blog post #2

I agree that internet technologies are changing the human mind in unpredictable ways and are damaging our memories and attention spans. We are not reading and thinking as we were 20 years ago. Now that we have machines and new technologies, it helps us take the easy way out. Google for example helps us find the correct answer quickly. We don’t need to waste our time reading through a lot because Google already finds it for us.

I remember while in middle school it would take days to write a report. We would go to the library, read books and go online and do the research and then write the report. Now we can write up a report in a couple of hours because we do our research quicker or rather the computer does it for us so we don’t even have to do the research ourselves anymore.

Maryanne Wolf states, “We are not only what we read, we are how we read”. In this quote I think she meant that because we are so used to reading short passages,  we only want to read short passages. I love to read long books so if I have to read a long article or passage, I’m fine with it. I have friends that they can’t concentrate if the article is too long. They start dozing off the page.

James Olds, a professor of neuroscience says that “The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” I think he meant that we can change the way we learn and think. I think if we read more, then we would be able to concentrate more on reading.

Midterm practice

     I agree that the Internet is damaging our attention spans and reading habits. When we have a question that we can’t answer, we turn to the Internet. We Google it, is a term a lot of people use when they are searching Google for something. Google is our answer to almost everything. You can find anything on Google too.

   Instead of us searching for our answer, we just type it into Google and we have an answer in almost seconds. Using Google makes our lives easier and gives us more free time to do other things. While this is making our lives easier it is doing more damage than good. It is getting us used to searching for everything quick and doing everything quick.

   In Nicholas’s article called “Is Google making us stupid?, “he talks about the more that he uses the web the more he has to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Since we get so used to finding everything quickly, our brains only want to read short passages. We get discouraged when we see a long story. In the article I also read about how the brain has the ability to reprogram itself. If we wanted to go back to reading long passages, we would just have to reprogram our minds by reading books all the time.

   Irene Pepperberg says” The Internet seemed to have given me a case of Attention Deficit Disorder, but did it really change the way I think, or just made it more difficult have the time to think. When we use the Internet we try to read quickly so we jump from one article to the next. In a sense we have ADD. We don’t even read all the words in an article anymore, we just skim through it.

    There are many ways that the Internet is damaging us but we can change that. We just have to reprogram our brain.

Doing research for a project used to take a couple of days. I remember a couple of years ago when I had to do a project I would have to read my school books. Then I would go to the library, take out a book or two and read them. I would also do some research online. After all of that I would have enough information to write my report. Now all we need is the internet.

The internet is endless. You can find dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, and everything we would need to do all our research and write a report in a couple of hours. The internet helped us advance in the way we do our work. If we didn’t have so much information on the internet, then I think school would be harder.

We have gotten used to getting the quickest answer. With Google, you can enter any words and millions of articles, etc comes up. The best ones come up first. We also end up looking for the shortest article. We read so much and so fast but we don’t want to sit and read a long article. We lose interest in it after a certain part of the article.

I read a lot of books, so when I have to read a long article, I already know what to expect. If it seems too long, and I start losing interest, I stop reading rest my eyes and then continue it.

Some people don’t think that the Internet changed the way they think. It has made them better. Our mind is like a machine. When machines can perform faster and more efficiently, they become better. Our minds become better because we program ourselves to read quicker and that  in turn helps train us to do everything else quicker. We all have a limited time and we don’t know when it up. I think its better spent doing important things such as playing or helping kids. We would be wasting days just to do 1 paper. We would fall behind in school because we wouldn’t have enough time to do everything.

 Google or the Internet is our way of life now. I cant wait to see what our future holds and how we advance more. Everything is already turning into hands free.

Evolution and Altruism

Blog #3

     Richard Dawkins is more pessimistic about finding altruism in humans.  I feel like this because he talks about one person dying to save one another. On page 65 he speaks about a third cousin being worth saving if the risk to me is very small. This is a pessimistic way of thinking.  Thinking of how close a family member has to be in order to determine their worth saving is a horrible way to think.

     Olivia Judson is more optimistic about the importance of altruistic behavior in human and animals. Olivia speaks about how among many animals a friendship is more than just “a bit of mutual scratching”. Friendship has to do with their ability to survive and reproduce in their group. She compares humans to chimps and gives examples of ways chimps and humans are very alike.

     Richard Dawkins seems to stress cooperation over completion. He demonstrates how we have 1 exact gene from our mothers and that a family member has a 50% chance of also having that gene.

  Judson’s evolutionary perspective challenges my understanding of human behavior because it makes me analyze chimp in a different way. It makes me realize that human are closest to chimps. We generally do many of the same things and act the same way. Dawkins makes me more uncomfortable about my understandings of why we act the way we do. We he speaks about death it makes it uncomfortable.

     Yes I do think that the way each essay is written makes the authors ideas easier to accept for most readers because they explain in many details what they are trying to say. They tried to paint a mental picture for us so we can understand what they want us to know.