August 2, 2008

It’s interesting how on some nights, one’s mind is just energized when you least expect it. Thoughts & concepts form quickly & presciently.

I was discussing philosophy with my friend Hazem on GTalk and the exchange generated an interesting quote from my mind…

“Every regime needs an enemy to validate its direction, ergo, comprising the basis of all conflict.”

The other thought that made a whistle-stop was confirmation that I am not the only one having difficulty concentrating in an information overload world. It’s a fantastic analysis on the impact technological development has had on thinking for alphabet-based languages.

I am not totally sold on the author’s assertion that our own minds risk slipping into auto-pilot and generating artificial thoughts if this info-overload continues. Given a web-free environment, I can still get through a good book at a fair click and savor the message and form an opinion.

What is interesting though is that I seem to have greater difficulty recalling information on a predictable basis. For example, I don’t actually remember much about the characters in that book. But if I read an excerpt, the details would form quite vividly in my mind. So, I started to wonder - “why is it that my memory isn’t as sharp as it used to be, and more interestingly, why is there so much more fragmentation in my working memory?”

Obviously, I don’t have any scientific proof, but the bottom line is that the Internet is my detailed working memory. I plugin whenever my memory needs augmentation or affirmation. And that scenario becomes increasingly frequent and addictive as more information gets delivered. So it is not at all surprising to me that my brain has re-mapped itself to maintain ‘stubs’… enough header information for me to ask the right questions to the infosphere and get the details I want.

Without my infosphere, I am not as effective at “deep processing”. The good news is that my re-mapped brain with the infosphere available becomes a formidable “wide-band” processor. My brain has subconsciously subscribed to a new type of quotient. I call it the Corellatory Quotient (CQ). Because my working memory isn’t full of detailed events and minutae, it has the capacity to store more event headers. More headers allow my working memory to make more correlations. The better the correlations, the higher your CQ and the more original thought it will breed.

So net-net, my brain has decided to trust the infosphere and delegate to it. I’ll take this version of my brain over the one a decade back any day.

Previous post Ode to Freddie Flintoff To get my Cricket fix, I usually purchase a web feed from Willow TV. They are a good setup, they’ve stablized their act over the last year and the Next post Drizzle 'whets' the appetite So, the Sun-MySQL boys, specifically their Director of Architecture Brian Aker, announced the new light-weight cloud store - Drizzle. I like