Online distractions build big brains?

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Don’t worry if you can’t make it through these two paragraphs without checking your email in another tab. There are plenty of doomsayers warning that the Internet is rotting our brains and ruining our ability to concentrate, but they’re missing the point, writes Robert Wright in the New York Times. “Maybe the essential thing about technological evolution is that it’s not about us,” he writes. “I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism.” While online we may feel like scatterbrains, but “the scattering of attention among lots of tasks is what allows us to add value to lots of social endeavors.”

We’re being drawn away from the people around us, but towards even bigger social groups online. Maybe, he theorizes, the point of evolution is to create a species with the social and technological intelligence to weave itself “into a giant, loosely organized planetary brain. … Kind of the way the point of the maturation of an organism is to create an adult.”

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Professor Mike

Professor Mike is a left-leaning, dog loving, political junkie. He has written dozens of articles for Substack, Medium, Simily, and Tribel. Professor Mike has been published at Smerconish.com, among others. He is a strong proponent of the environment, and a passionate protector of animals. In addition he is a fierce anti-Trumper. Take a moment and share his work.
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13 years ago

Being online to many sites builds big somethings, and it ain’t brains…!

13 years ago

My brain hurts…;-)

13 years ago

Perhaps one could think of the brain by itself as first level of thought consciousness.

Brains that can communicate with each other by computers and the internet as the second level of thought consciousness.

Perhaps a hardwired helmet that scans thoughts automatically into a continuous network that is always connected is the third level of thought consciousness.

Whoa…..dude…..mushrooms for lunch in a isolation chamber….

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