Obviously, I think "The End of Absence" is a great book.
This is why I am currently typing and organising all the following gems of wisdom that I underlined previously while reading. The staffroom is quiet, with my colleagues having left to embark on their weekend plans. Only the hum of the air-conditioner accompanies me. Still, I am happy to finally sit down and get it off my to-do list. Kudos to @ablunderfilledlife for his penchant for attention.
After typing these notes, I think this book compellingly offers a perspective of why we shouldn't be so quick to rely on technology all the time. Especially with the prevalence of Gen-AI, it's customary for us to resort to the Internet to streamline our processes and enhance our productivity. However, even as we churn out work faster than before, we are surrendering bits and pieces of our humanity. We don't bother to internalise and synthesise information; we have tons of online friends but shy away from building relationships with them; and we lose touch with perspectives that are different from our own. Michael Harris reminds me that my mind is magnificent precisely because of my quirks and idiosyncrasies.
The Uniqueness of Being Human
- Some people live with synesthesia, which means that his brain creates unusual sensory impressions based on seemingly unrelated inputs. His brain is hardwired to make unorthodox connections.
- Infants at two or three months still have intermingled senses.
- Children need moments of solitude as well as moments of healthy interaction. They need to experience a hushed state of mind so that they will learn how the mind makes its own happiness.
- Be a tastemaker. Offer your audience both comfort food and something surprising.
- The author wants a brain that can think on its own, produce its own connections from a personalised assortment of facts. Because it seems that the largest database in the world - stuffed with catalog upon catalog of information - still lacks the honed narrative impulse of a single human mind.
- Sherlock Homes curates his memory. It's the honing, the selection of what's worth remembering, that makes a mind great. The limits of the human body, and the human mind, too, are the borders that define us.
How We Remember Stuff
- Any long-term relationship (between co-workers or family or friends) involves such a memory system, with individuals each storing a portion of the group's information. Members of the group then remain aware of where the memories they don't personally hold are stored, giving them access to a larger pool of knowledge than they could ever hold themselves. This group memory is called "transactive memory". It allows the member to access wisdom from older co-workers or access backup of memories he has temporarily misplaced.
- The brain is multinominal. This means that we think by combining several terms in relation to one another, not merely by identifying particular words.
- If a writer decides to fire your neurons repeatedly, the neurons your brain has associated with a particular word will have become more and more likely to preoduce real synpatic growth. This helps you to burn it into your mind that way.
Our Relationship with Technology
We get hooked on our digital lives
- Operant conditioning, with the variable interval reinforcement schedule. Studies show that constant, reliable rewards do not produce the most dogged behaviour; rather, it's sporadic and random rewards that keep us hooked.
- Computers tap into a very basic function called an "orienting response". When the light changes in your peripheral vision, you must look at it because that could be the shadow of something that's about to eat you in the wilderness of our species' early years. Hence, having evolved in an environment rife with danger, we are hardwired to always default to fast-paced shifts in focus.
- Whenever kids exceed the one to two hours of recreational screen time a day the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) recommends, levels of attention issues go up.
- Eye-tracking studies have proven that when we read online, we read in a cursory way, we scan for information, taking in perhaps 20% of the words on a single Web page, often far less.
- Mass data analysis will allow Coursera, and other MOOC providers, to create software that personalises education in much the same way that Netflix, Google and Amazon already personalise your experiences of movie watching, searching, and shopping.
We lose our ability to be discerning
- By the late 1800s, newspapers opened "correspondence columns" that allowed everyday readers to turn into writers.
- Today's internet is killing our culture. We get mob opinion instead of singular voices; crowdsourced culture.
- When we make our confessions online, we abandon the powerful workshop of the lone mind, where we puzzle through the mysteries of our own existence without refrence to the demands of an often ruthless public.
- Young people count on the Internet as "their external brain" and have become skilful decision makers - even while they also thrist for instrant gratification and make quick, shallow choices.
- Our generation seems to be facing a crisis of critique. We want to know what's best, but we've begun to forget that real opinion, real critique, must always come out of an absence of voices - from a singular subjective viewpoint. You cannot aggrgate taste.
- Some lens has been shuttered over our vision. We feel that the things we gather lose some veracity in transit.
- It seems the safety of our abstracted, cyborg lives is more pleasing than the haptic symphony of raw reality.
We get embroiled in the echo chamber
- Big tech acts as a filter bubble. Since 2009, Google has been anticipating the search results that you'd find most interesting and has been promoting those results each time you search, exposing you to a narrower and narrower vision of the universe.
- Technology focuses our attention on one cramped view of things. They cut away the "haptic" symphony of senses and perceptions that make up real, lived interactions.
We lose our empathy
- Back in 1998, the writer Linda Stone coined the phrase “continuous partial attention”.
- The author's contact with friends becomes increasingly impersonal and less empathetic the more it's filtered through the reductive emoticons and textual abbreviations of his phone.
- Computers still lack the empathy required to meet humans on their own emotive level.
- The field in which an intelligent computer that can play the human game at least almost as well as a real human is called "affective computing". "Affective" comes from the Latin word afficere, which means "to influence" or (more sinisterly) "to attack with diseases."