Ticonderoga #2

On my walk this morning, near the high school, I came across a pencil lying on the sidewalk, apparently dropped from the pocket or backpack of a student. It was something of a surprise, like coming across a fossil in a streambed. Do they really still use pencils? Why? And for what? Don’t they have computers and iPads and calculators and, in a pinch, pens? I tried to think when the last time I used a pencil was. I have two large coffee mugs on the desk in my office with a few pencils in each, but can’t recall using any of them in at least several years, maybe five or eight or ten. If I ever have to write on paper – not very often, phone messages and shopping lists mostly – it’s always with a pen. I thought it might be at a hotel, where they provide a slim pad of paper and writing implement beside the phone, but it’s been I don’t know how long since the writing implement was a pencil and not a pen. And several times in the past few years there hasn’t been any pad of paper or pen or pencil, the assumption being that you had a computer or smartphone for any notes – written or oral – you might need to make. The world is digital and probably will forever be, and that’s probably for the good. But for a moment this morning, striding across that dropped Ticonderoga #2 on the sidewalk, a pang of nostalgia crossed my memory. And I wondered – did the student who drop it even ever miss it?

Popcorn Brain

As if I needed another malady to worry about, apparently I now suffer from something called “popcorn brain.” This is a condition discovered (or at least championed) by researcher David Levy of the University of Washington who defines the disorder as “a brain so accustomed to the constant stimulation of electronic multitasking that we're unfit for life offline, where things pop at a much slower pace.” I didn’t realize that things “popped” offline or on, slow or fast, but then I’m not a professor in the Information School (aren’t all schools “information schools” in the broad view of things?). The threat is that all the digital stimulus that most of us are constantly and simultaneously engaged in – email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, surfing the net, iPod, etc. – is basically feeding our brain’s inclination to instant gratification and zapping us of our ability to engage in face-to-face human interaction. As Stanford social psychologist Clifford Nass warns, “Human interaction is a learned skill, and [multitaskers] don't get to practice it enough."

There may well be something to this – I’m not one to argue with scientists and PhDs – but I’ve been a multitasker since long before computers. Back in the olden days of the 1960s and 1970s, during my high school and college fog, I don’t know that I ever was not doing at least two, and often three or more things at a time – reading (a textbook or comic book as the case might be), watching TV, listening to the radio or stereo, sometimes typing a paper (the night before it was due), and/or talking on the phone (a black rotary).

And there have for ages been warnings about the dangers of new technologies on the human brain and human interactions. Not to get too Greeky, but in Phaedrus, Plato complained that the then-new technology of the written word threatened the interactive quality of the spoken word as well as the need for memory, that people would “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction” and “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” Similarly, when Gutenberg unleashed his printing press in the 15^th century, Italian editor Hieronimo Squarciafico argued that making books easily available to all would lead to “less studiousness,” mental laziness, and a general weakening of minds. And we all know the ravages that movies, TV, and rock-and-roll were going to bring upon our civilization in the past century.

Truth be told, whatever brain we have now – popcorn or popover – is the brain we’ve had for hundreds of thousands of years. The brain of the genius who discovered fire or invented the wheel is much the same as the brain of Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Einstein or Stephen Hawking or Dylan. We evolve. Our technology evolves. But my hunch is that our brains remain pretty much the same, wonderfully able to adapt to whatever messes we happen to get ourselves into, technologically or otherwise.