Starvation

Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

I thought about that article writing on Akira, when I had to wait years before being able to watch it again. I had to go to the Fnac store to read and workout the heavy 12 manga volumes edition, month after month, to get my Neo Tokyo fix.

I had to squeeze my memory so bad to remember a maximum of what I saw of the movie. Because of the lack of information I was daydreaming about it, wondering the story over and over again.

What would have it been if I could have watched this movie anytime I wanted to during these early years? I wouldn’t have workout my memory, neither my imagination or my body by standing up hours in a back aisle of a book store. I would have jumped –I guess- to “yeah, give me some more weirdness, more blood, more sex” anime because at ten you just want to see the limits. And there’s hundreds of these. I would have done that without moving from my bedroom, my chair.

So this article rings a bell for sure. Limited knowledge access makes you work more. You have access to a few things and you learn to focus on it, instead of being hit by multiple things all the time, reducing your will to estimate, making you lazy. You are no more surprised by almost any YouTube video. You watch so many in a day, a week, a month that it’s not as extraordinary as it used to be. By over stimulating your brain, your brain becomes numb.

It’s not really a bad thing to have a lot of information if you can filter and search it. It is a great skill and makes you smarter. But it requires effort against the stream, it means being ready to say no to your brain, trying to prioritize this constant flow of data chunks. I over load sometimes, more often than ever.

For people growing up with internet –90s born people- I’m not sure how you would learn to do that except with information starvation. Is it too late?