Out and about

I’ll be talking about some of the themes of The Shallows in three upcoming events in the Northeast:

This Saturday, Oct. 16, I’ll be at the Boston Book Festival, participating in a panel discussion called “Internet or Not?” with William Powers (author of Hamlet’s BlackBerry) and Eric Haseltine (author of Long Fuse, Big Bang), moderated by MIT’s Andrew McAfee. It’s free, and details are here.

On Monday, Oct. 18, I’ll be giving a talk at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. The talk is part of the school’s fall symposium, called “Slowing in a Wired World,” and it’s free, too. Details.

Next month, on the evening Nov. 9, I’ll be giving a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences as part of a program called “From Stone Tools to the Internet: How Humans Adapt to Technology.” This one’s going to cost you $25, and you’ll find details here.

Touch me

Yesterday, the NPD Group released the results of a survey of iPad owners. The most intriguing finding was that “20 percent of users’ time with the iPad was spent with it in bed.” One has to wonder what other sorts of activities are being displaced by the nocturnal stroking of the iPad’s highly responsive screen.

Mighty stupid media

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of doing an interview with the BBC World Service’s excellent show Digital Planet. One thing we discussed was the way software tools, by automating certain mental chores, may in subtle ways weaken our ability to learn. We talked, in particular, about how the reliance on GPS systems may weaken our ability to build mental maps of space, as well as about a fascinating Dutch study that showed that user-friendly software can lead to intellectual laziness.

The brief interview, which you can hear here, inspired a BBC News article yesterday that bore the headline “How good software makes us stupid.”

And then, today, that BBC News article turned into a Daily Telegraph piece with this headline:

googlebrain2.jpg

I can’t wait to see the headline in the News of the World.

New frontiers in social networking

The big news this week is the launch of a National Science Foundation-funded study aimed at “developing the NeuroPhone system, the first Brain-Mobile phone Interface (BMI) that enables neural signals from consumer-level wireless electroencephalography (EEG) headsets worn by people as they go about their everyday lives to be interfaced to mobile phones and combined with existing sensor streams on the phone (e.g., accelerometers, gyroscopes, GPS) to enable new forms of interaction, communications and human behavior modeling.”

More precisely, the research, being conducted at Dartmouth College, is intended to accomplish several goals, including developing “new energy-efficient techniques and algorithms for low-cost wireless EEG headsets and mobile phones for robust sensing, processing and duty cycling of neural signals using consumer devices,” inventing “new learning and classifications algorithms for the mobile phone to extract and infer cognitively informative signals from EEG headsets in noisy mobile environments,” and actually deploying “networked NeuroPhone systems with a focus on real-time multi-party neural synchrony and the networking, privacy and sharing of neural signals between networked NeuroPhones.”

I’ve always thought that the big problem with existing realtime social networking systems, such as Facebook and Twitter, is that they require active and deliberate participation on the part of individual human nodes (or “beings”) – ie, typing out messages on keypads or other input devices – which not only introduces systemic delays incompatible with true realtime communication but also entails the possibility of the subjective distortion of status updates. NeuroPhones promise, by obviating the need for conscious human agency in the processing and transmission of updates, to bring us much closer to fulfilling the true realtime ideal, opening up enormous new opportunities not only in “human behavior modeling” but also in marketing.

Plus, “real-time multi-party neural synchrony” sounds like a lot of fun. I personally can’t wait to switch my NeuroPhone into vibration mode.

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s ongoing series “The Realtime Chronicles,” which began here.

UPDATE: Here is a picture of a prototype of the NeuroPhone:

neurophone.jpg

And here is a paper in which the researchers describe the project. They note, at the end, that “sniffing packets could take on a very new meaning if brain-mobile phone interfaces become widely used. Anyone could simply sniff the packets out of the air and potentially reconstruct the ‘thoughts’ of the user. Spying on a user and detecting something as simple as them thinking yes or no could have profound effects. Thus, securing brain signals over the air is an important challenge.”

The medium is the … squirrel!

A couple of weeks ago, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop per Child initiative, foretold the death of the printed book. Today, he foretells the death of book-reading: “I love the iPad, but my ability to read any long-form narrative has more or less disappeared, as I am constantly tempted to check e-mail, look up words or click through.”

The unread message

Five neuroscientists get into a raft. That might be the start of a mildly funny joke, but in this case it’s the premise of an article by Matt Richtel in today’s New York Times, the latest installment in the paper’s series on “computers and the brain.” Richtel accompanies the scientists as they float down a remote stretch of the San Juan River in Utah, beyond the reach of cell towers and wi-fi signals. The impetus for the trip was, Richtel reports, “to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.”

Two of the neuroscientists start the trip believing that the Net and related technologies can undermine people’s ability to pay attention, impeding deep thinking and even causing psychological problems. The other three are more sanguine about the effects of the technologies. To see what transpires, you’ll need to read the article.

The piece raises one particular idea that I found to be intriguing, and troubling. As the trip proceeds, the scientists begin to wonder “whether attention and focus can take a hit when people merely anticipate the arrival of more digital stimulation”:

“The expectation of e-mail seems to be taking up our working memory,” [Johns Hopkins professor Steven] Yantis says.

Working memory is a precious resource in the brain. The scientists hypothesize that a fraction of brain power is tied up in anticipating e-mail and other new information — and that they might be able to prove it using imaging.

“To the extent you have less working memory, you have less space for storing and integrating ideas and therefore less to do the reasoning you need to do,” says [University of Illinois professor Art] Kramer, floating nearby.

In The Shallows, I review a series of studies that indicate that the fast-paced delivery of messages and other information online overloads working memory, leading to a state of perpetual distractedness. In my research I didn’t come across the idea that the mere anticipation of receiving a fresh burst of information would also add to our cognitive load. But it makes sense. Research shows, for example, that office workers tend to glance at their email inbox 30 or more times an hour, which seems to me to be pretty clear evidence that even when we’re not reading messages we’re thinking about receiving messages – not just emails, but texts, Facebook updates, tweets, and so on.

This would also help explain why the Net continues to distract us even when we’re not online. Part of our mind is still thinking about that new message that might have just arrived in our inbox. What makes that hypothetical unread message particularly distracting is that it could actually be important. You won’t know until you’ve read it. Admit it: The suspense is killing you.