Smarter Than You Think

Failed networks kill ideas.

When informatics professor Gloria Mark studied office employees for one thousand hours, she found that they could concentrate for only eleven minutes at a time on a project before being interrupted or switching to another task—and once they’d been interrupted, it took an average of twenty-five minutes to return to their original work.

(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).

The “extended mind” theory of cognition argues that the reason humans are so intellectually dominant is that we’ve always outsourced bits of cognition, using tools to scaffold our thinking into ever-more-rarefied realms. Printed books amplified our memory. Inexpensive paper and reliable pens made it possible to externalize our thoughts quickly. Stu

As Farhad Manjoo documented in his book True Enough, it isn’t just about opinions—like-minded groups reinforce each other’s lousy, half-true, or even patently wrong facts. This is called selective exposure: we seek out and pay close attention to facts that suit what we believe, ignoring the ones that don’t.

Patent trolls employ the concept of multiples in a perverted reverse, using the common nature of new ideas to hold all inventors hostage.

While reading Kasparov’s book How Life Imitates Chess on my Kindle, I idly clicked on “popular highlights” to see what passages other readers had found interesting—and wound up becoming fascinated by a section on chess strategy I’d only lightly skimmed myself.

At their best, today’s digital tools help us see more, retain more, communicate more. At their worst, they leave us prey to the manipulation of the toolmakers.

I also suspect that as more forms of media become digital, they’ll become sites for public thinking—particularly digital books. Books have always propelled smart conversations; the historic, face-to-face book club has migrated rapidly online, joining the sprawling comments at sites like Goodreads. But the pages of e-books are themselves likely to b