Smarter Than You Think

Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about.

(Dewey was something of an obsessive about speed; he proselytized for shorthand and phonetic spelling, and even truncated his first name to “Melvil” and last name to “Dui” to save crucial seconds while writing).

When I turn my audio recorder off during an interview, people become more open and candid, even if they’re still on the record. People want their memories to be cued, not fully replaced; we reserve the existential pleasures of gently rewriting our history.

Scholars quickly set about organizing the new mental environment by clipping their favorite passages from books and assembling them into huge tomes—florilegia, bouquets of text—so that readers could sample the best parts.

“If you’re finding information that supports your conversation, that’s making it richer; it’s multiplexing, not multitasking,”

The trick is to encourage people to join in but also to think for themselves.

Without a way to find or make sense of the material, a lifelog’s greatest strength—its byzantine, brain-busting level of detail—becomes, paradoxically, its greatest flaw. Sure, go ahead and archive your every waking moment, but how do you parse it? Review it? Inspect it? Nobody has another life in which to relive their previous one.

“If you check e-mail while you talk to someone you lose forty IQ points,” he says. “People can’t multitask. It’s not possible. I think attention is a big, big issue. People are addicted to their Crackberries. You’ve got to make the systems so that they help people pay attention to the world in front of them.”

In essence, a new form of chess intelligence was emerging. You could rank the teams like this: (1) a chess grand master was good; (2) a chess grand master playing with a laptop was better. But even that laptop-equipped grand master could be beaten by (3) relative newbies, if the amateurs were extremely skilled at integrating machine assistance. “Hu