Freedom and Security

Why U.S. Politics Is a Deadlocked Mess
It's because of the rhetorical battle over 'freedom' and 'security.'
by Michael Kazin


The Real Reason Liberals Can’t Mobilize Religious Voters Freedom and security—for some 80 years, they have been the most cherished words in American political discourse. Each major party claims it can best shield the citizenry from danger while also protecting its liberties. Which side in this perennial contest makes the most persuasive case always ends up in power. And one reason national politics is a deadlocked, angry mess right now is that neither side has the rhetorical advantage.

First, a look back. The contest began during the Great Depression. Before that epic slump, “security” was a promise made more frequently by insurance brokers than by politicians. But, under Franklin Roosevelt, liberal Democrats used Social Security as the template for all of its most popular programs. The Wagner Act protected workers who wanted to have unions, and new federal jobs provided a measure of security for millions who would otherwise have been unemployed. The Liberty League, the New Deal’s most prominent foe, claimed all these policies were unconstitutional, socialist-inspired assaults on individual “freedom.” But, knowing the League was bankrolled by DuPont and other anti-union businesses, most Americans dismissed it as a thinly disguised corporate lobby. In contrast, FDR defined “freedom” as every individual’s ability to enjoy the good life, with the aid of a government that looked out for the common good.

World War II and the early cold war extended the liberals’ hegemony. They were able to define security as a military alliance against, first, the fascist right and, then, the communist left—forces that threatened the political freedoms of every American. The minimum wage, health benefits won by strong unions, and steady economic growth all reinforced the notion that security at home was best left in the hands of those who had rescued the nation from Hooverism. The “loss” of China and stalemate in the Korean war briefly allowed conservatives to put liberals on the defensive. But, tellingly, they did so on grounds of insecurity, not freedom, and their moment of triumph was brief.

Then came the 1960s. Under pressure from the grassroots left—movements of blacks, Chicanos, women, and gays—liberals rediscovered their nineteenth-century heritage as tribunes of individual liberty. The quarter-century of economic expansion that followed World War II had given Americans unprecedented freedom in making choices about their lives. “Not With My Life You Don’t,” an anti-draft slogan coined by Students for a Democratic Society, the largest organization on the new, white left, quickly became a sentiment embraced by adherents to an ever-expanding variety of causes. The sum total of their efforts transformed liberalism into an ideology that prized the emancipated self over a secure, if culturally repressed, mass society.

As a result, in the 1970s, when stagflation and a surge in violent crime occurred simultaneously, Democrats had no credible way to explain how they would keep the nation secure. Conservatives quickly seized their opportunity. Alarmed about abortion, feminism, and gay rights, the Christian right redefined security as the preservation of heterosexual marriage with the husband on top. Neocons, ironically, gave it a more traditional meaning when they warned about Soviet gains in both the arms race and the developing world. Meanwhile, the laissez-faire gospel that had failed to sway Americans in the 1930s was revived as a populist call to arms. The contest was between common-sense advocates of the free market and elites who foisted what Ronald Reagan called, in 1981, “excessive government intervention in their lives and in the economy” through “a punitive tax policy that does take ‘from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.’” Reagan brilliantly amalgamated these different, often contradictory, appeals to security and freedom.

Ever since, the right has been using Reagan’s synthesis, updated as needed, to make liberals seem either out of touch or without principles they are willing to defend. But it has been an incomplete triumph. The end of the cold war removed a major cause of global insecurity; neither Islamist terrorism nor China’s industrial might has provided a substitute as alarming or, at least so far, as durable. At home, anxiety about the economy, both present and future, has helped doom every conservative proposal to convert either Social Security—or Medicare, enacted in 1965 as a set of amendments to the original New Deal program—into a plaything of the free market. Meanwhile, the libertarian ethos benefits gay couples and dope smokers, as well as union-busters.

This conflict over who can lay claim to security and freedom is not and has never been between advocates of “big government” and those who favor a smaller one. Starting in the 1930s, whatever party has held national power has extended federal dollars to the groups and causes it favors, and the budget has only gone up. But, today, our politics is trapped between two competing notions of freedom and security, neither of which seems capable of defeating the other. Liberals demand respect for individual autonomy of speech, identity, and religion, while defending the protections that unions and the federal state give to workers and consumers. Conservatives, meanwhile, see private property as the basis of freedom and view military security as the only necessary kind.

Barack Obama, cautious pragmatist that he is, seeks to muddle the differences. He hails the landmark health care law more for cutting costs than because it should give secure coverage for nearly all Americans. And he offers only grudging, pro forma backing to collective bargaining at a time when the very existence of effective unions is in question, and opinion overwhelmingly supports their rights. Of course, after the election debacle of last November, such stands have a short-run logic. But they avoid the task of articulating a brave new synthesis of security and freedom that can speak to Americans who wonder what Democrats really think the government should do and why.

As Obama and his fellow partisans wonder how to break through in policy debates and the upcoming campaign, they might read or re-read how the architect of their modern party combined the ideals of freedom and security into a persuasive whole. FDR told the nation early in 1941:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
The world has, of course, changed in countless ways since FDR’s time as president. But our problems—economic, international, environmental, demographic—are no more daunting than those which Roosevelt faced. To “win the future,” FDR’s partisan descendants still have to explain how security and freedom require each other—and to make that combination sound not just sensible, but inspiring.

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and co-editor of Dissent. His next book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, will be published in August (Knopf).

Moonwalking with Einstein

Nonfiction Sunday, Mar 6, 2011 13:01 ET
"Moonwalking With Einstein": How to remember everything
Can memory actually be taught? Why do dirty images help? Joshua Foer explains how to stop forgetting
By Claire Lambrecht

Think remembering birthdays is difficult? Try memorizing two decks of cards in five minutes or less. That is what Joshua Foer did to win the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship. Such intellectual exploits might not be surprising given Foer's family tree; he is the younger brother of celebrated author Jonathan Safran Foer and New Republic editor Franklin Foer. What is surprising is that he is willing to unmask the illusion and make us privy to the tricks of the trade.

"Moonwalking With Einstein" does just that: It takes the reader on Foer's journey from memory novice to national champion. Foer talks with people from both spectrums of the memory divide -- from Kim Peek, the inspiration for the 1988 movie "Rain Man," to the guy dubbed "The Most Forgetful Man in the World" -- and their conversations offer insight into the relevance of memory in a society increasingly dominated by smart phones, Google and Wikipedia. As Foer delved into the science and research, what he found surprised him. Contrary to popular belief, memory is not a matter of smart or stupid. Instead, it is more like golf, foosball or Ms. Pac-Man: a matter of technique and practice.

Salon spoke with Foer on the phone about technology memory, and why there might be hope for us addicts yet.

You talk about Gutenberg and how the printing press made memory less relevant. Today, we have Wikipedia and Google and all of these smart phones. So why is memory important?

You could argue that we are nothing more and nothing less than what we remember. Memory is not just this storage vault that we dip into when we need to recall something. It's actually intimately involved in shaping how we move through the world and process the world.

Today when we want to find information, people generally say, "Google it." What has it done to us, as Americans, if we just look everything up on the Internet?

I think that there is an argument to be made that while it is incredibly useful to have all of this information at our fingertips, externalized, we don't have that information, facts, knocking around in our skulls. We need that not only to create new ideas, but to think about things, to make new connections, and make sense of the world. There is great benefit to relying on Google to answer every question, and knowing that you don't have to remember all of this stuff, but I think there is probably a cost also.

The book discusses the relationship between memory and humanity. Can you talk a little bit about that?

One of the really interesting people I had the opportunity to meet in the course of researching this book was a guy named EP -- or at least that is what he is referred to as in the scientific literature. He has, or had -- he unfortunately passed away since I met him -- one of the worst memories in the world. It was fascinating to spend time with somebody who was otherwise a completely functional, normal human being, except that he lacked a short-term memory. It was a window into the extent to which memory makes us who we are. Being without it, he basically lived entirely in the present. He was like a pathological Buddha. He could not ponder the future, but he also couldn't dwell on the past. He was completely and entirely in the present.

What are some of the misconceptions Americans might have about memory? You talk a little bit about educational policies and rote memorization and those sorts of things. What are we doing wrong?

I'm not sure we're doing anything wrong. One of the things I write about is how the idea of memory is almost a bad word in education. For good reason our education system has swung away from emphasizing raw facts to try to create people who are abstract thinkers and creative thinkers, but memory has been denigrated in the process. My opinion would be that the pendulum has swung a little too far in that direction. I'm not an education expert, but my impression is that the pendulum is always swinging on a whole host of things in education.

One misconception is one I had when I started this whole journey. Part of this whole enterprise of trying to train my memory was the idea that memorization was boring, and rote, and the opposite of anything that you might call interesting. But it turns out that the kinds of memory techniques used by "mental athletes" in contests to remember huge amounts of information -- the essence of them -- is about creating: figuring out ways to make otherwise uninteresting information interesting and colorful and meaningful and attention-grabbing. And that's actually kind of fun. I ended up getting into that. That is probably the reason I kept going with this. I discovered that, though you wouldn't think so, memorizing things was actually fun.

You talk about memorizing two decks of cards in five minutes for the Memory Championship, and how weird and even dirty images help an image stick. Could you explain how this works?

The idea with that particular technique is to associate every card with an image of a person doing something to an object, and the lewder and stranger the better. So, for me, when I was training my memory, the king of diamonds was Bill Clinton and the queen of diamonds was Hillary Clinton. I was constantly putting those two people, who I also respect and revere, in very, very strange positions and sometimes quite explicit positions for the sake of remembering those cards.

You also talk about "Memory Palaces." Could you explain what those are and what you use them for?

The basic idea of the Memory Palace, which dates back to Ancient Greece, is that if one creates an imagined building in the mind's eye, and populates that building with images that you want to remember, those memories are much stickier. It sounds strange. It sound like it shouldn't work, and that was kind of what I thought when I went into all of this, but it turns out that it is actually an incredibly effective way of remembering stuff. It's actually how Cicero remembered his speeches, how medieval scholars memorized entire texts. It's one of those strange things that tap into some of the innate strengths of our memory. If you, for example, were to go visit some house that you'd never been in before, took a walk around for a few minutes, you would leave that house with a pretty good blueprint in your mind of where each room was, where the refrigerator was, where the bathroom was, maybe what kind of carpeting there was, what color the walls were painted; that's actually a huge amount of information that you walked out of that house with. The idea behind the Memory Palace, this idea that was supposedly, according to legend, discovered by this Greek poet Simonides 2,500 years ago, was that he made spacial information actually meaningful. You would walk out of that building not with a blueprint of furniture but with new knowledge that you'd committed to memory.

It seems like a lot of people have this conception that having a great memory is something that is innate, that you are born with the ability to memorize a deck of cards. Would you say that your research supports that or contradicts that belief?

This gets to the misconception that I went into this research with. There is undoubtedly some degree of natural variation in people's innate memory abilities, but I don't think it's that great. I know that what these individuals who compete in these contests can do, and what I learned to do myself, is entirely a function of technique and training.

So you would argue that the average guy or gal off the street could perhaps reach your level of success with enough training?

Yes, I'm convinced of it.

I Can't Think!

I Can’t Think! by Sharon Begley from Newsweek

The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.

Imagine the most mind-numbing choice you’ve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes people’s decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study “combinatorial auctions,” bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version. Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport landing slots. The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the lowest price—a diabolical puzzle if you’re considering, say, 100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb, the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they overpay or make critical errors.

This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain’s emotion regions—previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC—run as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. “With too much information, ” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”

So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions. For earlier generations, that mean simply the due diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today, with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops. That can be a good thing, as when information empowers workers and consumers, not to mention whistle-blowers and revolutionaries. You can find out a used car’s accident history, a doctor’s malpractice record, a restaurant’s health-inspection results. Yet research like Dimoka’s is showing that a surfeit of information is changing the way we think, not always for the better. Maybe you consulted scores of travel websites to pick a vacation spot—only to be so overwhelmed with information that you opted for a staycation. Maybe you were this close to choosing a college, when suddenly older friends swamped your inbox with all the reasons to go somewhere else—which made you completely forget why you’d chosen the other school. Maybe you had the Date From Hell after being so inundated with information on “matches” that you chose at random. If so, then you are a victim of info-paralysis.

Imagine the most mind-numbing choice you’ve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes people’s decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study “combinatorial auctions,” bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version. Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport landing slots. The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the lowest price—a diabolical puzzle if you’re considering, say, 100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb, the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they overpay or make critical errors.

This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain’s emotion regions—previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC—run as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. “With too much information, ” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”

So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions. For earlier generations, that mean simply the due diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today, with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops. That can be a good thing, as when information empowers workers and consumers, not to mention whistle-blowers and revolutionaries. You can find out a used car’s accident history, a doctor’s malpractice record, a restaurant’s health-inspection results. Yet research like Dimoka’s is showing that a surfeit of information is changing the way we think, not always for the better. Maybe you consulted scores of travel websites to pick a vacation spot—only to be so overwhelmed with information that you opted for a staycation. Maybe you were this close to choosing a college, when suddenly older friends swamped your inbox with all the reasons to go somewhere else—which made you completely forget why you’d chosen the other school. Maybe you had the Date From Hell after being so inundated with information on “matches” that you chose at random. If so, then you are a victim of info-paralysis.

The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of books which keeps on growing,” and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of “a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land,” as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of what’s out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added “information fatigue” in 2009. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.

The research should give pause to anyone addicted to incoming texts and tweets. The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness—something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.

Decision science has only begun to incorporate research on how the brain processes information, but the need for answers is as urgent as the stakes are high. During the BP oil-well blowout last year, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the incident commander, estimates that he got 300 to 400 pages of emails, texts, reports, and other messages every day. It’s impossible to know whether less information, more calmly evaluated, would have let officials figure out sooner how to cap the well, but Allen tells NEWSWEEK’s Daniel Stone that the torrent of data might have contributed to what he calls the mistake of failing to close off air space above the gulf on day one. (There were eight near midair collisions.) A comparable barrage of information assailed administration officials before the overthrow of the Egyptian government, possibly producing at least one misstep: CIA Director Leon Panetta told Congress that Hosni Mubarak was about to announce he was stepping down—right before the Egyptian president delivered a defiant, rambling speech saying he wasn’t going anywhere. “You always think afterwards about what you could have done better, but there isn’t time in the moment to second-guess,” said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. “You have to make your decision and go execute.” As scientists probe how the flow of information affects decision making, they’ve spotted several patterns. Among them:

Total Failure to Decide
Every bit of incoming information presents a choice: whether to pay attention, whether to reply, whether to factor it into an impending decision. But decision science has shown that people faced with a plethora of choices are apt to make no decision at all. The clearest example of this comes from studies of financial decisions. In a 2004 study, Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and colleagues found that the more information people confronted about a 401(k) plan, the more participation fell: from 75 percent to 70 percent as the number of choices rose from two to 11, and to 61 percent when there were 59 options. People felt overwhelmed and opted out. Those who participated chose lower-return options—worse choices. Similarly, when people are given information about 50 rather than 10 options in an online store, they choose lower-quality options. Although we say we prefer more information, in fact more can be “debilitating,” argues Iyengar, whose 2010 book The Art of Choosing comes out in paperback in March. “When we make decisions, we compare bundles of information. So a decision is harder if the amount of information you have to juggle is greater.” In recent years, businesses have offered more and more choices to cater to individual tastes. For mustard or socks, this may not be a problem, but the proliferation of choices can create paralysis when the stakes are high and the information complex.

Imagine the most mind-numbing choice you’ve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes people’s decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study “combinatorial auctions,” bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version. Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport landing slots. The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the lowest price—a diabolical puzzle if you’re considering, say, 100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb, the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they overpay or make critical errors.

This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain’s emotion regions—previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC—run as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. “With too much information, ” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”

So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions. For earlier generations, that mean simply the due diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today, with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops. That can be a good thing, as when information empowers workers and consumers, not to mention whistle-blowers and revolutionaries. You can find out a used car’s accident history, a doctor’s malpractice record, a restaurant’s health-inspection results. Yet research like Dimoka’s is showing that a surfeit of information is changing the way we think, not always for the better. Maybe you consulted scores of travel websites to pick a vacation spot—only to be so overwhelmed with information that you opted for a staycation. Maybe you were this close to choosing a college, when suddenly older friends swamped your inbox with all the reasons to go somewhere else—which made you completely forget why you’d chosen the other school. Maybe you had the Date From Hell after being so inundated with information on “matches” that you chose at random. If so, then you are a victim of info-paralysis.

The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of books which keeps on growing,” and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of “a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land,” as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of what’s out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added “information fatigue” in 2009. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.

The research should give pause to anyone addicted to incoming texts and tweets. The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness—something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.

Decision science has only begun to incorporate research on how the brain processes information, but the need for answers is as urgent as the stakes are high. During the BP oil-well blowout last year, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the incident commander, estimates that he got 300 to 400 pages of emails, texts, reports, and other messages every day. It’s impossible to know whether less information, more calmly evaluated, would have let officials figure out sooner how to cap the well, but Allen tells NEWSWEEK’s Daniel Stone that the torrent of data might have contributed to what he calls the mistake of failing to close off air space above the gulf on day one. (There were eight near midair collisions.) A comparable barrage of information assailed administration officials before the overthrow of the Egyptian government, possibly producing at least one misstep: CIA Director Leon Panetta told Congress that Hosni Mubarak was about to announce he was stepping down—right before the Egyptian president delivered a defiant, rambling speech saying he wasn’t going anywhere. “You always think afterwards about what you could have done better, but there isn’t time in the moment to second-guess,” said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. “You have to make your decision and go execute.” As scientists probe how the flow of information affects decision making, they’ve spotted several patterns. Among them:

Total Failure to Decide
Every bit of incoming information presents a choice: whether to pay attention, whether to reply, whether to factor it into an impending decision. But decision science has shown that people faced with a plethora of choices are apt to make no decision at all. The clearest example of this comes from studies of financial decisions. In a 2004 study, Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and colleagues found that the more information people confronted about a 401(k) plan, the more participation fell: from 75 percent to 70 percent as the number of choices rose from two to 11, and to 61 percent when there were 59 options. People felt overwhelmed and opted out. Those who participated chose lower-return options—worse choices. Similarly, when people are given information about 50 rather than 10 options in an online store, they choose lower-quality options. Although we say we prefer more information, in fact more can be “debilitating,” argues Iyengar, whose 2010 book The Art of Choosing comes out in paperback in March. “When we make decisions, we compare bundles of information. So a decision is harder if the amount of information you have to juggle is greater.” In recent years, businesses have offered more and more choices to cater to individual tastes. For mustard or socks, this may not be a problem, but the proliferation of choices can create paralysis when the stakes are high and the information complex.

If we manage to make a decision despite info-deluge, it often comes back to haunt us. The more information we try to assimilate, the more we tend to regret the many forgone options. In a 2006 study, Iyengar and colleagues analyzed job searches by college students. The more sources and kinds of information (about a company, an industry, a city, pay, benefits, corporate culture) they collected, the less satisfied they were with their decision. They knew so much, consciously or unconsciously, they could easily imagine why a job not taken would have been better. In a world of limitless information, regret over the decisions we make becomes more common. We chafe at the fact that identifying the best feels impossible. “Even if you made an objectively better choice, you tend to be less satisfied with it,” says Iyengar.

A key reason for information’s diminishing or even negative returns is the limited capacity of the brain’s working memory. It can hold roughly seven items (which is why seven-digit phone numbers were a great idea). Anything more must be processed into long-term memory. That takes conscious effort, as when you study for an exam. When more than seven units of information land in our brain’s inbox, argues psychologist Joanne Cantor, author of the 2009 book Conquer Cyber Overload and an emerita professor at the University of Wisconsin, the brain struggles to figure out what to keep and what to disregard. Ignoring the repetitious and the useless requires cognitive resources and vigilance, a harder task when there is so much information.

It isn’t only the quantity of information that knocks the brain for a loop; it’s the rate. The ceaseless influx trains us to respond instantly, sacrificing accuracy and thoughtfulness to the false god of immediacy. “We’re being trained to prefer an immediate decision even if it’s bad to a later decision that’s better,” says psychologist Clifford Nass of Stanford University. “In business, we’re seeing a preference for the quick over the right, in large part because so many decisions have to be made. The notion that the quick decision is better is becoming normative.”

The brain is wired to notice change over stasis. An arriving email that pops to the top of your BlackBerry qualifies as a change; so does a new Facebook post. We are conditioned to give greater weight in our decision-making machinery to what is latest, not what is more important or more interesting. “There is a powerful ‘recency’ effect in decision making,” says behavioral economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University. “We pay a lot of attention to the most recent information, discounting what came earlier.” Getting 30 texts per hour up to the moment when you make a decision means that most of them make all the impression of a feather on a brick wall, whereas Nos. 29 and 30 assume outsize importance, regardless of their validity. “We’re fooled by immediacy and quantity and think it’s quality,” says Eric Kessler, a management expert at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “What starts driving decisions is the urgent rather than the important.”

The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.
(Page 4 of 5)

Illustration by Matt Mahurin for Newsweek
Imagine the most mind-numbing choice you’ve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes people’s decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study “combinatorial auctions,” bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version. Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport landing slots. The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the lowest price—a diabolical puzzle if you’re considering, say, 100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb, the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they overpay or make critical errors.

This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain’s emotion regions—previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC—run as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. “With too much information, ” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”

So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions. For earlier generations, that mean simply the due diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today, with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops. That can be a good thing, as when information empowers workers and consumers, not to mention whistle-blowers and revolutionaries. You can find out a used car’s accident history, a doctor’s malpractice record, a restaurant’s health-inspection results. Yet research like Dimoka’s is showing that a surfeit of information is changing the way we think, not always for the better. Maybe you consulted scores of travel websites to pick a vacation spot—only to be so overwhelmed with information that you opted for a staycation. Maybe you were this close to choosing a college, when suddenly older friends swamped your inbox with all the reasons to go somewhere else—which made you completely forget why you’d chosen the other school. Maybe you had the Date From Hell after being so inundated with information on “matches” that you chose at random. If so, then you are a victim of info-paralysis.

The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of books which keeps on growing,” and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of “a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land,” as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of what’s out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added “information fatigue” in 2009. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.

The research should give pause to anyone addicted to incoming texts and tweets. The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness—something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.

Decision science has only begun to incorporate research on how the brain processes information, but the need for answers is as urgent as the stakes are high. During the BP oil-well blowout last year, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the incident commander, estimates that he got 300 to 400 pages of emails, texts, reports, and other messages every day. It’s impossible to know whether less information, more calmly evaluated, would have let officials figure out sooner how to cap the well, but Allen tells NEWSWEEK’s Daniel Stone that the torrent of data might have contributed to what he calls the mistake of failing to close off air space above the gulf on day one. (There were eight near midair collisions.) A comparable barrage of information assailed administration officials before the overthrow of the Egyptian government, possibly producing at least one misstep: CIA Director Leon Panetta told Congress that Hosni Mubarak was about to announce he was stepping down—right before the Egyptian president delivered a defiant, rambling speech saying he wasn’t going anywhere. “You always think afterwards about what you could have done better, but there isn’t time in the moment to second-guess,” said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. “You have to make your decision and go execute.” As scientists probe how the flow of information affects decision making, they’ve spotted several patterns. Among them:

Total Failure to Decide
Every bit of incoming information presents a choice: whether to pay attention, whether to reply, whether to factor it into an impending decision. But decision science has shown that people faced with a plethora of choices are apt to make no decision at all. The clearest example of this comes from studies of financial decisions. In a 2004 study, Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and colleagues found that the more information people confronted about a 401(k) plan, the more participation fell: from 75 percent to 70 percent as the number of choices rose from two to 11, and to 61 percent when there were 59 options. People felt overwhelmed and opted out. Those who participated chose lower-return options—worse choices. Similarly, when people are given information about 50 rather than 10 options in an online store, they choose lower-quality options. Although we say we prefer more information, in fact more can be “debilitating,” argues Iyengar, whose 2010 book The Art of Choosing comes out in paperback in March. “When we make decisions, we compare bundles of information. So a decision is harder if the amount of information you have to juggle is greater.” In recent years, businesses have offered more and more choices to cater to individual tastes. For mustard or socks, this may not be a problem, but the proliferation of choices can create paralysis when the stakes are high and the information complex.

Many Diminishing Returns
If we manage to make a decision despite info-deluge, it often comes back to haunt us. The more information we try to assimilate, the more we tend to regret the many forgone options. In a 2006 study, Iyengar and colleagues analyzed job searches by college students. The more sources and kinds of information (about a company, an industry, a city, pay, benefits, corporate culture) they collected, the less satisfied they were with their decision. They knew so much, consciously or unconsciously, they could easily imagine why a job not taken would have been better. In a world of limitless information, regret over the decisions we make becomes more common. We chafe at the fact that identifying the best feels impossible. “Even if you made an objectively better choice, you tend to be less satisfied with it,” says Iyengar.

A key reason for information’s diminishing or even negative returns is the limited capacity of the brain’s working memory. It can hold roughly seven items (which is why seven-digit phone numbers were a great idea). Anything more must be processed into long-term memory. That takes conscious effort, as when you study for an exam. When more than seven units of information land in our brain’s inbox, argues psychologist Joanne Cantor, author of the 2009 book Conquer Cyber Overload and an emerita professor at the University of Wisconsin, the brain struggles to figure out what to keep and what to disregard. Ignoring the repetitious and the useless requires cognitive resources and vigilance, a harder task when there is so much information.

It isn’t only the quantity of information that knocks the brain for a loop; it’s the rate. The ceaseless influx trains us to respond instantly, sacrificing accuracy and thoughtfulness to the false god of immediacy. “We’re being trained to prefer an immediate decision even if it’s bad to a later decision that’s better,” says psychologist Clifford Nass of Stanford University. “In business, we’re seeing a preference for the quick over the right, in large part because so many decisions have to be made. The notion that the quick decision is better is becoming normative.”

‘Recency’ Trumps Quality
The brain is wired to notice change over stasis. An arriving email that pops to the top of your BlackBerry qualifies as a change; so does a new Facebook post. We are conditioned to give greater weight in our decision-making machinery to what is latest, not what is more important or more interesting. “There is a powerful ‘recency’ effect in decision making,” says behavioral economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University. “We pay a lot of attention to the most recent information, discounting what came earlier.” Getting 30 texts per hour up to the moment when you make a decision means that most of them make all the impression of a feather on a brick wall, whereas Nos. 29 and 30 assume outsize importance, regardless of their validity. “We’re fooled by immediacy and quantity and think it’s quality,” says Eric Kessler, a management expert at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “What starts driving decisions is the urgent rather than the important.”

Part of the problem is that the brain is really bad at giving only a little weight to a piece of information. When psychologist Eric Stone of Wake Forest University had subjects evaluate the vocabulary skills of a hypothetical person, he gave them salient information (the person’s education level) and less predictive information (how often they read a newspaper). People give the less predictive info more weight than it deserves. “Our cognitive systems,” says Stone, “just aren’t designed to take information into account only a little.”

The Neglected Unconscious
Creative decisions are more likely to bubble up from a brain that applies unconscious thought to a problem, rather than going at it in a full-frontal, analytical assault. So while we’re likely to think creative thoughts in the shower, it’s much harder if we’re under a virtual deluge of data. “If you let things come at you all the time, you can’t use additional information to make a creative leap or a wise judgment,” says Cantor. “You need to pull back from the constant influx and take a break.” That allows the brain to subconsciously integrate new information with existing knowledge and thereby make novel connections and see hidden patterns. In contrast, a constant focus on the new makes it harder for information to percolate just below conscious awareness, where it can combine in ways that spark smart decisions.

One of the greatest surprises in decision science is the discovery that some of our best decisions are made through unconscious processes. When subjects in one study evaluated what psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis of the Radboud University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands calls a “rather daunting amount of information” about four hypothetical apartments for rent—size, location, friendliness of the landlord, price, and eight other features—those who decided unconsciously which to rent did better. (“Better” meant they chose the one that had objectively better features.) The scientists made sure the decision was unconscious by having the subjects do a memory and attention task, which tied up their brains enough that they couldn’t contemplate, say, square footage.

There are at least two ways an info-glut can impair the unconscious system of decision making. First, when people see that there is a lot of complex information relevant to a decision, “they default to the conscious system,” says psychologist Maarten Bos of Radboud. “That causes them to make poorer choices.” Second, the unconscious system works best when it ignores some information about a complex decision. But here’s the rub: in an info tsunami, our minds struggle to decide if we can ignore this piece … or that one … but how about that one? “Especially online,” says Cantor, “it is so much easier to look for more and more information than sit back and think about how it fits together.”

Even experience-based decision making, in which you use a rule of thumb rather than analyze pros and cons, can go off the rails with too much information. “This kind of intuitive decision making relies on distilled expertise,” says Kessler. “More information, by overwhelming and distracting the brain, can make it harder to tap into just the core information you need.” In one experiment, M.B.A. students choosing a (make-believe) stock portfolio were divided into two groups, one that was inundated with information from analysts and the financial press, and another that saw only stock-price changes. The latter reaped more than twice the returns of the info-deluged group, whose analytical capabilities were hijacked by too much information and wound up buying and selling on every rumor and tip—a surefire way to lose money in the market. The more data they got, the more they struggled to separate wheat from chaff.?


Illustration by Matt Mahurin for Newsweek
Imagine the most mind-numbing choice you’ve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes people’s decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study “combinatorial auctions,” bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version. Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport landing slots. The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the lowest price—a diabolical puzzle if you’re considering, say, 100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb, the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they overpay or make critical errors.

This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain’s emotion regions—previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC—run as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. “With too much information, ” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”

So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions. For earlier generations, that mean simply the due diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today, with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops. That can be a good thing, as when information empowers workers and consumers, not to mention whistle-blowers and revolutionaries. You can find out a used car’s accident history, a doctor’s malpractice record, a restaurant’s health-inspection results. Yet research like Dimoka’s is showing that a surfeit of information is changing the way we think, not always for the better. Maybe you consulted scores of travel websites to pick a vacation spot—only to be so overwhelmed with information that you opted for a staycation. Maybe you were this close to choosing a college, when suddenly older friends swamped your inbox with all the reasons to go somewhere else—which made you completely forget why you’d chosen the other school. Maybe you had the Date From Hell after being so inundated with information on “matches” that you chose at random. If so, then you are a victim of info-paralysis.

The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of books which keeps on growing,” and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of “a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land,” as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of what’s out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added “information fatigue” in 2009. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.

The research should give pause to anyone addicted to incoming texts and tweets. The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness—something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.

Decision science has only begun to incorporate research on how the brain processes information, but the need for answers is as urgent as the stakes are high. During the BP oil-well blowout last year, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the incident commander, estimates that he got 300 to 400 pages of emails, texts, reports, and other messages every day. It’s impossible to know whether less information, more calmly evaluated, would have let officials figure out sooner how to cap the well, but Allen tells NEWSWEEK’s Daniel Stone that the torrent of data might have contributed to what he calls the mistake of failing to close off air space above the gulf on day one. (There were eight near midair collisions.) A comparable barrage of information assailed administration officials before the overthrow of the Egyptian government, possibly producing at least one misstep: CIA Director Leon Panetta told Congress that Hosni Mubarak was about to announce he was stepping down—right before the Egyptian president delivered a defiant, rambling speech saying he wasn’t going anywhere. “You always think afterwards about what you could have done better, but there isn’t time in the moment to second-guess,” said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. “You have to make your decision and go execute.” As scientists probe how the flow of information affects decision making, they’ve spotted several patterns. Among them:

Total Failure to Decide
Every bit of incoming information presents a choice: whether to pay attention, whether to reply, whether to factor it into an impending decision. But decision science has shown that people faced with a plethora of choices are apt to make no decision at all. The clearest example of this comes from studies of financial decisions. In a 2004 study, Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and colleagues found that the more information people confronted about a 401(k) plan, the more participation fell: from 75 percent to 70 percent as the number of choices rose from two to 11, and to 61 percent when there were 59 options. People felt overwhelmed and opted out. Those who participated chose lower-return options—worse choices. Similarly, when people are given information about 50 rather than 10 options in an online store, they choose lower-quality options. Although we say we prefer more information, in fact more can be “debilitating,” argues Iyengar, whose 2010 book The Art of Choosing comes out in paperback in March. “When we make decisions, we compare bundles of information. So a decision is harder if the amount of information you have to juggle is greater.” In recent years, businesses have offered more and more choices to cater to individual tastes. For mustard or socks, this may not be a problem, but the proliferation of choices can create paralysis when the stakes are high and the information complex.

Many Diminishing Returns
If we manage to make a decision despite info-deluge, it often comes back to haunt us. The more information we try to assimilate, the more we tend to regret the many forgone options. In a 2006 study, Iyengar and colleagues analyzed job searches by college students. The more sources and kinds of information (about a company, an industry, a city, pay, benefits, corporate culture) they collected, the less satisfied they were with their decision. They knew so much, consciously or unconsciously, they could easily imagine why a job not taken would have been better. In a world of limitless information, regret over the decisions we make becomes more common. We chafe at the fact that identifying the best feels impossible. “Even if you made an objectively better choice, you tend to be less satisfied with it,” says Iyengar.

A key reason for information’s diminishing or even negative returns is the limited capacity of the brain’s working memory. It can hold roughly seven items (which is why seven-digit phone numbers were a great idea). Anything more must be processed into long-term memory. That takes conscious effort, as when you study for an exam. When more than seven units of information land in our brain’s inbox, argues psychologist Joanne Cantor, author of the 2009 book Conquer Cyber Overload and an emerita professor at the University of Wisconsin, the brain struggles to figure out what to keep and what to disregard. Ignoring the repetitious and the useless requires cognitive resources and vigilance, a harder task when there is so much information.

It isn’t only the quantity of information that knocks the brain for a loop; it’s the rate. The ceaseless influx trains us to respond instantly, sacrificing accuracy and thoughtfulness to the false god of immediacy. “We’re being trained to prefer an immediate decision even if it’s bad to a later decision that’s better,” says psychologist Clifford Nass of Stanford University. “In business, we’re seeing a preference for the quick over the right, in large part because so many decisions have to be made. The notion that the quick decision is better is becoming normative.”

‘Recency’ Trumps Quality
The brain is wired to notice change over stasis. An arriving email that pops to the top of your BlackBerry qualifies as a change; so does a new Facebook post. We are conditioned to give greater weight in our decision-making machinery to what is latest, not what is more important or more interesting. “There is a powerful ‘recency’ effect in decision making,” says behavioral economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University. “We pay a lot of attention to the most recent information, discounting what came earlier.” Getting 30 texts per hour up to the moment when you make a decision means that most of them make all the impression of a feather on a brick wall, whereas Nos. 29 and 30 assume outsize importance, regardless of their validity. “We’re fooled by immediacy and quantity and think it’s quality,” says Eric Kessler, a management expert at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “What starts driving decisions is the urgent rather than the important.”

Part of the problem is that the brain is really bad at giving only a little weight to a piece of information. When psychologist Eric Stone of Wake Forest University had subjects evaluate the vocabulary skills of a hypothetical person, he gave them salient information (the person’s education level) and less predictive information (how often they read a newspaper). People give the less predictive info more weight than it deserves. “Our cognitive systems,” says Stone, “just aren’t designed to take information into account only a little.”

The Neglected Unconscious
Creative decisions are more likely to bubble up from a brain that applies unconscious thought to a problem, rather than going at it in a full-frontal, analytical assault. So while we’re likely to think creative thoughts in the shower, it’s much harder if we’re under a virtual deluge of data. “If you let things come at you all the time, you can’t use additional information to make a creative leap or a wise judgment,” says Cantor. “You need to pull back from the constant influx and take a break.” That allows the brain to subconsciously integrate new information with existing knowledge and thereby make novel connections and see hidden patterns. In contrast, a constant focus on the new makes it harder for information to percolate just below conscious awareness, where it can combine in ways that spark smart decisions.

One of the greatest surprises in decision science is the discovery that some of our best decisions are made through unconscious processes. When subjects in one study evaluated what psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis of the Radboud University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands calls a “rather daunting amount of information” about four hypothetical apartments for rent—size, location, friendliness of the landlord, price, and eight other features—those who decided unconsciously which to rent did better. (“Better” meant they chose the one that had objectively better features.) The scientists made sure the decision was unconscious by having the subjects do a memory and attention task, which tied up their brains enough that they couldn’t contemplate, say, square footage.

There are at least two ways an info-glut can impair the unconscious system of decision making. First, when people see that there is a lot of complex information relevant to a decision, “they default to the conscious system,” says psychologist Maarten Bos of Radboud. “That causes them to make poorer choices.” Second, the unconscious system works best when it ignores some information about a complex decision. But here’s the rub: in an info tsunami, our minds struggle to decide if we can ignore this piece … or that one … but how about that one? “Especially online,” says Cantor, “it is so much easier to look for more and more information than sit back and think about how it fits together.”

Even experience-based decision making, in which you use a rule of thumb rather than analyze pros and cons, can go off the rails with too much information. “This kind of intuitive decision making relies on distilled expertise,” says Kessler. “More information, by overwhelming and distracting the brain, can make it harder to tap into just the core information you need.” In one experiment, M.B.A. students choosing a (make-believe) stock portfolio were divided into two groups, one that was inundated with information from analysts and the financial press, and another that saw only stock-price changes. The latter reaped more than twice the returns of the info-deluged group, whose analytical capabilities were hijacked by too much information and wound up buying and selling on every rumor and tip—a surefire way to lose money in the market. The more data they got, the more they struggled to separate wheat from chaff.?

Which brings us back to the experimental subjects Angelika Dimoka has put in an fMRI scanner. The prefrontal cortex that waves a white flag under an onslaught of information plays a key role in your gut-level, emotional decision-making system. It hooks up feelings about various choices with the output of the rational brain. If emotions are shut out of the decision-making process, we’re likely to overthink a decision, and that has been shown to produce worse outcomes on even the simplest tasks. In one classic experiment, when volunteers focused on the attributes of various strawberry jams they had just rated, it completely scrambled their preferences, and they wound up giving a high rating to a jam they disliked and a low rating to one they had found delicious.

How can you protect yourself from having your decisions warped by excess information? Experts advise dealing with emails and texts in batches, rather than in real time; that should let your unconscious decision-making system kick in. Avoid the trap of thinking that a decision requiring you to assess a lot of complex information is best made methodically and consciously; you will do better, and regret less, if you let your unconscious turn it over by removing yourself from the info influx. Set priorities: if a choice turns on only a few criteria, focus consciously on those. Some people are better than others at ignoring extra information. These “sufficers” are able to say enough: they channel-surf until they find an acceptable show and then stop, whereas “maximizers” never stop surfing, devouring information, and so struggle to make a decision and move on. If you think you’re a maximizer, the best prescription for you might be the “off” switch on your smart phone.

E-Book Burning?

We've all read Farenheit 451 and stories about book burning in history. Will there one day be Nook Burning, or Kindle Burning? These devices are not book specific, but it would be symbolic to the ignorant, wouldn't it?

Jim Holt
The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember by Nicholas Carr
Atlantic, 276 pp, £17.99, September 2010, ISBN 978 1 84887 225 7


‘I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one,’ Woody Allen told an interviewer recently. Most of us have come to find computers indispensable, but he manages to have a productive life without one. Are those of us with computers really better off?

There are two ways that computers might add to our wellbeing. First, they could do so indirectly, by increasing our ability to produce other goods and services. In this they have proved something of a disappointment. In the early 1970s, American businesses began to invest heavily in computer hardware and software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word processing, don’t really add all that much to productivity; perhaps information becomes less valuable when it’s more widely available. Whatever the case, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that some of the productivity gains promised by the computer-driven ‘new economy’ began to show up – in the United States, at any rate. So far, Europe appears to have missed out on them.

The other way computers could benefit us is more direct. They might make us smarter, or even happier. They promise to bring us such primary goods as pleasure, friendship, sex and knowledge. If some lotus-eating visionaries are to be believed, computers may even have a spiritual dimension: as they grow ever more powerful, they have the potential to become our ‘mind children’. At some point – the ‘singularity’ – in the not-so-distant future, we humans will merge with these silicon creatures, thereby transcending our biology and achieving immortality. It is all of this that Woody Allen is missing out on.

But there are also sceptics who maintain that computers are having the opposite effect on us: they are making us less happy, and perhaps even stupider. Among the first to raise this possibility was the American literary critic Sven Birkerts. In his book The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), Birkerts argued that the computer and other electronic media were destroying our capacity for ‘deep reading’. His writing students, thanks to their digital devices, had become mere skimmers and scanners and scrollers. They couldn’t lose themselves in a novel the way he could. This didn’t bode well, Birkerts thought, for the future of literary culture.

Suppose we found that computers are diminishing our capacity for certain pleasures, or making us worse off in other ways. Why couldn’t we simply spend less time in front of the screen and more time doing the things we used to do before computers came along – like burying our noses in novels? Well, it may be that computers are affecting us in a more insidious fashion than we realise. They may be reshaping our brains – and not for the better. That was the drift of ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’, a 2008 cover story by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic. Carr, a technology writer and a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, has now elaborated his indictment of digital culture into a book, The Shallows.

Carr thinks that he was himself an unwitting victim of the computer’s mind-altering powers. Now in his early fifties, he describes his life as a ‘two-act play’, ‘Analogue Youth’ followed by ‘Digital Adulthood’. In 1986, five years out of college, he dismayed his wife by spending nearly all their savings on an early version of the Apple Mac. Soon afterwards, he says, he lost the ability to edit or revise on paper. Around 1990, he acquired a modem and an AOL subscription, which entitled him to spend five hours a week online sending email, visiting ‘chat rooms’ and reading old newspaper articles. It was around this time that the programmer Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web, which, in due course, Carr would be restlessly exploring with the aid of his new Netscape browser. ‘You know the rest of the story because it’s probably your story too,’ he writes.

Ever-faster chips. Ever quicker modems. DVDs and DVD burners. Gigabyte-sized hard drives. Yahoo and Amazon and eBay. MP3s. Streaming video. Broadband. Napster and Google. BlackBerrys and iPods. Wi-Fi networks. YouTube and Wikipedia. Blogging and microblogging. Smartphones, thumb drives, netbooks. Who could resist? Certainly not I.

It wasn’t until 2007, Carr says, that he had the epiphany that led to this book: ‘The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing.’

Lest we take him to be speaking metaphorically, Carr launches into a brief history of brain science, which culminates in a discussion of ‘neuroplasticity’: the idea that experience affects the structure of the brain. Scientific orthodoxy used to hold that the adult brain was fixed and immutable: experience could alter the strengths of the connections among its neurons, it was believed, but not its overall architecture. By the late 1960s, however, striking evidence of brain plasticity began to emerge. In one series of experiments, researchers cut nerves in the hands of monkeys, and then, using microelectrode probes, observed that the monkeys’ brains reorganised themselves to compensate for the peripheral damage. Later, tests on people who had lost an arm or a leg revealed something similar: the brain areas that used to receive sensory input from the lost limbs seemed to get taken over by circuits that register sensations from other parts of the body (which may account for the ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon). Signs of brain plasticity have been observed in healthy people, too. Violinists, for instance, tend to have larger cortical areas devoted to processing signals from their fingering hands than do non-violinists. And brain scans of London cab drivers taken in the 1990s revealed that they had larger than normal posterior hippocampuses – a part of the brain that stores spatial representations – and that the increase in size was proportional to the number of years they had been in the job.

The brain’s ability to change its own structure, as Carr sees it, is nothing less than ‘a loophole for free thought and free will’. But, he hastens to add, ‘bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones.’ Indeed, neuroplasticity has been invoked to explain depression, tinnitus, pornography addiction and masochistic self-mutilation (this last is supposedly a result of pain pathways getting rewired to the brain’s pleasure centres). Once new neural circuits become established in our brains, they demand to be fed, and they can hijack brain areas devoted to valuable mental skills. Thus, Carr writes: ‘The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.’ And the internet ‘delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli – repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive – that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions’. He quotes the brain scientist Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of neuroplasticity and the man behind the monkey experiments in the 1960s, to the effect that the brain can be ‘massively remodelled’ by exposure to the internet and online tools like Google. ‘THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES,’ Merzenich warns in caps – in a blog post, no less.

Many in the neuroscience community scoff at such claims. The brain is not ‘a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience’, Steven Pinker has insisted. Its wiring may change a bit when we learn a new fact or skill, but its basic cognitive architecture remains the same. And where is the evidence that using the internet can ‘massively remodel’ the brain? The only germane study that Carr is able to cite was undertaken in 2008 by Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA. Small recruited a dozen experienced web surfers and a dozen novices, and scanned their brains while they did Google searches. Sure enough, the two groups showed different patterns of neural firing. The activity was broader in the experienced web surfers; in particular, they made heavy use of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with decision-making and problem-solving. In the novices, by contrast, this area was largely quiet.


Is ‘broader’ the same as ‘worse’? Rather the opposite, one might think. As Carr admits, ‘the good news here is that web surfing, because it engages so many brain functions, may help keep older people’s minds sharp.’ Nor did the brain changes caused by web surfing seem to interfere with reading. When the researchers had the subjects read straight texts, there was no significant difference in brain activity between the computer veterans and the novices. And just how extensive was the alleged rewiring? When the UCLA researchers had the novices spend an hour a day surfing the web, it took only five days for their brain patterns to look like those of the veterans. ‘Five hours on the internet, and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,’ Small concluded. Typically, though, brain changes that occur very quickly can also be reversed very quickly. If, for example, a normally sighted person is made to wear a blindfold, in a week’s time the visual centres of their brain will have been taken over to a significant degree by the tactile centres. (This was found in experiments on the learning of Braille.) But it takes only a single day after the blindfold is removed for brain function to snap back to normal.

If surfing the web stimulates problem-solving and decision-making areas of the brain, as the UCLA study indicated, are we entitled to conclude, pace Carr, that Google makes us smarter? That depends on what you mean by ‘smart’. Psychologists distinguish two broad types of intelligence. ‘Fluid’ intelligence is one’s ability to solve abstract problems, like logic puzzles. ‘Crystallised’ intelligence is one’s store of information about the world, including learned short cuts for making inferences about it. (As one might guess, fluid intelligence tends to decline with age, while the crystallised variety tends to increase, up to a point.) There is plenty of evidence that computers can stoke fluid intelligence. Ever played a video game? Maybe you should have. Video-gamers are better at paying attention to several things at once than non-players, and are better at ignoring irrelevant features of a problem. Very young children trained with video games have been shown to develop superior attention-management skills, scoring substantially higher than their untrained peers on some IQ tests. You can actually see the improvement on an EEG: four-year-olds trained on video games display patterns of activity in the attention-control parts of their brains that you’d normally expect to find in six-year-olds. Carr acknowledges the evidence that video games can enhance certain cognitive skills. But he insists that these skills ‘tend to involve lower-level, or more primitive, mental functions’. Those who are unfamiliar with video games might find that plausible, but a very different picture emerges from Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You (2005). According to Johnson, the sophisticated video games of today (unlike the simplistic Pac-Man-style games of yesteryear) involve richly imagined worlds with their own hidden laws. To navigate such worlds, one must constantly frame and test hypotheses about their underlying logic. This is hardly a pastime that promotes mental flightiness. ‘The average video game takes about 40 hours to play,’ Johnson writes, ‘the complexity of the puzzles and objectives growing steadily over time as the game progresses.’

Even if computers can improve our fluid intelligence, perhaps they are inimical to crystallised intelligence – that is, to the acquisition of knowledge. This seems to be Carr’s fall-back position. ‘The net is making us smarter,’ he writes, ‘only if we define intelligence by the net’s own standards. If we take a broader and more traditional view of intelligence – if we think about the depth of our thought rather than just its speed – we have to come to a different and considerably darker conclusion.’ Why is the ‘buzzing’ brain of the computer user inferior to the ‘calm mind’ of the book reader? Because, Carr submits, a buzzing brain is an overloaded one. Our ability to acquire knowledge depends on information getting from our ‘working memory’ – the mind’s temporary scratch pad – into our long-term memory. The working memory contains what we are conscious of at a given moment; it is estimated that it can hold only as many as four items of information at a time, which quickly vanish if they are not refreshed. The working memory is thus the bottleneck in the learning process – or, to use Carr’s image, the ‘thimble’ by which we must fill up the ‘bathtub’ of our long-term memory. A book provides a ‘steady drip’ of information which, through sustained concentration, we can transfer by means of this thimble with little spillage. But on the web, Carr writes, ‘we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from one faucet to the next,’ and what we end up with is ‘a jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream from one source.’

This is a seductive model, but the empirical support for Carr’s conclusion is both slim and equivocal. To begin with, there is evidence that web surfing can increase the capacity of working memory. And while some studies have indeed shown that ‘hypertexts’ impede retention – in a 2001 Canadian study, for instance, people who read a version of Elizabeth Bowen’s story ‘The Demon Lover’ festooned with clickable links took longer and reported more confusion about the plot than did those who read it in an old-fashioned ‘linear’ text – others have failed to substantiate this claim. No study has shown that internet use degrades the ability to learn from a book, though that doesn’t stop people feeling that this is so – one medical blogger quoted by Carr laments, ‘I can’t read War and Peace any more.’

The digerati are not impressed by such avowals. ‘No one reads War and Peace,’ responds Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University. ‘The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it.’ (Woody Allen solved that problem by taking a speed-reading course and then reading War and Peace in one sitting. ‘It was about Russia,’ he said afterwards.) The only reason we used to read big long novels before the advent of the internet was because we were living in an information-impoverished environment. Our ‘pleasure cycles’ are now tied to the web, the literary critic Sam Anderson claimed in a 2009 cover story in New York magazine, ‘In Defense of Distraction’. ‘It’s too late,’ he declared, ‘to just retreat to a quieter time.’

This sort of ‘outré posturing’ by intellectuals rankles with Carr since, he thinks, it enables ordinary people ‘to convince themselves that surfing the web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought’. But Carr doesn’t do enough to dissuade us from this conclusion. He fails to clinch his case that the computer is making us stupider. Can he convince us that it is making us less happy? Suppose, like good Aristotelians, we equate happiness with human flourishing. One model for human flourishing is the pastoral ideal of quiet contemplation. It is this ideal, Carr submits, that is epitomised by ‘the pensive stillness of deep reading’. He gives us a brisk history of reading from the invention of the codex through to the Gutenberg revolution, and describes how its evolution gave rise to an ‘intellectual ethic’ – a set of normative assumptions about how the human mind works. ‘To read a book was to practise an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object,’ he writes. As written culture superseded oral culture, chains of reasoning became longer and more complex, but also clearer. Library architecture came to accommodate the novel habit of reading silently to oneself, as private carrels and cloisters were torn out and replaced with grand public rooms. And the miniaturisation of the book, hastened in 1501 when the Italian printer Aldus Manutius introduced the pocket-sized octavo format, brought reading out of libraries into everyday life. ‘As our ancestors imbued their minds with the discipline to follow a line of argument or narrative through a succession of printed pages, they became more contemplative, reflective and imaginative,’ Carr writes. The digital world, by contrast, promotes a very different model of human flourishing: an industrial model of hedonic efficiency, in which speed trumps depth and pensive stillness gives way to a cataract of sensation. ‘The net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves and conversing with others,’ but it ‘also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.’

So which fits better with your ideal of eudaemonia, deep reading or power browsing? Should you set up house in Sleepy Hollow or next to the Information Superhighway? The solution, one might decide, is to opt for a bit of both. But Carr seems to think that it’s impossible to strike a balance. There is no stable equilibrium between analogue and digital. ‘The net commands our attention with far greater insistence than our television or radio or morning newspaper ever did,’ he writes. Once it has insidiously rewired our brains and altered our minds, we’re as good as lost. He quotes the novelist Benjamin Kunkel on this loss of autonomy: ‘We don’t feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead … that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even like to.’

Near the end of the book, Carr describes his own attempt to emancipate himself from the nervous digital world and return to a Woody Allen-like condition of contemplative calm. He and his wife move from ‘a highly connected suburb of Boston’ to the mountains of Colorado, where there is no mobile phone reception. He cancels his Twitter account, suspends his Facebook membership, shuts down his blog, curtails his Skyping and instant messaging, and – ‘most important’ – resets his email so that it checks for new messages only once an hour instead of every minute. And, he confesses, he’s ‘already backsliding’. He can’t help finding the digital world ‘cool’, adding, ‘I’m not sure I could live without it.’


Perhaps what he needs are better strategies of self-control. Has he considered disconnecting his modem and Fedexing it to himself overnight, as some digital addicts say they have done? After all, as Steven Pinker noted a few months ago in the New York Times, ‘distraction is not a new phenomenon.’ Pinker scorns the notion that digital technologies pose a hazard to our intelligence or wellbeing. Aren’t the sciences doing well in the digital age, he asks? Aren’t philosophy, history and cultural criticism flourishing too? There is a reason the new media have caught on, Pinker observes: ‘Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not.’ Without the internet, how can we possibly keep up with humanity’s ballooning intellectual output?

This raises a prospect that has exhilarated many of the digerati. Perhaps the internet can serve not merely as a supplement to memory, but as a replacement for it. ‘I’ve almost given up making an effort to remember anything,’ says Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired, ‘because I can instantly retrieve the information online.’ David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, writes: ‘I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realised the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants – silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.’

Books also serve as external memory-storage devices; that is why Socrates, in the Phaedrus, warned that the innovation of writing would lead to the atrophy of human memory. But books have expanded the reservoir of information and ideas, and, through the practice of attentive reading, have enriched the memory, not superseded it. The internet is different. Thanks to algorithmic search engines like Google, the whole universe of online information can be scanned in an instant. Not only do you not have to remember a fact, you don’t even have to remember where to look it up. In time, even the intermediary of a computer screen might prove unnecessary – why not implant a wireless Google connection right in the head? ‘Certainly,’ says Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, ‘if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.’

The idea that machine might supplant Mnemosyne is abhorrent to Carr, and he devotes the most interesting portions of his book to combatting it. He gives a lucid account of the molecular basis of memory, and of the mechanisms by which the brain consolidates short-term memories into long-term ones. Biological memory, which is necessarily in ‘a perpetual state of renewal’, is in no way analogous to the storage of bits of data in static locations on a hard drive: that he makes quite plain. Yet he doesn’t answer the question that really concerns us: why is it better to knock information into your head than to get it off the web?

The system by which the brain stores and retrieves memories is, for all its glorious intricacy, a bit of a mess. That’s understandable: it’s the product of blind evolution, not of rational engineering. Unlike a computer, which assigns each bit of information a precise address in its data banks, human memory is organised contextually. Items are tied together in complex associative webs, and are retrieved by clues rather than by location. Ideally, the desired item just pops into your head (‘The founder of phenomenology? Husserl!’). If not, you try various clues, which may or may not work (‘The founder of phenomenology? Let’s see, starts with an “h” … Heidegger!’). Human memory has certain advantages over computer memory; for instance, it tends to give automatic priority to the most frequently needed items. But it’s fragile and unreliable. Unrehearsed memories soon sink into oblivion. And interference between items within associative webs causes confusion and leads to the formation of false memories.

The computer’s postcode memory system has no such vulnerabilities. Moreover, as the cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus has pointed out, it’s possible to have the benefits of contextual memory without the costs. ‘The proof is Google,’ Marcus writes. ‘Search engines start with an underlying substrate of postcode memory (the well-mapped information they can tap into) and build contextual memory on top. The postcode foundation guarantees reliability, while the context on top hints at which memories are most likely needed at a given moment.’ It’s a pity, Marcus adds, that evolution didn’t start with a memory system more like the computer’s.

Considering these advantages, why not outsource as much of our memory as possible to Google? Carr responds with a bit of rhetorical bluster. ‘The web’s connections are not our connections,’ he writes. ‘When we outsource our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect and even our identity.’ Then he quotes William James, who in 1892 in a lecture on memory declared: ‘The connecting is the thinking.’ And James was onto something: the role of memory in thinking, and in creativity. What do we really know about creativity? Very little. We know that creative genius is not the same thing as intelligence. In fact, beyond a certain minimum IQ threshold – about one standard deviation above average, or an IQ of 115 – there is no correlation at all between intelligence and creativity. We know that creativity is empirically correlated with mood-swing disorders. A couple of decades ago, Harvard researchers found that people showing ‘exceptional creativity’ – which they put at fewer than 1 per cent of the population – were more likely to suffer from manic-depression or to be near relatives of manic-depressives. As for the psychological mechanisms behind creative genius, those remain pretty much a mystery. About the only point generally agreed on is that, as Pinker put it, ‘Geniuses are wonks.’ They work hard; they immerse themselves in their genre.

Could this immersion have something to do with stocking the memory? As an instructive case of creative genius, consider the French mathematician Henri Poincaré, who died in 1912. Poincaré’s genius was distinctive in that it embraced nearly the whole of mathematics, from pure (number theory) to applied (celestial mechanics). Along with his German coeval David Hilbert, Poincaré was the last of the universalists. His powers of intuition enabled him to see deep connections between seemingly remote branches of mathematics. He virtually created the modern field of topology, framing the ‘Poincaré conjecture’ for future generations to grapple with, and he beat Einstein to the mathematics of special relativity. Unlike many geniuses, Poincaré was a man of great practical prowess; as a young engineer he conducted on-the-spot diagnoses of mining disasters. He was also a lovely prose stylist who wrote bestselling works on the philosophy of science; he is the only mathematician ever inducted into the literary section of the Institut de France. What makes Poincaré such a compelling case is that his breakthroughs tended to come in moments of sudden illumination. One of the most remarkable of these was described in his essay ‘Mathematical Creation’. Poincaré had been struggling for some weeks with a deep issue in pure mathematics when he was obliged, in his capacity as mine inspector, to make a geological excursion. ‘The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work,’ he recounted.

Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience’s sake, I verified the result at my leisure.

How to account for the full-blown epiphany that struck Poincaré in the instant that his foot touched the step of the bus? His own conjecture was that it had arisen from unconscious activity in his memory. ‘The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable,’ he wrote. ‘These sudden inspirations … never happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless.’ The seemingly fruitless effort fills the memory banks with mathematical ideas – ideas that then become ‘mobilised atoms’ in the unconscious, arranging and rearranging themselves in endless combinations, until finally the ‘most beautiful’ of them makes it through a ‘delicate sieve’ into full consciousness, where it will then be refined and proved.

Poincaré was a modest man, not least about his memory, which he called ‘not bad’ in the essay. In fact, it was prodigious. ‘In retention and recall he exceeded even the fabulous Euler,’ one biographer declared. (Euler, the most prolific mathematician of all – the constant e takes his initial – was reputedly able to recite the Aeneid from memory.) Poincaré read with incredible speed, and his spatial memory was such that he could remember the exact page and line of a book where any particular statement had been made. His auditory memory was just as well developed, perhaps owing to his poor eyesight. In school, he was able to sit back and absorb lectures without taking notes despite being unable to see the blackboard.


It is the connection between memory and creativity, perhaps, which should make us most wary of the web. ‘As our use of the web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory,’ Carr observes. But conscious manipulation of externally stored information is not enough to yield the deepest of creative breakthroughs: this is what the example of Poincaré suggests. Human memory, unlike machine memory, is dynamic. Through some process we only crudely understand – Poincaré himself saw it as the collision and locking together of ideas into stable combinations – novel patterns are unconsciously detected, novel analogies discovered. And this is the process that Google, by seducing us into using it as a memory prosthesis, threatens to subvert.

It’s not that the web is making us less intelligent; if anything, the evidence suggests it sharpens more cognitive skills than it dulls. It’s not that the web is making us less happy, although there are certainly those who, like Carr, feel enslaved by its rhythms and cheated by the quality of its pleasures. It’s that the web may be an enemy of creativity. Which is why Woody Allen might be wise in avoiding it altogether.

By the way, it is customary for reviewers of books like this to note, in a jocular aside, that they interrupted their writing labours many times to update their Facebook page, to fire off text messages, to check their email, to tweet and blog and amuse themselves on the internet trying to find images of cats that look like Hitler. Well, I’m not on Facebook and I don’t know how to tweet. I have an email account with AOL (‘America’s Oldest Luddites’), but there’s rarely anything in my inbox. I’ve never had an iPod or a BlackBerry. I’ve never had a mobile phone of any kind. Like Woody Allen, I’ve avoided the snares of the digital age. And I still can’t get anything done.

The Racial Tea Party

The No, The Tea Party Isn't Racist. Yes, It Is Racial.
Jonathan Chait
Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor

No, The Tea Party Isn't Racist. Yes, It Is Racial.

Conservatives are up in arms over a new book that says that President Obama sees the Tea Party as racist. See Fox News ("Obama Says Tea Party Is Racist In New Book"), along with slightly less inflammatory reactions from the Daily Caller and Red State.

The first thing to recognize is that Obama isn't "calling" the Tea Party racist. A private conversation of his is being reported, which is not the same thing as playing the race card. Second, Obama's viewpoint, which is broadly characterized, is (surprise!) more subtle than the headline suggest:

Obama, in his most candid moments, acknowledged that race was still a problem. In May 2010, he told guests at a private White House dinner that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency from conservatives, especially right-wing activists in the anti-incumbent "Tea Party" movement that was then surging across the country. Many middle-class and working-class whites felt aggrieved and resentful that the federal government was helping other groups, including bankers, automakers, irresponsible people who had defaulted on their mortgages, and the poor, but wasn't helping them nearly enough, he said.
A guest suggested that when Tea Party activists said they wanted to "take back" their country, their real motivation was to stir up anger and anxiety at having a black president, and Obama didn't dispute the idea. He agreed that there was a "subterranean agenda" in the anti-Obama movement—a racially biased one—that was unfortunate. But he sadly conceded that there was little he could do about it.
His goal, he said, was to be as effective and empathetic a president as possible for all Americans. If he could accomplish that, it would advance racial progress for blacks more than anything else he could do.
Conservatives tend to be extraordinarily sensitive to accusations of racism, and they have developed a whole cottage industry of mocking and countering perceptions of racism within the Tea Party movement. To some extent, their sensitivity is understandable. I am sure that virtually all Tea Party members think of themselves as non- or anti-racists, committed to judging individuals on the content of their character. A few open racists have shown up at Tea Party rallies, and Tea Parties feel (again, understandably) that a tiny minority has been held up to taint all of them. They have gone out of their way to police rallies for racist signs. Moreover, the Tea party is organized around traditional right-wing public policy beliefs about government spending, and is almost completely uninterested in what we call "racial issues."

However, it is also demonstrably true that Tea Party sympathizers hold distinctly reactionary views on racial issues.

The evidence is overwhelming. A New York Times poll found that 52% of Tea Party sympathizers, as opposed to just 28% of Americans as a whole, believe "too much has been made of the problems facing black people." Another poll delved into this in greater depth:

Only 35 percent of those who strongly approve of the tea party agreed that blacks are hardworking, compared with 55 percent of those who strongly disapprove of the tea party. On whether blacks were intelligent, 45 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed, compared with 59 percent of the tea-party opponents. And on the issue of whether blacks were trustworthy, 41 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed, compared with 57 percent of the tea-party opponents.
And yet another poll showed that Tea Party sympathizers are far more likely than white Democrats to consider anti-white racism a greater problem than anti-black racism:

62 percent of whites who identified as Tea Party members, 56 percent of white Republicans, and even 53 percent of white independents said that today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. Only 30 percent of white Democrats agreed with that statement.
Again, these views on racial issues are distinctive to the Tea Party, but they're not the Tea Party's main agenda. Tea Party rallies tend not to mention racial issues. But race is embedded into conservative politics in ways that conservatives don't want to acknowledge. Research has shown that white ethnocentric beliefs correlate strongly with opposition to means-tested spending programs. They correlate with higher support for universal programs. White people support programs they see as benefiting people like themselves. They oppose programs they see as benefiting people unlike themselves -- i.e., blacks.

This fact has shaped much of the debate over Obama's agenda. The conservative backlash to health care reform, in particular, took the form of staunchly defending Medicare against cuts which would redistribute benefits to undeserving beneficiaries. In general, conservatives like to tout the exceptional nature of anti-government beliefs in America without recognizing the role played by the legacy of slavery -- a huge source of opposition to more powerful government is the fear that such power will take from whites and give to blacks.

Again, you can hold right-wing beliefs about the role of government without having the slightest tinge of racial animosity. Racism and economic libertarianism are logically separable belief systems. But politically, they are closely intertwined. Unfortunately, the right's defensiveness on racial issues extends to erecting a conservative taboo around any recognition of this reality.