Couldn't help but re-post this insightful comparison from the good folks over at Lapham's Quarterly, partly due to the fact that I can't help but draw attention to the fact that I've actually read the thousand-plus pages of the seventeenth century document quoted in the piece. Those untold hours of clandestine reading at the Albany Public Library's back desk in the spring of '04 have paid off!
A recent New York Times article by Matt Richtel, entitled "Your Brain on Computers: Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime," notes that in the current age of electronic media saturation, our ability to quickly fill in spare moments or even seconds with stimuli - staving off tedium while in line at the grocery store or while on hold with the cable company - may be choking off necessary moments of memory restoration and mental "downtime". If checking a football score or the NASDAQ numbers via iPhone at a long stoplight may keep us entertained during moments of boredom, what is such activity keeping our brain from otherwise contemplating?
I've long suspected that the vast majority of our time spent plugged in and staring at our phones is little more than simple distraction - the adult equivalent of waving a rattle in a bored baby's face to keep them from crying. The unexamined consequence of spending nearly every waking moment responding to flickering electronic images or sounds may be a complete inability to ponder or reflect. As we tumble into our beds in exhaustion each night and power down the phone, have we spent any moments in contemplation? Or are we terrified of being left alone with our own thoughts?
The cliche of Americans leading "unexamined lives" is an old one, of course, and if the charge holds true, there are many factors at play besides the recent influx of portable electronic devices. Yet one need only step inside any coffee shop, be it Starbucks or a local business with oil paintings on the walls, to witness the antithesis of the Parisian or Viennese café ideal. American coffee shops often seem to be eerily-perfect recreations of the interior of corporate office buildings, with only the cubicle walls removed. Laptops dominate, with much clacking of keys and snaking of cords. Others sit with smart phone in hand, offering a mirror image of their companion, head similarly bent towards the mobile device. Books are in short supply, and conversation sometimes even less so.
But what does all this mean in terms of our brains? Richtel notes the strain such constant activity may be wreaking on our ability to function properly :
“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”
At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.
Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.
“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist."
But as Lapham's Quarterly points out, such laments are far from unique to our digital age. In 1621, the librarian of Christ's Church College and vicar of St. Thomas, Oxford, the estimable Robert Burton, published his massive The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of those delightfully non-classifiable works of the pre-novelistic era, one that purported to be a medical textbook examining the condition of melancholia. In actuality, the work is a bizarre and learned exploration of all manner of scientific, religious and artistic statements on melancholy. If at times it seems as though Burton was on familiar terms with nearly every example of Western writing from ancient times up until the early seventeenth century (and I suspect he was), there is a wit and an endless curiosity that keeps The Anatomy from ever being a mere gloss on old wisdom. Few volumes can boast equal admiration from the divergent likes of Dr. Johnson ("the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise", according to Boswell) to Jacques Barzun and Jorge Luis Borge (in his landmark short story The Library of Babel, Borge opens with the direct Burton quote, "By this art you may contemplate the variation of the twenty-three letters").
Burton - among many, many other things - noted the rising onslaught of printed materials, in which the growth of the publishing industry had conspired to make available far more volumes of information than any one mortal could hope to consume. If Burton's goal in 1621 was to compile all notable information whatsoever relating to melancholia, he immediately recognized upon publication that he may have completed his task at exactly the right moment - the notion of a complete survey of Western literature was rapidly becoming a total impossibility. As he noted in his own massive contribution to knowledge :
"[E]very man hath liberty to write, but few ability. Heretofore learning was graced by judicious scholars, but now noble sciences are vilified by base and illiterate scribblers, that either write for vain-glory, need, to get money, or as Parasites to flatter and collogue with some great men, they put out trifles, rubbish and trash. Among so many thousand Authors you shall scarce find one by reading of whom you shall be any whit better, but rather much worse; by which he is rather infected than any way perfected…
What a catalogue of new books this year, all his age (I say) have our Frankfurt Marts, our domestic Marts, brought out. Twice a year we stretch our wits out and set them to sale; after great toil we attain nothing…What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning. For my part I am one of the number—one of the many—I do not deny it..."
If the notion of an early seventeenth century missive against media overload seems nearly impossible to fully comprehend, a well-informed reader on the Lapham's Quarterly blog points out such warnings can be traced back even earlier. She cites the 16th century Swiss biologist and founder of zoology, Conrad Gessner, who attempted to catalogue every book in existence in a herculean effort that eventually found form as the Bibliotecha universalis. As clinical psychologist Dr. Vaughn Bell told NPR earlier this year, one result of Gessner's project was outrage "at what he called the 'confusing and harmful abundance of books' which had flooded the 16th century world through the invention of the printing press." The blog commenter goes on to quote at length the French scholar Adrien Baillet, who claimed in 1685 that :
"We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. Unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not."
As always, the realization that we're once again stuck in a situation which has confounded and puzzled great minds since time immemorial is both worrisome and comforting. If I can't quite imagine how Burton, Baillet and Gessner would approach collecting the world's knowledge in the age of Google and iPhones, I also suspect that three hundred years hence, our ancestors will be shaking their heads at the crudity of our technology, the limits of our knowledge, and wondering what on earth we did with all of our downtime.
A recent New York Times article by Matt Richtel, entitled "Your Brain on Computers: Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime," notes that in the current age of electronic media saturation, our ability to quickly fill in spare moments or even seconds with stimuli - staving off tedium while in line at the grocery store or while on hold with the cable company - may be choking off necessary moments of memory restoration and mental "downtime". If checking a football score or the NASDAQ numbers via iPhone at a long stoplight may keep us entertained during moments of boredom, what is such activity keeping our brain from otherwise contemplating?
I've long suspected that the vast majority of our time spent plugged in and staring at our phones is little more than simple distraction - the adult equivalent of waving a rattle in a bored baby's face to keep them from crying. The unexamined consequence of spending nearly every waking moment responding to flickering electronic images or sounds may be a complete inability to ponder or reflect. As we tumble into our beds in exhaustion each night and power down the phone, have we spent any moments in contemplation? Or are we terrified of being left alone with our own thoughts?
The cliche of Americans leading "unexamined lives" is an old one, of course, and if the charge holds true, there are many factors at play besides the recent influx of portable electronic devices. Yet one need only step inside any coffee shop, be it Starbucks or a local business with oil paintings on the walls, to witness the antithesis of the Parisian or Viennese café ideal. American coffee shops often seem to be eerily-perfect recreations of the interior of corporate office buildings, with only the cubicle walls removed. Laptops dominate, with much clacking of keys and snaking of cords. Others sit with smart phone in hand, offering a mirror image of their companion, head similarly bent towards the mobile device. Books are in short supply, and conversation sometimes even less so.
But what does all this mean in terms of our brains? Richtel notes the strain such constant activity may be wreaking on our ability to function properly :
“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”
At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.
Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.
“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist."
But as Lapham's Quarterly points out, such laments are far from unique to our digital age. In 1621, the librarian of Christ's Church College and vicar of St. Thomas, Oxford, the estimable Robert Burton, published his massive The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of those delightfully non-classifiable works of the pre-novelistic era, one that purported to be a medical textbook examining the condition of melancholia. In actuality, the work is a bizarre and learned exploration of all manner of scientific, religious and artistic statements on melancholy. If at times it seems as though Burton was on familiar terms with nearly every example of Western writing from ancient times up until the early seventeenth century (and I suspect he was), there is a wit and an endless curiosity that keeps The Anatomy from ever being a mere gloss on old wisdom. Few volumes can boast equal admiration from the divergent likes of Dr. Johnson ("the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise", according to Boswell) to Jacques Barzun and Jorge Luis Borge (in his landmark short story The Library of Babel, Borge opens with the direct Burton quote, "By this art you may contemplate the variation of the twenty-three letters").
Burton - among many, many other things - noted the rising onslaught of printed materials, in which the growth of the publishing industry had conspired to make available far more volumes of information than any one mortal could hope to consume. If Burton's goal in 1621 was to compile all notable information whatsoever relating to melancholia, he immediately recognized upon publication that he may have completed his task at exactly the right moment - the notion of a complete survey of Western literature was rapidly becoming a total impossibility. As he noted in his own massive contribution to knowledge :
"[E]very man hath liberty to write, but few ability. Heretofore learning was graced by judicious scholars, but now noble sciences are vilified by base and illiterate scribblers, that either write for vain-glory, need, to get money, or as Parasites to flatter and collogue with some great men, they put out trifles, rubbish and trash. Among so many thousand Authors you shall scarce find one by reading of whom you shall be any whit better, but rather much worse; by which he is rather infected than any way perfected…
What a catalogue of new books this year, all his age (I say) have our Frankfurt Marts, our domestic Marts, brought out. Twice a year we stretch our wits out and set them to sale; after great toil we attain nothing…What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning. For my part I am one of the number—one of the many—I do not deny it..."
If the notion of an early seventeenth century missive against media overload seems nearly impossible to fully comprehend, a well-informed reader on the Lapham's Quarterly blog points out such warnings can be traced back even earlier. She cites the 16th century Swiss biologist and founder of zoology, Conrad Gessner, who attempted to catalogue every book in existence in a herculean effort that eventually found form as the Bibliotecha universalis. As clinical psychologist Dr. Vaughn Bell told NPR earlier this year, one result of Gessner's project was outrage "at what he called the 'confusing and harmful abundance of books' which had flooded the 16th century world through the invention of the printing press." The blog commenter goes on to quote at length the French scholar Adrien Baillet, who claimed in 1685 that :
"We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. Unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not."
As always, the realization that we're once again stuck in a situation which has confounded and puzzled great minds since time immemorial is both worrisome and comforting. If I can't quite imagine how Burton, Baillet and Gessner would approach collecting the world's knowledge in the age of Google and iPhones, I also suspect that three hundred years hence, our ancestors will be shaking their heads at the crudity of our technology, the limits of our knowledge, and wondering what on earth we did with all of our downtime.
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