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Untitled. Discover Magazine: The latest in science and technology news, blogs and articles - How Google Is Making Us Smarter. Our minds are under attack. At least that’s what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Inside the magazine, author Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet is damaging our brains, robbing us of our memories and deep thoughts. I have a hard time taking these Cassandras of the Computer Age seriously.

More significantly, the ominous warnings feed on a popular misconception of how the mind works. This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998, right around the time Google was born, by two philosophers, Andy Clark, now at the University of Edinburgh, and David Chalmers, now at the Australian National University. The mind appears to be adapted for reaching out and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself. Untitled. The Extended Mind. Andy Clark & David J. Chalmers [*] Department of Philosophy Washington University St. Louis, MO 63130 Department of Philosophy University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 andy@twinearth.wustl.educhalmers@arizona.edu *[[Authors are listed in order of degree of belief in the central thesis.]] [[Published in Analysis 58:10-23, 1998. 1 Introduction Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? 2 Extended Cognition Consider three cases of human problem-solving: (1) A person sits in front of a computer screen which displays images of various two-dimensional geometric shapes and is asked to answer questions concerning the potential fit of such shapes into depicted "sockets"

. (2) A person sits in front of a similar computer screen, but this time can choose either to physically rotate the image on the screen, by pressing a rotate button, or to mentally rotate the image as before. . (3) Sometime in the cyberpunk future, a person sits in front of a similar computer screen. 3 Active Externalism. Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr. Illustration by Guy Billout "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. Also see: Computers, internet and our brain – the extended mind? « GenomicEnterprise.com Science Blog. Discover Magazine: The latest in science and technology news, blogs and articles - How Google Is Making Us Smarter. Our minds are under attack. At least that’s what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?)

Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” I have a hard time taking these Cassandras of the Computer Age seriously. More significantly, the ominous warnings feed on a popular misconception of how the mind works. This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998, right around the time Google was born, by two philosophers, Andy Clark, now at the University of Edinburgh, and David Chalmers, now at the Australian National University. The mind appears to be adapted for reaching out and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself. Clark and Chalmers asked their readers to imagine a woman named Inga. In the view of Clark and Chalmers, Inga’s brain-based memory and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same.