Name: How the Internet Redesigns your Mind | Choose your Default Mode
Uploaded: 2018-04-22T13:03:58.000Z
Duration: 10 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Imagine for a second that everyone had a magical
cube in their pockets.

With the right permutation, you could materialize
all kinds of food or drink.

Adverbs of manner

At first there was only one cube in existence
and nobody knew what it did until after about

a year of fiddling with the thing, someone
found the permutation for water.

After that, they started to quickly figure
out how to make more things like tea and avocados

Over several years, they then figured out
how to manufacture the cubes efficiently and

inexpensively and with a lot more cubes and
plenty of people to play with them, things

rapidly progressed to the point where they
were making more complex things like kimchi,

Cube users were increasing exponentially and
the world was excited about this- it was going

to cure world hunger, standard of living would
increase across the globe, everyone would

A couple days later beer was added to the
list.

Then a bunch of hard liquors came out and
a few people became slightly worried about

Then a couple weeks later two guys from Virginia
show up and say “Hey uhhh we just made cocaine

For the first time in most of these people's
lives, they were in a situation where they

had access to a huge variety of choices at
all moments during the day . They could do

anything from having the highest quality nourishing
meal, to deciding to add just one or two cookies

to their lunch, or they could say “eh work's
not going so well, maybe a spot of cocaine

And that's kind of what we have with the
internet.

OK It's unrealistic to say you get pathologically
addicted to the internet as fast as you would

to cocaine, but just as the mystical cube
people can choose to nourish or poison their

bodies at any point in the day, the internet
allows us to subject our brains to information

that enriches our intellect and gives us new
perspectives, OR we can choose streams of

information that leave us thinking “What
I have been doing the past 30 minutes?”

The thing is, the problem goes deeper than
just the minutes you lose to twitter, facebook

The way you use the internet literally changes
your brain's default way of operating, and

part of it has to do with how intimately your
brain interacts with tools.

A 2010 research article from the association
of psychological science found that when you

are using a tool, your brain understands the
tool not as something you are manipulating

with your hands, but actually as if it were
a part of your body.

For example if you have someone hold a marker
and then you could ask their brain to describe

their right hand, the brain might say something
like “I have 6 rods coming out of a meat

5 of the rods are bendable and 3 of them are
attached to a rigid, meatless rod.”

Kind of like you are what you eat, from your
brain's perspective you are what you use.

In Nicholas Carr's book “The Shallows,”
which is all about how the internet affects

your brain, he explains how different tools
change our perception of the world and the

the actual way we think, and not just what
we think about.

One example is the very simple and useful
tool that is the map.

Without the map people would rely on their
sight as well as their understanding of intricate

smells and sounds to create a 3D landscape
in their minds.

The map then simplifies this complex process
down to just visualizing your position in

Another example is how originally our perception
of time was an understanding of how cycles

and rhythms of the natural world relate to
each other.

With the advent of the mechanical clock, we
began to look at our day as just a compilation

Even something as simple as the spaces between
words can be considered a tool that changes

For a while, there were no spaces between
words and everything was just jammed together,

so you had to read the text out loud to see
where one word began and another ended.

Putting spaces between words made the task
of reading much easier to the point that people

could read silently to themselves for much
longer stretches of time.

Because people now had something they could
engage with and stay concentrated on for hours

at a time, deep focus became a more widespread
skill.

However, the recent internet environment is
one that wires peoples' brains for enhanced

At all times you have multiple streams of
information in the form of notifications,

advertisements, and messages
from your friends -all things that you can

Our brains are naturally on the alert for
new information, and the more we're exposed

to this kind of virtual interface, the more
our brain decides to rewire itself to respond

to and even crave these internet distractions.

Try and think about how long you usually stay
on one tab, one application or one video at

Might be no longer than a couple minutes or
even a few seconds.

You might have flipped over to facebook in
just the course of this video.

I've even found myself opening up reddit
on my phone while watching a movie on my TV

I'm already entertained, so what am I doing?

You can exercise or let atrophy different
modes of thinking.

Maybe at some point you finally set some time
aside to work on that big project you've

been meaning to do, only to find yourself
feeling uncomfortable and asking yourself

The reason is the same as why most people
can't sign their names with their left hand.

Alright, so what if we are gearing our brains
to be distracted?

Maybe things take a little bit longer to do-
that's not that terrible.

The problem with getting distracted like this
has to do with how your short term memory

Your brain, ironically, can be compared to
a web browser.

For example, when you're shopping on Amazon,
you might want to go back a couple pages to

You can do this by clicking the back button
because the web browser stores those pages

When you're doing something like reading
a book, your brain is processing and storing

the information in short term memory so it
can relate the paragraph you're reading

to the last couple paragraphs you just read.

If you get distracted by a text message while
you're reading, you might find that when

you go back to the sentence you were just
on, you're asking “Wait, who are they

This is because getting distracted and shifting
your attention to the text message is like

Your brain can't hit the back button to
review what it just read because it dumped