Denkbuch

keeping track of what i read. the sole purpose of this is read more and keep better notes.

[denkbuch]

The brilliant Frank Schirrmacher

"In the late 19th century we discussed that human muscles have to adapt to machines to optimise the human workforce. Now the have similar discussions about the brain (multitasking)."

"The moment brain science uses computational tools to analyse human thinking, the idea emerges that thinking itself can be perceived in terms of technical thinking. You always had technical metaphors for the brain, but not for thinking itself."

http://edge.org/conversation/the-age-of-the-informavore

[denkbuch]

Here's something else that's interesting. Everybody who's watching me right now, you and I, we all spend four, maybe more, five years with deliberate study and training to learn how to read and write, and that process of learning how to read and write actually has rewired our brains. We know that from plenty of studies of literate and illiterate people from the same culture—that reading and writing changes how your brain works. That only came about because of four or five years of deliberate practice and study, and we shouldn't expect necessarily that the real mastery of this new media is something we can deduce by hanging around. You can't learn calculus just hanging around people who know calculus, you actually have to study it. It may be that for us to really master the issues of attention management, critical thinking, learning how technological devices work and how they bite back, all this techno-literacy may be something that we have to spend several years being trained to do. Maybe you can't just learn it by hanging around people who do it or else just hanging around trying to learn it by osmosis. It may require training and teaching, a techno-literacy, and learning how to manage your attention and distractions is something that is probably going to require training.

http://edge.org/conversation/the-technium

[denkbuch]

Partial Recall - Can neuroscience help us rewrite our most traumatic memories? Michael Specter

I always find it slightly amusing when neuroscience “discovers” phenomena that have been discussed in other disciplines for decades. Here it is the idea that human memory, even of most traumatic events, is hardly ever unalterable and stable. It seems to be impossible to remember without overwriting and rewriting that memory with present interpretations of the past. This idea has been around for quite some time in cultural memory studies and various schools of psychology and psychoanalysis. Nonetheless a great article. 

"Concepts of memory tend to reflect the technology of the times. Plato and Aristotle saw memories as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could be erased easily and used again. These days, we tend to think of memory as a camera or a video recorder, filming, storing, and recycling the vast troves of data we accumulate throughout our lives."

"Memory “works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page,” Loftus said in a recent speech. “You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.”"

"If misinformation can be incorporated so seamlessly into a person’s recollection of an event, what becomes of the original memory? Is it completely overwritten, or merely adjusted somehow, layered with a new trace?"

"What makes us so certain that, after our memories are formed, they are fixed forever?”

“The very act of remembering something makes it vulnerable to change”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_specter?currentPage=all&src=longreads