16 September 2010
Cognition
I am losing my mind. You probably are too, but it seems we are getting another one. I am not sure we signed up for this, but that doesn't seem to matter. I think- at least in the time that I spend doing that activity- that something big is happening to us.
Remember the last time you had to memorize a phone number? We stopped doing that about the same time we stopped having land-lines. Now, granted, you might still have something connected to the wall. We are of a certain age, after all.
But the last decade brought some dramatic changes to my life, and I wound up with just a cell phone, and it turned out to be just fine. In fact, the computer is a phone, which I prefer to the Droid I carry, envious of the iPhone but prohibited from getting one since it is tied to those bandits at AT&T, which is not who some of us (of a certain age) recall being a telegraph company.
Shoot, the kids only wear watches when they think of costume jewelry. Why would you need one? Accurate time to the nanosecond is displayed on your phone based on network settings, so for goodness sake why would you need one?
Same thing with long-term memory. I have noticed the loss in a profound way through the daily story. I remember when these things were “letters,” painfully pounded out on an electric typewriter and backed with a carbon paper attachment to save them for the record.
Jeeze. Prehistoric! I found one of those folders filled with flimsy onionskin paper and marveled at it. What to do with that crap?
I also remember what went into them. Books piled up around the typewriter, overflowing ash-tray, glass of Jameson’s or coffee (or both) at the ready. Facts underlined in pen, bookmarks throughout the tomes, paperbacks cracked.
That was life before Google, and I had to remember what I read and then reinforced it by having to actually type the thing a few times if it was time to catch up with a pal.
Gone, all gone. Now if I don’t know the hull number of a ship, I just toggle over to Google it. I am a fogey, I know, and there are other and possibly better search engines, but I am a creature of habit. The thing is a wonder, and my stories are much more accurate, or at least some of the details are correct.
Here is the deal, though. I don’t recall any of it.
I was looking back through the digital archives to find the threads of related to my conversations with Mac, one of the icons of my profession. There were all sorts of things I ran across and had no real memory of having created them.
It occurred to me that I have outsourced actual brain functions. Midwest 6-4890 is the phone number at the house at 688 Chester Street in Birmingham, Michigan in 1959.
I could not tell you my office number today without finding a business card.
Some things no longer matter, and we stop thinking about them.
I know the change is noticeable in my own brain, when I stop to think about it, and as noted, I have been doing this a long time.
My pal Kimo is still in the game. He is in a position where he has to break in young officers to the rigors of the Fleet. He says the change is much more striking in the generation after our generation. The kids, male and female, are remarkably adept at devices and cyber things, but they lack some elementary situational awareness. Context, if you will, that is necessary to determined why things are happening the way they are.
The new world is wired in a different way. I don’t know if it is good or bad, or what the consequences might be. I can guess, though.
Maybe you can too. I could come to some conclusions on my own, but maybe I will just Google some articles. It is much faster.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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