ONE OF Einstein’s colleagues asked him for his telephone number one day. Einstein reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. “You don’t remember your own number?” the man asked, startled.
“No,” Einstein answered. “Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?”
In fact, Einstein claimed never to memorize anything which could be looked up in less than two minutes.
oaks.nvg.org/sa5ra17.html

Having facts readily accessible to us is changing what we remember, but it’s not eroding our ability to think clearly. Anyone who believes that has an inexplicably rosy idea of how clearly people thought in the past.

Thinking clearly is dangerous to the established order – the history of pedagogy and politics is full of instances where teaching has been re-tooled to remove critical thinking at the behest of political or theological rulers. Or fundamentalist school boards, here in America. Clear thinking requires skepticism, and logic, and a firm grasp of how to evaluate evidence for reasonableness.

There are many forces in our culture which fight against those things, but the ease of getting information on the internet isn’t one of those forces – in fact, it supports clear thinking by giving people the tools to verify or debunk what they are told – if they have learned how to think clearly.

One of my gripes with this is that you’re saying there’s no correlation, but what you’re arguing, actually, is that there’s a negative correlation. I think you should acknowledge that these are two different arguments. I bet a lot of people here would be more willing to believe the former than the latter.

To jump to the later part of the thread, you say, “…I don’t think remembering details of information is completely divorced from analysis, interpretation, reflection, etc. Before you can grapple with an idea, you must have the details of the idea in your mental grasp.”

I don’t disagree with this, but in order to make your main argument stick, you still have to prove to me that there is a real value difference between remembering something “in your head” versus using an outside source to remember it for you. To me, there is little difference other than a speed advantage with using your head, and a breadth advantage with using outside sources.

The point I’d like to make is that there is a difference between mental processing/cogitating (what we might refer to as “analysis” or “reflection”) and strict memory. And in turn, memory itself can be broken down into both basic informational memory and procedural memory. I’d offer that what you characterize as truly “grasping” a subject can be classified as procedural memory, and that’s a separate mental module from reflection or cogitation. Developing procedural memory may require some amount of reflection, but more importantly I think it requires practice, which you could define as “applied reflection”.

The speed of that practice–the speed at which you develop procedural memory–depends on the person, obviously. And I don’t think the process of offloading the storage of information to outside media (which has been going on for millenia and is arguably human nature) is detrimental to how fast you can process or analyze. Not in and of itself.

My last point (bear with me) is this: I do think that you’re on to something, but you’re blaming the wrong thing. I believe that people are losing some of their analytical, deep-thinking power, but it has nothing to do with social/shared intelligence or the offloading of memory capacity. I think our ability to think deeply is being eroded by certain aspects of a quick-fix, info-overload culture that in some ways is a byproduct of the same media we use to so efficiently store the world’s knowledge (knowledge we wouldn’t be able to use otherwise). Empty hours of looking at the TV and not thinking are different than hours spent searching on PubMed, but they are born from the same technological framework.

The connectivity required to build from spoken word to written word, then to books, then libraries and universities, and now the internet, is made possible by a technological system that simultaneously creates a generation of 11-year-olds that can’t spend one minute within themselves without being updated on the fleeting, unimportant thoughts of a dozen of their friends. I don’t know if that will hurt the next generation, or prepare them for the world they’re entering, but there’s your culprit. The internet in and of itself is not the culprit, it’s just the medium.

Amphiox: I get your point, but I don’t think remembering details of information is completely divorced from analysis, interpretation, reflection, etc. Before you can grapple with an idea, you must have the details of the idea in your mental grasp.

Evidence indicates that child is handicapped in critical thinking.

[Citation needed]

I’m all for social intelligence, my friend, but I see little connection between social intelligence and critical thinking, close reading, deep thinking, etc.

I do not see any link whatsoever between critical thinking, close reading, deep thinking, or any other remotely related processes with the two kinds of learning investigated in this study. It’s a separate module of intelligence from either remembering information straight up or remembering where to find the information.

And thus it does not follow at all that those abilities would be either harmed or helped by the advent of electronic information and communication.

Also, this is not a new process. Compare the memory abilities of individuals in preliterate societies with those in societies with writing and books. This is only one small extension of a process that has its roots all the way back to the beginning of civilization itself (and perhaps even older than that).