Incognito : the secret lives of the brain

Secret lives of the brain

The best American science and nature writing 2012

Best American series.

Bacteria/microorganisms: The teeming metropolis of you / Animals: The long, curious, extravagant evolution of feathers / Humans (the good): The scent of your thoughts / Humans (the bad): The feedback loop / Society and environment: Crush point / Technology: Test-tube burgers / Mind vs. machine

Is the Internet changing the way you think? : the net's impact on our minds and future

www.edge.org.

the edge question / the dawn of entanglement / The bookless library / The invisible college / Net gain / Let us calculate / The waking dream / To dream the waking dream in new ways / Tweet me nice / The dazed state / What's missing here? / Power corrupts / The rediscovery of fire / The rise of social media is really a reprise / The internet and the loss of tranquility / The greatest detractor to serious thinking since television / The large information Collider, BDTs, and gravity holidays on Tuesdays / The web helps us see what isn't there / Knowledge without, focus within, people everywhere / A level playing field / Move aside, sex / Rivaling Gutenberg / The shoulders of giants / Brain candy and bad mathematics / Publications can perish / Will the great leveler destroy diversity of thought? / We have become hunter-gatherers of images and information / The human texture of information / Not at all / This is your brain on internet / The sculpting of human thought / What kind of a dumb question is that? / Public dreaming / The age of (quantum) information? / Edge, A to Z (pars pro toto)

The degradation of predictability -- and knowledge / Calling you on your crap / How I think about how I think / I am not exactly a thinking person -- I am a poet / Kayaks versus canoes / The upload has begun / Hell if I know / What I notice / It's not what you know, it's what you can find out / When I'm on the net, I start to think / The internet has become boring / The dumb butler / Finding stuff remains a challenge / Attention, crap detection, and network awareness / Information metabolism / Ctrl + click to follow link / Replacing experience with facsimile / Outsourcing the mind / A prehistorian's perspective / The fourth phase of homo sapiens / Transience is now permanence / A return to the Scarlet-Letter Savanna / Take love / Internet mating strategies / Internet society / Don't ring me / A thousand hours a year / Thinking like the internet, thinking like biology / The internet makes me think in the present tense / Social prosthetic systems / Evolving a global brain / Search and emergence

My fingers have become part of my brain / A mirror for the world's foibles / A completely new form of sense / By changing my behavior / There is no new self / I once was lost but now am found, or How to navigate in the chartroom of memory / The greatest pornographer / My sixth sense / The internet reifies a logic already there / Instant gratification / The internet as social amplifier / Navigating physical and virtual lives / Not everything or everyone in the world has a home on the internet / Ephemera and back again / What do we think about? Who gets to do the thinking? / The internet is a cultural form / Wallowing in the world of knowledge / One's guild / Trusting nothing, debate everything / Harmful one-liners, an ocean of facts, and rewired minds / What other people think / The extinction of experience / The collective nature of human intelligence / Six ways the internet may save civilization / Better neuroxing through the internet / A gift to conspirators and terrorists everywhere / The ant hill / I can make a difference because of the internet

Go virtual, young man / My internet mind / "If you have cancer, don't go on the internet" / Incomprehensible visitors from the technological future / "Go native" / The maximization of neoteny / Wisdom of the crowd / Weirdness of the crowd / The synchronization of minds / My judgment enhancer / Speed plus mobs / Repetition, availability, and truth / The armed truce / More efficient, but to what end? / I have outsourced my memory / The new balance : more processing, less memorization / The enemy of insight? / The joy of just-enoughness / The rise of internet prosthetic brains and soliton personhood / Immortality / A third replicator / Bells and smoke / Dare, care, and share / Getting close / A miracle and a curse / "The plural of anecdote is not data" / Collective action and the global commons / Informed, tightfisted, and synthetic / Massive collaboration / We know less about thinking than we think / An impenetrable machine / A question without an answer / Conceptual compasses for deeper generalists / Art making going rural / The cat is out of the bag / Everyone is an expert

Pioneering insights / Thinking in the Amazon / The virtualization of the universe / Information-provoked attention deficit disorder / Present versus future self / I am realizing how nice people can be / My perception of time / The rotating problem, or How I learned to accelerate my mental clock / I must confess to being perplexed / Taking on the habits of the scientist, the investigative reporter, and the media critic / Thinking as therapy in a world of too much / Internet is wind / Of knowledge, content, place, and space / The power of conversation / A real-time perpetual time capsule / Getting from Jack Kerouac to the pentatonic scale / A vehicle for large-scale education about the human mind / Sandbars and portages / No one is immune to the storms that shake the world / Dowsing through data / Bleat for yourself