Tag Archives: google

What’s to Know?

How knowledge is changing, yet again

I always had this romantic notion that my library gives the walls of my living room a dusty intelligent look. That huge pile of covered paper used to be my pride and joy. I meticulously collected fiction, science, philosophy, poetry and art books and thought of it as a window not only into my education, but to my soul. Today, I shamefully admit I read much less than I used to. I focus on non-fiction works, and usually read about 7 of them in parallel, most of which I never finish. Today, my library is a graveyard to the old world I come from.
But this post is not about books. It’s about what those books represent. I no longer read mainly because the source of my knowledge has shifted – from books, to anything online. I consume heaps of written content, but instead of flipping through paper, I now simply scroll down. And while our generation is in an in-between phase as we’re getting to see the paper to digital revolution take place, I’m sure (or at least, hope) my kids will live in a paper-less world.

 

Bookshelf

(image by trawin)

Of course, the world didn’t always rely on paper to spread knowledge. Before Gutenbreg invented the printing press, knowledge was spread in classes, in person. That’s why the invention of print was such a huge deal. It revolutionized the distribution of knowledge and created new forms of media which, in turn, created new industries and business models. Those are in the process of breaking today as we’re shifting to a digital world.
And once upon a time, long long ago, before the invention of writing, knowledge could only be documented, transferred and acquired orally. Just imagine! to learn something, people had to be in the same place at the same time. Once administrations became more complex and financial accounts and historic records outgrew human memory, writing was invented, and changed humanity forever.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and we’re experiencing another revolution. And as with the former ones, those are not only the mediums and the qunatities that are changing, and not even only the businesses and industries around those media, it’s the very core of human knowledge that is changing. What it is to know something. or to remember something. I’ve long claimed that our memory is changing as we now refer to the web as an expansion of our own memory. Recently, researchers at Columbia University have shown exactly that – our memory works differently in the age of Google.

 

And it doesn’t only have to refer to knowing (or remembering) facts or information. With facebook, twitter and the social web, how we know people is changing too. You can know someone virtually better than you know people you meet IRL (in real life). As Fred Wilson so eloquently put it: “in real life, as if there were anything other than real life“. That’s my point exactly. People keep making the distinction between real and virtual, when in fact they are one and the same. As we’re going through the information age revolution, our very minds and cognition are changing, being augmented by technology.

And what we’re seeing now is just the beginning. I, for one, can’t wait for the day I’ll finally be able to search google straight from my mind. Just imagine, information streams coming directly to your brain at will, and you sift through the results with your own neural activity. Doesn’t that make more sense than reaching out for your iPhone every time?

Memory – meet Google

OR: The Emergence of Referential Memory in the Google age

“Oh yeah, that reminds me of something I read, it was, what’s his name, during the 80’s, no, the 90’s. hmpf. Wait, I’ll google it”. How many times have you heard that? Felt that? Once a day? Once an hour? People are saying Google is ruining human knowledge. There’s constant talk about how the information age is changing, even harming, our brains. I believe by now it’s safe to say that the age of information not only is light-years away from the age of knowledge, but it also inherently moves it even farther away. As access to information becomes effortless, we no longer need to know things, but only how to find them. So what’s happening to our brains in the process?

What is Memory?

Traditionally, psychologists divide the human memory into two main types: implicit and explicit. Implicit memory refers to stuff we know but cannot quite point to how we know them or what it is to know them. The myth of the coca cola ads in the 60’s is a great example for that. Coca cola allegedly used what the psychologists call priming to raise awareness to their product. Embedding split second displays of a product into movies makes people think of it even though they couldn’t explain why as they wouldn’t remember seeing the images. But there’s no need to go to the extent of these subliminal messages. We are constantly swamped with massive amounts of information that we’re unaware of, yet that changes the way we perceive things. Whenever we read a newspaper, watch a movie or even talk to a friend, we’re presented with stereotypes and even prejudice that affects our judgment. Our brain is constantly being rewired with every stimulus we are exposed to, we can’t help it.

A different, more common type of implicit memory is procedural memory. Being the reason behind the coining of the phrase “It’s as easy as riding a bike”, procedural memory refers exactly to those types of actions and procedures that are engraved in our motor memories. These memories do not require active retrieval – i.e. remembering – but rather feel inherent in our very organs. Much like priming, tying a shoelace or driving a car do not necessarily come into one’s full awareness.

Explicit memory, on the other hand, refers to those memories whose retrieval is entirely conscious by nature. Think of any historical fact you’ve once studied and are trying to remember. A story your grandma told you as a kid or the name of a person you had just run into. These are all stuff that are stored in your brain and in order to retrieve them you use your explicit memory.

Computer_brain_white

Enter a New Kind of Memory

Until recently, this historical division of explicit and implicit memory seemed to pretty much capture what was going on in our brains. These days, it seems to be out of date. As we are always online, we’ve become accustomed to use Google as an extension to our own explicit memory. Instead of only searching our brains for facts, we have an infinitely growing database of facts being indexed by Google at our immediate disposal. Mobile web or laptop, home, work or on-the-go, Google is always at our fingertips. And how do we search this enormous memory-base? As I see it, we do so using our procedural memory. Think of how you Google things – there’s usually a certain code behind what you’re looking for that you have to decipher, extract the keywords out of, and search for. Say I was looking for a talk I saw by someone whose name I can’t remember, but I can remember he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon who spoke sometime this year about gaming and design. All I had to do was search for exactly that, and the 3rd result I got was Jesse Schell’s amazing talk about gamifying life. Now, if I track back my actions I notice that this extraction of keywords and Google search came to me automatically. I didn’t have to contemplate but just search. Worst case scenario would be I see something weird in the results page and search again. Searching became automatic, much like riding a bike. So we’re using our procedural memory to search our augmented, Google based, explicit memory. And this is what I call Referential Memory. Much like a reference in a book, our brain holds an internal reference that points us to external content, in this case – web content. Referential memory is simply using our procedural memory to extract facts from our Google augmented explicit memories.

What next, you ask? How will referential memory change us as individuals? How will it change human kind? Well, whether be it a worrying decline in creativity, or the rise of collective intelligence, the implications are immense and can potentially altar society, people, intelligence – the world as we know it. But that’s a whole different story. For now, I’m merely hoping for some hard rock brain science type of evidence that referential memory actually exists and is not a fiction of my imaginative mind.