[ Thu. Jan. 6. 2011 ]

Does the Internet affect our brains? 170 scientists and artists are trying to answer that question.

Since 1998, John Brockman of The Edge Foundation, an association of scientists and intellectuals, asks his members every year a question which they must answer with a short essay. Examples from recent years include "What do you think is true, but you can not prove?" and "What did you change your mind about? The question last year is also the title of this book. It is of course a very topical issue although the Internet has no really been around long enough to have serious statements about the impact on our brains or our way of thinking, yet in recent years there have been dozens of works published describing the investigated effects. 

Here you get 170 scientists and artists, including big names such as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennet, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Brian Eno, each of whom has a few pages to explain the advent of the Internet and what it has meant to them.

With so many people are discussed, this is a very diverse book. Optimists like Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, may hold a hymn to the possibilities of the Internet, while several pages later another describes the worldwide web as "the biggest distraction from serious thinking since television was invented." Some authors point to the disastrous consequences that the Internet already has on our brains, while an evolutionary biologistsays that the Internet so far has changed our very little because the information we find there is still viewed through our lenses as hunter-gatherers. That we can not handle this, for example, leads to a greater sense of insecurity.

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