Adults can easily dismiss the danger that “Technology is making us stupid.”  Maybe you used to fuss semi-competently with maps, got lost now and then, and now you are glad that your cell phone can provide directions.  What is the problem?  You did not get stupider, your life got easier.  Well, adults consistently fail to consider how differently certain problems can manifest themselves in that dimly remembered country they once inhabited: Childhood.

A fifth grade teacher recently told me that not one child in her room could tell time from an analog clock.  Their homes have only digital clocks on TV recorders, microwave ovens, clock radios and the like.  Experts and editorialists everywhere wring their hands about “Why can’t Johnny do fractions?”  There is your answer.  Incredibly, a fifth grade teacher confronts blank space where you might expect rudimentary notions of quarter, half and whole to preexist. If you are reading this, chances are by age 10 you could make it to dinner on time if your mother told you it would be at a “quarter past.”  Your familiarity with that pie shaped area between the big hand and the 12 made your fifth grade teacher’s job a whole lot easier.

Taking the kids for a hike or just out on a drive?  Let the GPS be for emergencies only!  Those minds will not develop unless they get practice observing and memorizing landmarks, guessing and testing distances and travel times, comparing routes and struggling to make the connection between the the territory and the map.  The ability to absorb abstract information and apply it in the real world, an ability you may take for granted, can be gained in no other way.

What do you make of the commonplace notion that we only use 10 percent of our brains?  I have always taken it to mean that we could all afford to learn about 10 times as much stuff as we do before having any overload trouble. Too bad we seldom bother. Like most people, I watch for information that confirms my pre-existing notions, and Lo!  An article in The Economist about the link between genius, or savant syndrome and autism roughly confirmed my suspicion.

The movie “Rain Man” is a fair presentation of savant syndrome.  I had assumed that such savants are born, not made, but an element of the syndrome called RRBI, restrictive and repetitive behaviors and interests, must indeed be made, even if the inclination towards RRBI is inborn.

Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.

So what happens when a neurotypical does clock up 10,000 hours?

There are, however, examples of people who seem very neurotypical indeed achieving savant-like skills through sheer diligence. Probably the most famous is that of London taxi drivers, who must master the Knowledge—ie, the location of 25,000 streets, and the quickest ways between them—to qualify for a licence.

The expert here is Eleanor Maguire of University College, London, who famously showed a few years ago that the shape of the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in long-term learning, changes in London cabbies. Dr Maguire and her team have now turned their attention to how cabbies learn the Knowledge.

The prodigious geographical knowledge of the average cabbie is, indeed, savant-like. But Dr Maguire recently found that it comes at a cost. Cabbies, on average, are worse than random control subjects and—horror—also worse than bus drivers, at memory tests such as word-pairing. Surprisingly, that is also true of their general spatial memory. Nothing comes for nothing, it seems, and genius has its price.

25,000 streets, and no Manhattan-style grid to make it easy!  Plus, London cabbies must also know all hotels, theaters, museums, hospitals, shops, embassies and so much more. I love that they simply call it The Knowledge. 10,000 hours is about 3 1/2 years of 8 hour days.  Obtaining The Knowledge can be a four year project.

So now we know.  Spend 45 minutes a week reading maps. Look for places you have been.  Look for places you have heard of and might like to know more about or visit.  Think about new ways you could travel to work. What might be worth seeing along the way?  Who could you drop in on?  45 minutes a week.  You might get 2% of the way towards a situation where you have clogged up your mind to the point where your ability to do crosswords or learn to read music is slightly impaired.

There is so much to think about in that essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? that I must continue.

Carr opens and closes the essay with references to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Even people who have not seen the movie know about HAL, the computer that conversed like a human.  I missed the point back then by assuming Hal was supposed to horrify me.  It did not, but I get it now.  The horror is not HAL, it is what happens when people hold the intelligence of HAL in the same or greater esteem than they hold their own.

Simulated Intelligence is the non-misleading term for chess playing computers, attempts to pass the Turing Test, and the like.  To speculate that even the most remotely possible achievements of so called artificial intelligence could belong in the same class as (it is already a tragedy that I feel the need to introduce this term) Organic Intelligence is to ignore or devalue most of what distinguishes intelligent beings from machines (and I include plenty of beings besides human ones).  Eager for a “Yes” when they ask “Can this machine think?”, technophiliacs unwittingly shrink the concept of intelligence.  Human nature strikes again. The pursuit of artificial intelligence with hope of gaining perspective on the very nature of intelligence blunts appreciation of what minds are for and what they really do.

Where to begin?  Eye contact.  Body language.  Why do we ever bother to touch each other?  The initial and most essential communications that we undertake with our fellow beings are nonverbal.  Infants and pets master this effortlessly.  Then there is poetry.  Music. Art. Gardening. Home cooking. Turing Test my a–.

No one has been able to provide a widely agreed upon definition of consciousness.  I will not try, but I will insist that the needs to survive, reproduce and, in the case of a social creature, connect with others are necessary to and inseparable from the whole that is consciousness.

Isolating parts from the whole is exactly what the manner in which computers process information is all about.  Those who think that with enough speed, memory, parallel processing, data, whatever, something we could consider consciousness might “emerge” are, in my opinion, today’s version of medieval alchemists who thought there had be some way to turn lead into gold.

None of this is a reason for scientists, programmers and engineers to cease their work.  Playing chess is fun, but building a machine that can beat anyone at chess is, no doubt, even more fun.  Mo’ better computers are coming our way!  However, the job of keeping it all in proper perspective must not belong to the people immersed in that stuff.  Have you thanked a philosopher today?

Some of us devise marvelous tools, even before their eventual uses are devised.  Then most of us adopt tools and proceed to shape our worlds without reflecting upon how our tools shape us too.  It is worth thinking about.  With today’s tools, the stakes are high.

No, only you can, but if that is what you want, help is at every hand!

This important essay, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, does not mention map reading, but I think Nicholas Carr ties together a great number of observations on the same theme I elaborate on this blog.

Google, audible turn by turn navigation, or glancing at a little online map image instead of getting the atlas off the shelf does not make you stupid.  What they do is make it much too easy to let your mental habits drift while you fail to take proper account of the gains and losses to your mental powers.  Before you know it, something has happened that you might not have chosen had you thought it through beforehand.

In the essay, Carr and other highly intelligent, literate people confess that after years of googling, surfing and skimming online content they have lost the patience or even the ability to read a book!  Has that happened to you yet?  Not me, thanks.  Carr and his anecdotal cohort seem bemused at what has happened to them.  They are, after all, busy and successful.

Not every book does this for me, but the reason I consider the novel one of the greatest art forms is this.  Often upon completing an excellent novel, I am pleasantly surprised by the intensity of the moment when I contemplate the whole of what I have just absorbed.  A vast blob of emotional truth crystallizes and shimmers before me.  The  unknowable becomes known. I would say it is inexpressible but it is not:  The author expressed it!  It took thousands of words.  No wonder I sound silly trying to describe the experience in a paragraph.  Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf: “Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking”.

Everywhere are messages and pressures urging us to buy and get with the latest thing.  Skeptics like me are merely trying to provide balance and perspective, not stop progess.

Mind control is here.  It always has been.  How much control do you want to take and how much do you want to hand over?

Learning and problem solving is often a matter of parts and steps.  The parts of the parts and the steps within the steps must be isolated, broken down until they are irreducible, and the connections and relationships noted, one by one.  This is especially so when we are setting up a computer to do the problem solving.

Unlike computers, our minds deal effortlessly with wholes.  My point about how laborious it would be to write out every fact that a detailed map could tell us is also a point about how unnecessary that labor is.  Just look at the map and you know.

Mushroom hunting became a favorite pastime of mine this summer.  It is healthy brain exercise to foster the state of relaxed alertness in which you most efficiently spot the mushrooms.  You can tromp along and see none.  You can stop, look around and conclude “No mushrooms here.”  Then keep looking.  Staring is the wrong way to look. You don’t have to execute a search pattern either.  Slow down, wait and trust your eyes.  One of my favorite moments is when you suddenly see a hundred mushrooms in a place that had just seemed bare of them.  I guess most people do not get their thrills in the same ways I do.  Mostly, I believe, because they have not tried.  Silent, low tech encounters with fungi in situ are not big in popular culture these days.  Birdwatchers probably know what I am trying to say.

Printed guides to mushrooms always bear stern warnings about not eating anything until a real live expert has confirmed the identity of your find.  Every living expert must have learned from other experts, who learned from other experts, and so on.  Let us be grateful for the sacrifices that someone, somewhere, some time ago must have made to learn the hard way!

In defiance of the warnings I ate some mushrooms, and survived.  Some had been shown to me by someone who had eaten that mushroom.  Others, like this Bears Head Tooth were so unlike any other possible growth that I judged it foolproof.  Most of the time, however, I would puzzle over my guidebook and my finds.  There are photographs, but every specimen seems misshapen.  Colors are never quite the same.  There are written descriptions of properties:  stems, collars, the little fin-like things or lack thereof underneath,  how it smells, what happens when you bruise it etc.  There are a lot of parts to the identity of a mushroom!  Just when you think you have narrowed the possiblities down to one you flip around the book a bit and think it could be something else.  What is the difference?  Is that stipe (stem) really bulbose? Are those lamellae nearly detached or fully detached?

I have resolved to sign up for the first expert-led mushroom class, walk, foray or whatever I can find next spring.  The difference between learning mushrooms from a book and learning with live specimens under the guidance of an expert is the difference between learning from the parts up and from whole down.  When you really know a mushroom, you know it as a whole.  You know it on sight.  That and where it grows, how it grows, how it smells, how best to cook it, all your history with it are parts of one whole piece of knowledge.

Check the book before you eat it anyway.

All this to praise the uniqueness of the map as a tool for learning:  The parts and the whole are simultaneous and integral.  There is no either – or.  Reading maps trains your mind for more effective thinking even in realms non-geographical.