Google Brain
With your feet on the air and your head on the ground Try this trick and spin it, yeah Your head will collapse But there's nothing in it And you'll ask yourself Where is my mind? -Pixies
When I was much younger (now a boomer) I enjoyed what was called a ‘photographic memory’ - I remembered everything as if conjuring a picture. And since I voraciously devoured all the books I could find, they created quite the library in my head. Later on, as a physician on hospital rounds, I carried around lab values and even data graphs in my floating memory banks (yes the other docs hated that). And when for my research, I ran multiple structure activity comparisons of molecules, I ‘saw’ the SARs and rotated them at will, in my imagination. Very Cool.
Nowadays? Ah not so much. What happened?
At first I thought I was losing my mind/brain like that mouse in Flowers for Algernon. (OMG was this what ‘normal’ felt like?) But no; I had started to routinely use search engines. My memory ability was changing - into ‘Google Brain’.
Yes the smart brain is an efficient brain, energy-wise. Just Google it. Don’t remember it. If your mind knows it can 'look it up' then it will not invest effort to encode a memory, only the code for searching it. Even having a smart phone in your line of sight, will hinder memory formation and its retrieval.
Techno Communism?
And what are the consequences of this ‘cyberdependency’? We have relinquished control of our knowledge retrieval to that search bar, and the engine that lines up the ‘most relevant’ info, excluding what it deems not to be. How Orwellian. It’s 1984.
“Google search results were strongly biased in favor of liberals and Democrats. This was not true on Bing or Yahoo.” - Dr. Robert Epstein, reporting on his research for 2020 election. (This is why I use Duck Duck Go for my searches.)
Question: I wonder how long you have to be off the grid to train the brain to think again?
REFS
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/how-to-get-a-photographic-memory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon
https://www.wired.com/2011/07/is-google-ruining-your-memory/
https://www.ibtimes.com/google-effect-changes-our-brains-299451
https://time.com/69626/who-needs-a-memory-when-we-have-google/
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/how-google-is-changing-our-brains
https://gellerreport.com/2020/11/robert-epstein-google-shifted-a-minimum-of-6-million-votes-in.html/
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