Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a large audience. An audience of ten is meaningless. Economically, it means you’ve failed. This is part of the thinking that causes traditional media executives to scoff at the spectacle of the “guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks.”¹⁵ But for the rest of the people in the world, who never did much nonwork writing in the first place—and who almost never did it for an audience—even a handful of readers can have a vertiginous, catalytic impact.

      Writing about things has other salutary cognitive effects. For one, it improves your memory: write about something and you’ll remember it better, in what’s known as the “generation effect.” Early evidence came in 1978,¹⁶ when two psychologists tested people to see how well they remembered words that they’d written down compared to words they’d merely read. Writing won out. The people who wrote words remembered them better than those who’d only read them—probably because generating text yourself “requires more cognitive effort than does reading, and effort increases memorability,” as the researchers wrote. College students have harnessed this effect for decades as a study technique: if you force yourself to jot down what you know, you’re better able to retain the material.

      This sudden emergence of audiences is significant enough in Western countries, where liberal democracies guarantee the right to free speech. But in countries where there’s less of a tradition of free speech, the emergence of networked audiences may have an even more head-snapping effect. When I first visited China to meet some of the country’s young bloggers, I’d naively expected that most of them would talk about the giddy potential of arguing about human rights and free speech online. I’d figured that for people living in an authoritarian country, the first order of business, once you had a public microphone, would be to agitate for democracy.

      But many of them told me it was startling enough just to suddenly be writing, in public, about the minutiae of their everyday lives—arguing with friends (and interested strangers) about stuff like whether the movie Titanic was too sappy, whether the fashion in the Super Girl competitions was too racy, or how they were going to find jobs. “To be able to speak about what’s going on, what we’re watching on TV, what books we’re reading, what we feel about things, that is a remarkable feeling,” said a young woman who had become Internet famous for writing about her sex life. “It is completely different from what our parents experienced.” These young people believed in political reform, too. But they suspected that the creation of small, everyday audiences among the emerging middle-class online community, for all the seeming triviality of its conversation, was a key part of the reform process.

      Once thinking is public, connections take over. Anyone who’s googled their favorite hobby, food, or political subject has immediately discovered that there’s some teeming site devoted to servicing the infinitesimal fraction of the public that shares their otherwise wildly obscure obsession. (Mine: building guitar pedals, modular origami, and the 1970s anime show Battle of the Planets). Propelled by the hyperlink—the ability of anyone to link to anyone else—the Internet is a connection-making machine.

      And making connections is a big deal in the history of thought—and its future. That’s because of a curious fact: If you look at the world’s biggest breakthrough ideas, they often occur simultaneously to different people.

      This is known as the theory of multiples, and it was famously documented in 1922¹⁷ by the sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas. When they surveyed the history of major modern inventions and scientific discoveries, they found that almost all the big ones had been hit upon by different people, usually within a few years of each other and sometimes within a few weeks. They cataloged 148 examples: Oxygen was discovered in 1774 by Joseph Priestley in London and Carl Wilhelm Scheele in Sweden (and Scheele had hit on the idea several years earlier). In 1610 and 1611, four different astronomers—including Galileo—independently discovered sunspots. John Napier and Henry Briggs developed logarithms in Britain while Joost Bürgi did it independently in Switzerland. The law of the conservation of energy was laid claim to by four separate people in 1847. And radio was invented at the same time around 1900 by Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla.

      Why would the same ideas occur to different people at the same time? Ogburn and Thomas argued that it was because our ideas are, in a crucial way, partly products of our environment. They’re “inevitable.” When they’re ready to emerge, they do. This is because we, the folks coming up with the ideas, do not work in a sealed-off, Rodin’s Thinker fashion. The things we think about are deeply influenced by the state of the art around us: the conversations taking place among educated folk, the shared information, tools, and technologies at hand. If four astronomers discovered sunspots at the same time, it’s partly because the quality of lenses in telescopes in 1611 had matured to the point where it was finally possible to pick out small details on the sun and partly because the question of the sun’s role in the universe had become newly interesting in the wake of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory. If radio was developed at the same time by two people, that’s because the basic principles that underpin the technology were also becoming known to disparate thinkers. Inventors knew that electricity moved through wires, that electrical currents caused fields, and that these seemed to be able to jump distances through the air. With that base of knowledge, curious minds are liable to start wondering: Could you use those signals to communicate? And as Ogburn and Thomas noted, there are a lot of curious minds. Even if you assume the occurrence of true genius is pretty low (they estimated that one person in one hundred was in the “upper tenth” for smarts), that’s still a heck of a lot of geniuses.

      When you think of it that way, what’s strange is not that big ideas occurred to different people in different places. What’s strange is that this didn’t happen all the time, constantly.

      But maybe it did—and the thinkers just weren’t yet in contact. Thirty-nine years after Ogburn and Thomas, sociologist Robert Merton took up the question of multiples.¹⁸ (He’s the one who actually coined the term.) Merton’s work uncovered an interesting corollary, which is that when inventive people aren’t aware of what others are working on, the pace of innovation slows. One survey of mathematicians, for example, found that 31 percent complained that they had needlessly duplicated work that a colleague was doing—because they weren’t aware it was going on. Had they known of each other’s existence, they could have collaborated and accomplished their calculations more quickly or with greater insight.

      As an example, there’s the tragic story of Ernest Duchesne,¹⁹ the original discoverer of penicillin. As legend has it, Duchesne was a student in France’s military medical school in the mid-1890s when he noticed that the stable boys who tended the army’s horses did something peculiar: they stored their saddles in a damp, dark room so that mold would grow on their undersurfaces. They did this, they explained, because the mold helped heal the horses’ saddle sores. Duchesne was fascinated and conducted an experiment in which he treated sick guinea pigs with a solution made from mold—a rough form of what we’d now call penicillin. The guinea pigs healed completely. Duchesne wrote up his findings in a PhD thesis, but because he was unknown and young—only twenty-three at the time—the French Institut Pasteur wouldn’t acknowledge it. His research vanished, and Duschesne died fifteen years later during his military service, reportedly of tuberculosis. It would take another thirty-two years for Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming to rediscover penicillin, independently and with no idea that Duchesne had already done it. Untold millions of people died in those three decades of diseases that could have been cured. Failed networks kill ideas.

      When you can resolve multiples and connect people with similar obsessions, the opposite happens. People who are talking and writing and working on the same thing often find one another, trade ideas, and collaborate. Scientists have for centuries intuited the power of resolving multiples, and it’s part of the reason that in the seventeenth century they began publishing scientific journals and setting standards for citing the similar work of other scientists. Scientific journals and citation were a successful attempt to create a worldwide network, a mechanism for not just СКАЧАТЬ