Sunday, Oct 12, 2014 01:00 PM CST
Google makes us all dumber: The neuroscience of search engines
As search engines get better, we become
lazier. We're hooked on easy answers and undervalue asking good
questions
Ian Leslie
In
1964, Pablo Picasso was asked by an interviewer about the new electronic
calculating machines, soon to become known as computers. He replied,
“But they are useless. They can only give you answers.”
We live in
the age of answers. The ancient library at Alexandria was believed to
hold the world’s entire store of knowledge. Today, there is enough
information in the world for every person alive to be given three times
as much as was held in Alexandria’s entire collection —and nearly all of
it is available to anyone with an internet connection.
This
library accompanies us everywhere, and Google, chief librarian, fields
our inquiries with stunning efficiency. Dinner table disputes are
resolved by smartphone; undergraduates stitch together a patchwork of
Wikipedia entries into an essay. In a remarkably short period of time,
we have become habituated to an endless supply of easy answers. You
might even say dependent.
Google is known as a search engine, yet
there is barely any searching involved anymore. The gap between a
question crystallizing in your mind and an answer appearing at the top
of your screen is shrinking all the time. As a consequence, our ability
to ask questions is atrophying. Google’s head of search, Amit Singhal,
asked if people are getting better at articulating their search queries,
sighed and said: “The more accurate the machine gets, the lazier the
questions become.”
Google’s strategy for dealing with our slapdash
questioning is to make the question superfluous. Singhal is focused on
eliminating “every possible friction point between [users], their
thoughts and the information they want to find.” Larry Page has talked
of a day when a Google search chip is implanted in people’s brains:
“When you think about something you don’t really know much about, you
will automatically get information.” One day, the gap between question
and answer will disappear.
I believe we should strive to keep it open. That gap is where our curiosity lives. We undervalue it at our peril.
The
Internet can make us feel omniscient. But it’s the feeling of not
knowing which inspires the desire to learn. The psychologist George
Loewenstein gave us the simplest and most powerful definition of
curiosity, describing it as the response to an “information gap.” When
you know just enough to know that you don’t know everything, you
experience the itch to know more. Loewenstein pointed out that a person
who knows the capitals of three out of 50 American states is likely to
think of herself as knowing something (“I know three state capitals”).
But a person who has learned the names of 47 state capitals is likely to
think of herself as
not knowing three state capitals, and thus more likely to make the effort to learn those other three.
That
word “effort” is important. It’s hardly surprising that we love the
ease and fluency of the modern web: our brains are designed to avoid
anything that seems like hard work. The psychologists Susan Fiske and
Shelley Taylor coined the term “cognitive miser” to describe the
stinginess with which the brain allocates limited attention, and its
in-built propensity to seek mental short-cuts. The easier it is for us
to acquire information, however, the less likely it is to stick.
Difficulty and frustration — the very friction that Google aims to
eliminate — ensure that our brain integrates new information more
securely. Robert Bjork, of the University of California, uses the phrase
“desirable difficulties” to describe the counterintuitive notion that
we learn better when the learning is hard. Bjork recommends, for
instance, spacing teaching sessions further apart so that students have
to make more effort to recall what they learned last time.
A great
question should launch a journey of exploration. Instant answers can
leave us idling at base camp. When a question is given time to incubate,
it can take us to places we hadn’t planned to visit. Left unanswered,
it acts like a searchlight ranging across the landscape of different
possibilities, the very consideration of which makes our thinking deeper
and broader. Searching for an answer in a printed book is inefficient,
and takes longer than in its digital counterpart. But while flicking
through those pages your eye may alight on information that you didn’t
even know you wanted to know.
The gap between question and answer
is where creativity thrives and scientific progress is made. When we
celebrate our greatest thinkers, we usually focus on their ingenious
answers. But the thinkers themselves tend to see it the other way
around. “Looking back,” said Charles Darwin, “I think it was more
difficult to see what the problems were than to solve them.” The writer
Anton Chekhov declared, “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not
answer them.” The very definition of a bad work of art is one that
insists on telling its audience the answers, and a scientist who
believes she has all the answers is not a scientist.
According to
the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell, “thoroughly conscious ignorance
is the prelude to every real advance in science.” Good questions induce
this state of conscious ignorance, focusing our attention on what we
don’t know. The neuroscientist Stuart Firestein teaches a course on
ignorance at Columbia University, because, he says, “science produces
ignorance at a faster rate than it produces knowledge.” Raising a toast
to Einstein, George Bernard Shaw remarked, “Science is always wrong. It
never solves a problem without creating ten more.”
Humans are born
consciously ignorant. Compared to other mammals, we are pushed out into
the world prematurely, and stay dependent on elders for much longer.
Endowed with so few answers at birth, children are driven to question
everything. In 2007, Michelle Chouinard, a psychology professor at the
University of California, analyzed recordings of four children
interacting with their respective caregivers for two hours at a time,
for a total of more than two hundred hours. She found that, on average,
the children posed more than a hundred questions every hour.
Very
small children use questions to elicit information — “What is this
called?” But as they grow older, their questions become more probing.
They start looking for explanations and insight, to ask “Why?” and
“How?”. Extrapolating from Chouinard’s data, the Harvard professor Paul
Harris estimates that between the ages of 3 and 5, children ask 40,000
such questions. The numbers are impressive, but what’s really amazing is
the ability to ask such a question at all. Somehow, children
instinctively know there is a vast amount they don’t know, and they need
to dig beneath the world of appearances.
In a 1984 study by
British researchers Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes, four-year-old
girls were recorded talking to their mothers at home. When the
researchers analyzed the tapes, they found that some children asked more
“How” and “Why” questions than others, and engaged in longer passages
of “intellectual search” — a series of linked questions, each following
from the other. (In one such conversation, four-year-old Rosy engaged
her mother in a long exchange about why the window cleaner was given
money.) The more confident questioners weren’t necessarily the children
who got more answers from their parents, but the ones who got more
questions. Parents who threw questions back to their children — “I don’t
know, what do you think?” — raised children who asked more questions of
them. Questioning, it turn out, is contagious.
Childish curiosity
only gets us so far, however. To ask good questions, it helps if you
have built your own library of answers. It’s been proposed that the
Internet relieves us of the onerous burden of memorizing information.
Why cram our heads with facts, like the date of the French revolution,
when they can be summoned up in a swipe and a couple of clicks? But
knowledge doesn’t just fill the brain up; it makes it work better. To
see what I mean, try memorizing the following string of fourteen digits
in five seconds:
74830582894062
Hard, isn’t it? Virtually impossible. Now try memorizing this string of fourteen letters:
lucy in the sky with diamonds
This
time, you barely needed a second. The contrast is so striking that it
seems like a completely different problem, but fundamentally, it’s the
same. The only difference is that one string of symbols triggers a set
of associations with knowledge you have stored deep in your memory.
Without thinking, you can group the letters into words, the words into a
sentence you understand as grammatical — and the sentence is one you
recognize as the title of a song by the Beatles. The knowledge you’ve
gathered over years has made your brain’s central processing unit more
powerful.
This tells us something about the idea we should
outsource our memories to the web: it’s a short-cut to stupidity. The
less we know, the worse we are at processing new information, and the
slower we are to arrive at pertinent inquiry. You’re unlikely to ask a
truly penetrating question about the presidency of Richard Nixon if you
have just had to look up who he is. According to researchers who study
innovation, the average age at which scientists and inventors make
breakthroughs is increasing over time. As knowledge accumulates across
generations, it takes longer for individuals to acquire it, and thus
longer to be in a position to ask the questions which, in Susan Sontag’s
phrase, “destroy the answers”.
My argument isn’t with technology, but the way we use it. It’s not that the Internet is making
us stupid or incurious. Only we can do that. It’s that we will only
realize the potential of technology and humans working together when
each is focused on its strengths — and that means we need to consciously
cultivate effortful curiosity. Smart machines are taking over more and
more of the tasks assumed to be the preserve of humans. But no machine,
however sophisticated, can yet be said to be curious. The technology
visionary Kevin Kelly succinctly defines the appropriate division of
labor: “Machines are for answers; humans are for questions.”
The
practice of asking perceptive, informed, curious questions is a cultural
habit we should inculcate at every level of society. In school,
students are generally expected to answer questions rather than ask
them. But educational researchers have found that students learn better
when they’re gently directed towards the lacunae in their knowledge,
allowing their questions bubble up through the gaps. Wikipedia and
Google are best treated as starting points rather than destinations, and
we should recognize that human interaction will always play a vital
role in fueling the quest for knowledge. After all, Google never says,
“I don’t know — what do you think?”
The Internet has the potential
to be the greatest tool for intellectual exploration ever invented, but
only if it is treated as a complement to our talent for inquiry rather
than a replacement for it. In a world awash in ready-made answers, the
ability to pose difficult, even unanswerable questions is more important
than ever.
Picasso was half-right: computers are useless without truly curious humans.
(Credit: Ollyy via Shutterstock)
No comments:
Post a Comment