Feature
Who needs to know?
by Matt Nippert
Is learning under threat from the morass of information masquerading as fact?
In the ivory tower, warning bells are ringing. Sweeping changes in the way we absorb and process information hint that the way our brains work – the way we think – may be changing, and not necessarily for the better.
James Flynn, an internationally respected IQ expert and emeritus professor at Otago University, says he’s noticed a “depressing” trend during his more than three decades teaching postgraduate students.
“I find amongst my advanced students, when I ask them their favourite novelist, fewer and fewer of them read,” Flynn says from New York, where he is a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.
“Maybe 20 years ago they would say Aldous Huxley. But today either they have no favourite novelist, or they say Wilbur Smith or other airport trash.”
Flynn’s academic colleague at Otago, Professor Cliff Abrahams, has noticed something similar. Straightforward lectures that would once have demanded the attention of students for a whole 50 minutes now need to be spruced up with video and audio content.
“Attention spans, anecdotally, seem to be getting shorter,” says Abrahams, director of the university’s Brain Health and Repair Research Centre.
And Nicholas Carr, an author and former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, writes that he finds his own concentration waning when he tries reading anything dense.
“I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
Over in Europe, Oxford Brookes University teaching fellow Jude Carroll has chronicled an alarming rise in reported plagiarism in the past 10 years – mirroring figures in New Zealand.
Speaking from Stockholm, where she is helping Swedish universities deal with corner-cutting students, Carroll says today’s university generation has developed a magpie mentality. Many writing assignments are constructed through “cutting and pasting” – often verbatim and without any scepticism – from online sources.
“They see research as just harvesting stuff. Going out and finding stuff and putting it together. One of my hobbies is patchwork quilting, and I see the process as very similar.”
Carroll says, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, that “plagiarism began in 1998”. This is the year the internet search engine cited by Carr as the cause of his brain-pain began. Carr’s cover story in the August issue of the Atlantic magazine asks the question: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
Carr’s thesis is simple. The growing dominance of the internet – for many people replacing their postbox, tele-phone, fountain pen, library, clock and calendar – is fundamentally changing our way of thinking by sidelining memory and encouraging bite-sized information consumption.
“My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy in a jet ski,” he writes.
As Carroll puts it, the rise of Google has meant remembering facts can seem less efficient than outsourcing memory to an internet search. “I asked someone in Stockholm ‘What’s the capital of Lithuania?’ About a minute later he said,
‘Vilnius. But it would have been quicker if I used Google.’ Which proves my point.”
The way in which learning is being changed by these new, internet-derived, research behaviours is starkly illustrated by a recent study by the University College London that examined millions of search logs held at several large library sites.
The study concluded: “In general terms, this new form of information-seeking behaviour can be characterised as being horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature. Users are promiscuous, diverse and volatile.”
Little time is spent evaluating sources for relevance or authority, the amount of time spent reading articles averages around five minutes and most articles aren’t read in their entirety: “Observational studies have shown that young people scan online pages very rapidly, boys especially, and click extensively on hyperlinks, rather than reading sequentially.”
Flynn and Abrahams both say this behaviour could well be changing the way our brains work. Not that our grey matter is evolving. Rather, its plasticity allows for constant adaptation. “Our brains haven’t changed much in the last thousand years or so, but the way we use them has,” says Abrahams.
Despite the physiology of brains remaining unchanged, Flynn has quantified a shift in the way we think. He has shown that our ability to process abstract information has improved dramatically in the last hundred years – a phenomenon now known as the “Flynn Effect”.
Flynn puts this improvement – chronicled after a detailed analysis of IQ test results – mostly down to a widening of education and the related spread of the scientific method. But he worries that more recent changes in mental activity may see a decline in critical thinking and understanding.
A deficit in basic knowledge leads to a catch-22, Flynn says. Despite the wealth of eye-opening information on the internet, people simply won’t know where to look.
“To know the facts about the Jewish situation in Poland in the 17th century from Wikipedia is very different from reading Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Slave. That novel gives you an intimate understanding of the Christian beliefs of the time, the real plight of the Jewish community – it gives you a feel for the time you’re not going to get from Google,” he says.
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