Posts Tagged ‘thinking’
My I/O Brain
This is an expansion on my thoughts from last week about Father Brown’s lecture and the “Is Google Making us Stupid” article. Technology does promote a high speed, in/out model of gathering information. Because I access information in a much more fragmented way I have become more fragmented in the way I think and learn. As I started getting worried that too much skimming was dulling my brain, I had a few instances this week that made me wonder if learning that seems fragmented on the surface does in fact, lead to deep linking and deep learning.
I have always been a fan of lists and paper-based information archiving, i.e. writing everything down. From my point of view, by writing it down I free up value disk space in my brain that can store bytes of new information. Since I am such a fan of information archiving, I’m not so great at information recall — paper is my memory. But this week, I had a few cases where I was randomly inspired to recall information. In one instance I opened an old document that had ideas about a project I’m working on simply because I happened upon it while searching my archives. In it, I discovered a to-do item that I nearly forgot to do. This made me wonder about whether the connections we make to data are deep — regardless of our fragmented methods of access.
It seems that my I/O brain is retaining more information that I thought, I hope I don’t need to add more disk space.
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