Google made me stupid !

Deep Reading

In his article 'Is Google making us stupid', Nicholas Carr asks the question.

Our skills, those associated with deep reading, are they been eroded by google, are we losing the ability to connect, to concentrate, to comprehend and if we lose these skills are we losing the ability to engage in productive, creative, critical and conceptual thinking.

You see, the ability to concentrate to hold information in working memory facilities connections which leads to comprehension. Which leads to critical thinking and feedback loops,creative and conceptual breakthroughs follow.

Memory it turns out is the key building block of a particular type of intelligence. Memory, the type you need for deep reading. Verbal memory, is not a skill I have ever possessed, I believed I did but I was wrong.

A form of rote learning, photographic learning of text can mask a problem but without comprehension, problems are multiplied in later in life, 6without connections without context there is no creative or conceptual breakthroughs. That ability, that talent, that skill to study hard and not to lose focus, to make incremental returns for hours, weeks even months, I never had that.

Yet remarkably some of the great minds who have defined the last century, our modern world, are in the same boat, Marconi, Darwin Faraday and Edison, who as a boy was sent home by his teachers, with a note.

The note read "too stupid to learn anything" of course Thomas Edison didn’t listen and went on to be fired from his first two jobs for being unproductive, left to own devises he found a way. Edison's story illustrates that what you know, what you believe to be true is almost certainly wrong.

This brings us to Kruger and Dunning out of Brown and the - Blissful ignorance of illusory superiority.

Quoting Bertrand Russell

'One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision'

Dunning has since drawn an analogy to a condition in which a person who suffers a physical disability because of brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of the disability, even for dramatic impairments such as blindness or paralysis.

In the the context of the bigger picture the Kruger Dunning study warns against a failure to recognize genuine skill in others and the overestimation of our own level of skill and it's importance. Nicholas Carr himself makes an overconfident subjective assertion of what constitutes stupid and intelligent, in doing so he wrongly, in my opinion, elevates academic excellence above Edison's achievements.

Dunning et al. goes on to cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" to underscore that those who consider themselves highly intelligent and informed are just as likely to suffer from delusions of adequacy, it is part of the human condition that holds us all back.

Our story of discovery , begins with a 25 year old patent clerk who against all the odds wins a Nobel prize, it is baffling how this is possible, how can something as prosaic as memory, holds the key to how a c’ student, a school dropout turns around so completely that he wins a Nobel prize.

A self confessed visual thinker with strong visualisation capabilities and memory, a young Einstein had poor auditory focus and memory.

Rather like Marconi, our ideas are not new — numerous investigators had explored various techniques for over 50 years, but none had proven successful; for anything except memorizing lists. Marconi did not discover any new and revolutionary principles, but rather he assembled and improved on a number of components unified and then adapted them to his system Marconi first did better what others were doing and then by unifying into his system created something that no one else was doing. In a nutshell this is our offer, this is what we do We improve memory. We train it.

Charles Darwin 'Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge'