't take advantage of the real benefits that the internet have, and fall into the trap of the rest of the more trivial and "useless" stuff. So, I do think that completely banning smartphones is too radical, but at the same time think that we must do something to solve the problems that this article describes.
I think there's definitely room for talking to your child about self-awareness, and self-directed behavior. If you just stop your child from using some distraction then they'll just be an adult who is consumed by distraction. You're creating a crutch from actually learning the skill of managing their time.
> Also just going to say, if you had taken away my smartphone/internet in highschool
"Smartphone" and "internet" are two separate categories, and the former is strongly associated variously low-value, deliberately-addicting behaviors. The internet still has valuable corners, but the action is now where the monitization's at.
High school (and younger!) kids (generally) using their smartphones for stuff like getting streaks on Snapchat, not turning themselves into autodidacts.
Do you have evidence for that claim? You know your parents said the same about you with your computer games. In reality, yes you played games, you also learned more. The truth is you used more of your time than they did and some of it was productive, and some of it wasn't. VSauce has a good episode about how every generation thinks this about the next, and there has never been any evidence for it being true about any of them.
> Do you have evidence for that claim? You know your parents said the same about you with your computer games.
You're asking me to provide you evidence of a widely written about social phenomena while simultaneously claiming to know about my youth and what my parents thought about my activities?
>>> Most of the profitable skills I know are self-taught, from the internet.
If you want to know more about how the current smartphone and internet ecosystem is deliberately designed to be addictive, I suggest you go teach yourself from the internet. A lot's been written the last few months.
While you're at it, read up on loot boxes, since you seem to be interested in computer games.
It's rhetoric, I presume nothing about your youth or your parents. Literally every generation has had that said about them so it's a pretty safe guess.
You don't need a smartphone to engage in gambling or other addictive behaviors. If children are seeking out skinner boxes it might be worth exploring why they aren't getting fulfillment out of their life.
There is a qualitative difference between cellphone use during school hours and sitting behind a laptop on your own time. Most HN visits are probably more of the latter.
Exactly this. Even the title is misleading as "damaging" the brain, certainly there are changes, but jumping to the conclusion they are damaging and not beneficial to the human race in the long run is near sighted.
> Socrates felt the same way about books actually a lot of big thinkers in that era felt that writing and reading would lead to the degradation of the human memory.
They probably did lead to degradation of human memory--not in the underlying capabilities, of course, but in how well most people are able to use them.
There is some interesting discussion of this in Joshua Foer's book "Moonwalking with Einstein" [1]. Before books were widespread learning ways to use memory quickly and efficiently was important to scholars and others who worked with large amounts of information. Afterwards, it was good enough to just go with your raw, untrained memory, and the old memory techniques were almost forgotten.
> a lot of big thinkers in that era felt that writing and reading would lead to the degradation of the human memory.
And I'd hazard that they were right. However the degradation wasn't catastrophic because searching books is hard, so people still had to develop their memories.
This is a false analogy, as presumably the schools will have computers for the kids to use. And at some schools, the kids themselves may even bring laptops! ;)
