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How to Think Without Googling
You can’t pay attention to anything
Attention is selecting which elements you look at, interact with, and remember. Attention can get tired, like a muscle.
The internet is a very powerful stimulus for attention. It offers information constantly, demanding and overloading a system that was designed to function in the low to medium social networks of the natural world.
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Our mental processes and habits
E-thinking has moved us into habits of grabbing our phones to answer the simplest of questions: finding the map directions to a known address, or calculating the square root of four.
While the verdict is still out if the internet is rewiring and/or dumbing us down, we should consider to what degree the internet is changing how we think.
You can’t pay attention to anything
Attention is selecting which elements you look at, interact with, and remember. Attention can get tired, like a muscle.
The internet is a very powerful stimulus for attention. It offers information constantly, demanding and overloading a system that was designed to function in the low to medium social networks of the natural world.
The burden of task-switching
Trying to protect oneself from boredom and the fear of missing out (FOMO), has caused people to switch from tab to tab, or screen to screen on the desktop.
People switch between content on computers every 19 seconds, viewing the content for less than a minute. Multitasking this way breaks concentration. You lose time with this and context-switching and deplete your available mental energy.
Reclaim your attention from the internet
This is not a fight against the internet, but a fight against a society that is obsessed with speed and productivity made possible by the internet. You can practice resistance.
- Close some of your tabs.
- Shut off your notifications.
- Don't answer an email for a few days.
- Stop listening to podcasts at 1.5x-speed.
- Take time for silence and introspection.
Your brain network, associated with creativity and imagination, becomes active when your task-oriented networks are shut off. You might become more productive as a result.
How your memory works
Your memory comes in a variety of subtypes:
- Episodic memory: remembering events that happened, such as your wedding day.
- Semantic memory: remembering facts like the sky is blue, or where you went to school.
- Procedural memory: remembering how to drive your car.
- Transactive memory: knowing where to find information. This memory is behind most of the advances in human society.
Storing information
Storing information, when it is filed in transactive memory, makes it disastrous for remembering later. You may have a disjointed set of thoughts that you have trouble remembering and using.
How to remember facts better
Our brains are organized through networks of related concepts, stories, or the overall perception of a topic. When you learn a new fact, it gets embedded in a nest of everything else you know. The tighter the connections, the better you will remember and recall the information.
If you want to remember facts better, create a little contextual nest for your new fact to live in: Read some background. Consider what you've just read. Think about the terms you already know. Write it down or draw little images.
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Boost Learning Speed
- Learners proficient in fast-paced games are significantly faster at performing new cognitive tasks.
- By pretending you are teaching something to someone using simple language, you understand it better.
- Bilingual people may have a leg up when it comes to understanding new things and processing information, regardless of the learned language.
- Learning new material right before sleeping provides a significant retention advantage.
- Establishing as many connections as possible is an effective way to learn, and the best way to do that is to relate new information to known information.
- The brain processes visual information faster than text. Include relevant visuals (charts, symbols, diagrams…) with learning materials to improve retention.
Perceptual Learning
Is the idea that we learn unconsciously through our senses in a self-regulated way, without requiring external reinforcement.
More simply, you can learn to intuitively identify different situations or images through directly experiencing them in a fast-paced manner.
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The Forgetting Curve
Our memories have a 'forgetting curve', and unless we review what we see or learn, most of the content is forgotten in 24 hours, and the rest in the following days.
Due to the Interne...
Memories Are Associations
The more information that is available to us, the more we are unable to retain it. Memory means association and most information we consume may be simply buried inside, lurking deep in, and surfacing when the right cue pops up.
Binge-watching or binge-reading serves no useful purpose as we are only holding the content in our working memories. That's why schools space out the chapters and review them, helping us retain the material.
Memories Get Interwoven
The art and culture we engage our brains in turn into memories which can be unpredictable and fickle.
The books we read, the songs we hear and the movies we watch become interwoven and entangled with everything else in our lives.
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The Art of Telling Stories
Today, brand perceptions and relationships are increasingly difficult to maintain, due to constraints of limited budgets, a whole lot of options, and audiences who are distracted, disinterested and...
Facts Mean Nothing
The assumption that the audience will logically look at the facts and figures and make the right choice is fundamentally flawed. Audiences ignore most factual data, which even if repeated often, is forgotten or distorted.
An Impactful Story
Even when brands know the value of communicating through stories, it is hard to create truly powerful narratives.
An impactful story usually involves empathetic and authentic people overcoming challenges, which can inspire, entertain and inform audiences.
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