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Why the TV/Internet Comparison Just Doesn’t Work

Lyn Lesch

December 25, 2019

When I’ve found myself lately discussing the potential negative influences of the Internet with people, I often hear others make the case that television has the same adverse effects on us that the World Wide Web tends to perpetuate. That is, others suggest that the Internet is conditioning us in much the same way that television previously did; that is by drawing us hypnotically into a particular reality that keeps us focused on the screen in front of us in a manner that is deeply manipulative in order to sell us certain advertising or shape our opinions concerning various areas of political discourse by attracting our attention in ways that narrow our focus through a certain loss of perspective that is being engendered within us.

Although this is in fact certainly true, what many people don’t realize is that there is a profound bottom-line difference between the way that television has habitually conditioned us in comparison to how the Internet does. This is simply that the Internet is not so much a seduction into a particular reality, like television is, but the reality itself by which we connect ourselves to the world in which we live. That is, the cyber world conditions us to think, act, and even remember along certain digital pathways inside our computers and phones that have become fused with the organic pathways inside our brains – a form of conditioning that is much more insidious than television having the power to program us to accept certain values to which we might become attracted.

Another major difference is that while television has the power to condition us by causing us to traverse certain internal pathways in our brains to which we are being directed, like when we watch our favorite political commentator without standing back to assimilate the full context of what he or she might be telling us, the cyber world, on the other hand, literally causes us to outsource our working memories and internal pathways to large search engines which have the power to control those same organic pathways from outside us. This they do through virtual algorithms, computer coding, and other non-organic entities which have the power to direct and control our own neuronal pathways inside our very organic brains by essentially assimilating them as their own.

So it is the digital pathways inside our computers and phones which control our organic pathways of thought and memory that tend to make any adverse effects of the Internet far more pernicious than the effects of television simply because with the Web our thoughts and memories, rather than simply being influenced and conditioned from entities outside us, like disingenuous advertising or manipulative newscasters, are being controlled from a place within us as those thoughts and memories merge with the virtual pathways of our digital devices. And so it becomes exponentially more difficult to apprehend clearly what is in fact happening to us. That is, unless we take the first step in recognizing that this process is something far deeper and more insidious that how television might have conditioned us in the past.

The Possible Unreality of the Digital World

Lyn Lesch

December 11, 2019

Recently, Taylor Lorenz, internet culture reporter for the New York Times, was interviewed concerning what social media accounts she uses in order to be sure that she is keeping her fingers on the pulse of how young people are using modern technology. Ms. Lorenz responded by saying that she is on Twitter pretty much consistently throughout the day and that she also spends a great deal of time on Instagram and YouTube, watching a lot of YouTuber vlogs. She’s likewise in a lot of Telegram groups and Discord servers for different meme pages and influencers. Likewise, she also spends time in Facebook groups about celebrity news and pop culture, and usually spends an hour or more each day on TikTok.

Of course, it is Ms. Lorenz’s job to keep up on pop culture, and on how young people are using the Internet. Yet at the same time, it probably doesn’t take an extraordinary degree of imagination to conceive of the idea that this sort of blanket use of various Internet technologies is fairly typical of how young people today are using the Web. Otherwise, Ms. Lorenz wouldn’t be involved in all of her digital explorations to the obsessive degree in which she seems to be involved. That is, many of our nation’s youth are spending much of their day on their phones or PCs making sure that they have covered all the digital bases so that serious FOMO doesn’t set in and they risk missing something that they might consider important.

However, it seems imperative that amidst all this continual exploration of the digital world by the young, the question is asked whether or not all this Web-based exploration is the same as an investigation of one’s real world in time and space.That is, is the world inside people’s PCs and phones the same as the world they inhabit when they are offline. Or to stand the question somewhat on its head, is the belief that one is getting in touch just as fully with the real offline world of time and space when one is only online a significant delusion; one that might even lead us all, particularly those of a younger generation, deeper into unreality?

Unfortunately, it appears to be increasingly assumed by many people today that these two worlds – the online world and the real world existing in time and space – are actually one and the same. That is, many people assume that the information we are getting inside a small plastic screen is the same information that we would get as our fully embodied selves making our way through the world, with all its various sensorial experience simultaneously available to us. For instance, the misguided assumption that what we are in touch with while watching a video on YouTube is the same experience we would be having if we were watching the same events live in real time and space. Or that pictorial sites such as data art provide us with information just as completely as if we were learning about it through a lengthy passage of writing.

In the movie The Social Network, Justin Timberlake playing Sean Parker, the founder of Napster who was heavily involved with Mark Zuckerberg in the creation of Facebook, excitedly exclaims, “People used to live on farms. Then they lived in cities. Now we’ll live on the Internet.” Let’s hope for all our sakes that his frightening admonition never comes fully to fruition.

Are We Becoming the New Robots?

Lyn Lesch

December 6, 2019

As we search the Web these days looking for information, often using large search engines such as Google to guide our search, most of us are probably still under the impression that we are still freely in control of where our search is taking us. That is, we believe that we are simply using advanced technology to freely explore different aspects of our world, without being conditioned or controlled by that same technology. Yet at the same time, there are a couple of dynamics that, if we took some time to examine them, might lead us to believe otherwise in apprehending just how deeply our minds and brains are being controlled even as we believe we have absolute freedom in how we are using the Internet to inform us.

One is that as we search for knowledge or information online, we follow digital learning paths that originate entirely outside us, instead of following ones that originate in our own networks of thought and long-term memories. That is, our thinking minds are often being externalized to the point to where our creative thought processes might actually exist outside of them. As a consequence of this, as virtual pathways that exist outside the neuronal pathways in our brains begin to not only significantly control them, but even begin to fuse with them, we may be actually losing the freedom to determine where our own thoughts might take us.

The other potentially dangerous dynamic to which we might be subjecting ourselves is that we are become ever more conditioned by the information on the Web itself even as we are under the assumption that we are freely investigating our world. As a result of this, our own internal space, that which might allow us to keep the world we inhabit at arm’s length so that we might investigate how we are becoming conditioned by it, is in danger of being significantly swallowed by the virtual world that we employ to seek knowledge and information simply because the virtual pathways inside our phones and PCs and our own neuronal pathways are often becoming one and the same.

Furthermore, what tends to be so insidious about this whole process is simply that because our minds and brains are becoming so heavily conditioned by the same technology that we are using to explore ourselves and our world, it becomes extremely difficult for those same minds and brains to actually step outside this same process in order to observe what it is doing to us. In fact, it is very much like Ouroboros, the snake that is eating its own tail. Ultimately, unless increasing numbers of people begin to step outside the process of how the Internet is affecting us at a deeply psychological level, we may in fact increasingly become the new robots who believe we still have free choice even as it is slipping away from us.

YouTube Content May Not Be the Real Issue

Lyn Lesch

December 3, 2019

This past Sunday 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl sat down with Susan Wojcicki, Ceo of YouTube in order to question her about some of the controversial videos that have been allowed on the site as of late. Of particular concern to 60 Minutes was content that users of the site had been able to upload in the past that was either untrue, represented disinformation or conspiracies, or else represented violence-inducing hate speech. Wojcicki’s response was that any videos are allowed that don’t cause harm, but that YouTube doesn’t allow any disinformation related to such things as political issues or health concerns, She also said that they have recently tightened their policy on hate speech.

Of course it is a good thing that YouTube is making an effort to monitor their data, with all the misinformation and hate speech that is now transpiring on the Web. Yet at the same time, there may be something else involving pictorial or video sites like YouTube that might likewise be a dangerous development. That is, if people today are increasingly getting their knowledge and information largely in the visual realm, rather than by sitting and quietly reading long passages, then it seems entirely possible that the quiet spaces in our minds necessary for developing truly accurate analyses of various situations are being continually eroded.

In addition, if people are increasingly simply watching videos online that give them only abbreviated versions of facts in which they are interested, rather than getting their information by attending to an extended piece of writing, then those same quiet space in our minds so necessary for creative thinking may likewise be in danger of significantly disappearing. While at the same time, people’s fluency with written language itself, which is so necessary for not only thinking creatively about various situations, but for also making significant connections within a broad field of knowledge or information may be in danger of being significantly stifled in this new cyber age.

Eventually, we could end up living in a world where many people have become content to simply absorb facts or fragmented bits of information which they have gathered only pictorially or through videos without bothering to think critically or creatively about them simply because they have received that information only in the visual realm. We need to remember that the meaning behind information or knowledge will always be what is most important about them, not necessarily how the knowledge or information is represented. Otherwise, it would seem, we risk living in a much shallower world where we think less deeply about important issues.

The Tyranny of the Keyboard in Our Digital Age

Lyn Lesch

November 30, 2019

Now that personal connection in our new digital age takes place largely through the iPhone or the PC, this means that the keyboard itself may be rapidly replacing the human voice as the primary means of human communication. And because this is a significant sea change in how people are relating to one another, it would appear that this rather profound development is going to have to be studied further in order to explore its potential effects on us all. For instance, when certain dynamics like the inflections of people’s voices while speaking to one another are being rapidly replaced by the literal communication inherent in relating to others by keyboard, what changes might that bring in how people understand one another?

Also, when it isn’t possible to interject ironical humor into our communication with each other simply because irony is such an indirect form of communication that relies heavily on such things as the tone of one’s voice, the twinkle in one’s eye, and above all else looking at something in humorous fashion out of the corner of one’s eye where what one says or proclaims to believe is often really a point of view that is in fact the direct opposite of one’s actual meaning, then honest communication between people through humor ends up becoming something extremely limiting like the current LOL tag. And when this occurs, communication through irony or sarcasm becomes rapidly lost in the bargain.

In other words, this new cyber age of ours where the keyboard reigns supreme might well be holding us hostage to a more limited form of communication with each other. In addition, because it has now become accepted practice to respond to others in short bursts through e-mail or text message, rather than through more personal communication over the phone (particularly when one has disappointing news to deliver), we are all likewise becoming hostages to this other abbreviated form of communication in which it might appear strange to others for one to send lengthy e-mails or texts which may potentially get more effectively to the heart of what one wants to say. And so this new form of brevity, like the keyboard, is rapidly controlling us all.

What might make a difference in freeing us from the tyranny of the keyboard and the abbreviated communication that is e-mail or text messages? Perhaps simply a return to an accentuation of the human voice as our primary means of connecting with one another. Yet, it would seem, people are going to have to make a real effort in this direction. In addition, the theater, because it relies so fully on the dynamics of human speech, body language, and facial expressions as forms of communication might be somewhere else where we might look in pursuit of saving ourselves from the rigidity of the algorithms inside our phones and PCs.

Lyn Lesch’s book Intelligence in the Digital Age: How the Search for Something Larger May Be Imperiled was recently published by Rowman & Littlefield and is available on Amazon.

Empirical Loneliness

Lyn Lesch

October 25, 2019

As many of us already realize, the reality in which we live today is often based on empirical representations of it. How many Facebook friends or Twitter followers does one have? Who are the top billionaires on the Forbes list? What are the standardized test scores representing how well students are learning or how well their schools are teaching them? What books can be found on the New York Times bestseller list? Of course, these type of empirical evaluations have always been with us. Yet now, they appear to be rapidly reaching the point where they not only augment a certain validation of popularity or success. Rather, now these quantitative determinants of success are becoming sole measures of it.

One result of this trend toward empiricism may be that as our world grows more outer-directed, and less inner-directed, people’s personas are in danger of growing more soulless and devoid of the richness which one’s inner experience may offer as the validity of that inner world is increasingly fused with the outer world of empirical success. While another result of this turning away from inner-directed existence may be how so many people are traversing the course of their lives by staring obsessively into the plastic screen of their phones, in lieu of apprehending the richness of human experience that is transpiring all around them.

However, there appears to be something else taking place which may be even more insidious. This is the isolation and loneliness which many people feel who have been somehow abandoned by the empirical validations of success which they can see others not only garnering, but in so doing enhancing their sense of self-worth. That is, when one can see other people who don’t appear to be all that significant in whatever endeavors they are pursuing with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter while one has less than a hundred, it seems logical that increasing feelings of isolation might result.

As Martin Scorsese’s iconic movie Taxi Driver made clear in revealing the isolated, lonely person who ultimately grows violent in the form of a Manhattan taxi driver played by Robert DeNiro in one of his more memorable roles, a feeling of isolation from the success that others enjoy, as when DeNiro stares despondently at his television screen while watching happy couples dance on American Bandstand, is a classic breeding ground for a stifling loneliness. So the question would seem to present itself: Might the viewing of success through a largely empirical lens that is currently taking place in our society be a corollary for a new type of loneliness?

The Internet has played a significant role in exposing the details of people’s lives that in a previous time were generally kept private. Personal relationships, private conduct, and monetary status have now all become fair game for how we might become exposed to others online. Indeed, with the Internet increasingly turning into a new reality for many people, this growing lack of privacy related to personal identity is becoming rapidly institutionalized. And as the quality of who we are as individuals becomes increasingly represented by the details of our lives inside a plastic screen, numerical evaluations of us are rapidly becoming the new normal; compared to how people might have been previously represented to others in ways which were less limiting and more fair simply because they were more anecdotal. And so they provided us with a broader, more complex view of who we are as human beings.

Yet when the number of followers on social media becomes an indication of one’s popularity and one’s worth; when standardized test scores become a primary test of one’s intelligence and one’s capacity to learn; and when the amount of individual wealth someone enjoys is presented to others in starkly numerical terms, as a result any number of people might easily begin to feel defined and even trapped by these sort of numerical evaluations. Consequently, it becomes exponentially easier for a stifling isolation and loneliness to rear its ugly head.

Now that we are all now more exposed to each other in this new digital age, the danger of comparing ourselves to others and in so doing to be found wanting has increased significantly simply because of how we are habitually made aware of the success of others in highly specific terms, and by how we are being conditioned to view our own comparative self-worth in purely numerical ways; and by the essentially rigid nature of digital algorithms and coding into which even our own thought processes are being increasingly assimilated.

Indeed, numerical representations of real-life situations, algorithms, and digital code have become by and large the language of our Internet age. And although these things may simplify our world for us as they allow us to search more expeditiously for information or to connect more easily with others, if over time they come to represent our humanity, we may find ourselves in a world of trouble.

Intrusive Judgment on the Internet

Lyn Lesch

October 20, 2019

In the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski’s mesmerizing 1994 movie Red, which stars a young Irene Jacob and an older Jean-Louis Tritignant, the subject of how much right we have as human beings to judge others was explored in ways which were not only striking, but were likewise seamlessly interwoven into an entirely offbeat love story. Jacob plays the model Valentine, who in returning a dog whom she has accidentally run over with her car to an aging judge played by Tritignant, discovers that the judge has an elaborate electronic spying system set up in his house through which he can listen to the lives that unfold in the houses of his neighbors, one of them which he discovers exists on the edge of familial catastrophe.

At first Valentine is utterly repulsed that someone would do such a thing, and even considers the judge to be a pathetic figure. Yet when after the dog he has given her to keep runs home to the judge, and Valentine comes back to his house to retrieve her and then attempts to warn one of his neighbors of the electronic spying game that has been transpiring under their noses, she finds that she can’t go through with it. In doing so, she begins to confront, as has the judge for years, the futility of attempting to make others lives just by interfering with them. From there Valentine learns from the judge how after being unable to keep his personal feeling about a man he had to pass sentence on apart from that sentence, the judge had immediately retired.

From there the discussion between the two of them moves toward how the judge believes that if he were any of the people who had appeared before him in his court – charged with murder, robbery, what not – given their lives, he would have committed exactly the same crimes that they did. And as the friendship between the two lonely people grows, and as the judge gives up his spying game and even turns himself in, he begins to come out of his isolation and Valentine begins to grow less angry toward the world. Eventually, through a series of circumstance brought on by the judge admitting his crime, Valentine meets the man she was destined to meet, a younger version of the judge himself.

This is obviously the sort of film which makes one wonder about the synonymous real world implications. In this case, to what degree is the voyeurism of the aging judge in Red really our own, only on a different scale? For aren’t we all, if we’re honest with ourselves, at least somewhat guilty of the same type of eavesdropping that he was practicing? As much as people want to, they can have immediate access to the details of other people’s personal lives on the Internet; a tendency that is continually manifested by the degree to which people can download the readily available personal information of others in which they are interested and then comment about it on Facebook or Twitter. Indeed, ours is more and more becoming a voyeuristic culture.

The larger question of course is whether or not we have learned, as the judge did, that intrusion into the lives of others really serves no greater purpose. That is, commenting about others on social media after gaining access to the details of their personal lives, something that would have been impossible to do some twenty years ago, isn’t really going to change anyone’s mind or anyone’s behavior for the better. It’s only going to cause either hurt or embarrassment. So the question becomes one of why so many people are drawn toward this type of behavior in which they cannot only probe the personal lives of others, but even revel in any embarrassing details that they discover.

One reason may simply be that, as the great country singer Kris Kristofferson wrote in one of his songs from the 1970s, Jesus Was a Capricorn, “everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on.” And today, as our culture becomes increasingly comparative by numbers (who has more followers on social media, how much money does somebody like Jeff Bezos have, students and schools being exclusively defined by standardized test scores) the tendency to search for someone online whose life compares less favorably in the digital world with one’s own has been significantly exacerbated. Of course, the cost for this sort of untoward behavior may well be one’s integrity. Yet, like the aging judge in Red, if people are inclined to do so, they may yet save themselves from their own digital voyeurism.

The Denial of the Word in Cyberspace

Lyn Lesch

October 13, 2019

Just recently, the much anticipated biography of the great intellectual and writer Susan Sontag by Benjamin Moser appeared on the shelves of book stores. Although Sontag was known for any number of comments on a variety of subjects, from the inherently limiting nature of the photographic image to disease being used as a metaphor, one of her most famously quoted lines was, “Love words/ agonize over sentences/pay attention to the world.” What she most likely meant by this admonition was that by pushing oneself into the meaning of words on the printed page one is in effect connecting him/herself more directly with the particulars of the world in which one lives.

Unfortunately, one of the acutely negative effects wrought by the coming of our current digital age is that people tend to be in the position of increasingly getting their information about the world from predominately visual sites like YouTube or Data Art, rather than from books, papers, and digital web pages where the ability to dive into a piece of writing at length in order to receive significant information on a particular subject is what is required. As a result of this, what may be occurring is that as information and knowledge are increasingly accessed through images rather than through words, the opportunity which people have to connect themselves more fully with their world thought the written word may over time be in the process of being significantly diminished.

Ultimately, words can be fragmented pieces of information that prevent us from seeing the whole about some area of human endeavor simply because as soon as one attaches a word to something it tends to limit it by defining it. And if there is in fact a unitary, expansive consciousness, then that surely exists on the other side of words and thoughts. Yet at the same time, words and thoughts have led to certain towering intellectual achievements, such as Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species or Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. So without being fully attentive to the meaning of written words, human beings couldn’t possibly have explored their world or their universe as fully as we have done.

At the same time, one has to wonder just what might occur if people grow too attached to the pictures, images, and videos inside their phones or PCs as primary sources of information. Will our capacity for exploration begin to grow limited simply because we will be less acquainted with how to effectively use words and thoughts as tools for our our explorations? And will we be less able to fully sink into the images and pictures that are presented to us in the digital world simply because we no longer have the written word to effectively guide us in doing so?

There is also the matter of the significance of the written word in the sort of post truth age that we now seem to be in. For now more than ever we all need to be very careful of the meaning of words within various social and political contexts so that we can remain certain that words and the truth remain one and the same. On the other hand, if people increasingly get their knowledge and information largely from pictorial images or videos, there is a significant danger that the truth can be manipulated more easily. Susan Sontag was able to write so brilliantly about a variety of subjects – from the photographic image to the interpretation of art to international relations – primarily because she was so in love with the written word. It would be a shame if this same love of words began to disappear in our current cyber age.

Lyn Lesch’s book Intelligence in the Digital Age: How the Search for Something Larger May Be Imperiled is being published later this year by Rowman & Littlefield and will be available on Amazon.

The Stream of Life and Political Discourse

Lyn Lesch

September 30, 2019

As most of us already realize, political discourse in our society is growing increasingly rigid and preconceived. That is, politicians and others have staked out their positions on certain issues before even taking time to seriously listen to another person who may have a different viewpoint before having a discussion with them. Of course, in part this dogmatic approach is a function of many people believing that various social and political forces need to be tightly controlled in order to keep things from going awry. That is,they think that just as a powerful river needs to be dammed in order to keep it from overflowing its banks, societal forces need to be controlled in order for them to be dealt with correctly.

Whether its finding an equitable way to be certain that everyone has access to affordable health insurance, how to somehow put an end to the current wave of mass shootings, or how to deal with the issue of climate change – we tend to think that approaches to these particular issues, and others, need to be tightly regulated in order for them to be effectively addressed. And unfortunately, people of the left have now become just as guilty of this sort of myopic approach as those on the right.

Whatever the issue in question – health insurance, gun control, immigration, foreign policy, or climate change – political candidates and others now tend to feel that it is somehow necessary to cling to rigid positions on hot button issues, lest they begin to lose control of their attachment to them. Certainly, the recent Democratic debates in which candidates appeared to be too busy defending their narrow positions on particular issues to genuinely listen to each other would seem to be a prime example of this trend.

Part of the problem may simply be that so many people in our current Twitter universe culture believe that approaches to various societal problems must first be narrowly defined in order that those problems will be properly addressed. That is, rather than through an understanding that by letting go of this need for dogmatic control, the forces in our society, if left alone to resolve themselves without a certain measure of external control by government or other bureaucracies and organizations, might move effortlessly and naturally toward other larger, more significant forces in reaching a point of equilibrium.

The metaphysical thinker Alan Watts in his book The Wisdom of Insecurity made mention of what he referred to as The Great Stream of Life, that universal force that we consistently impede by defining various realities through words, thoughts, and concepts which are never the actual realities which they describe. So we’re never really in touch with those same forces because we have limited their dynamic flow by tightly defining them. Instead, if we allowed them to flow toward where they’re naturally inclined, they would grow larger in scope, thus permitting us to see the full spectrum of societal dynamics of which they’re a part more clearly.

Perhaps what is needed is a new type of libertarian approach in which government and other bureaucracies stop damming the stream of life of which all such issues are a part by the imposition of narrow, myopic solutions, and instead allow events which are part of our social and political discourse to move naturally and effortlessly toward wherever they’re inclined to move. For this to take place, however, would mean fusing political and social concerns with a more expansive view of life in our world; something which might best be described as a flow state in allowing different points of conflict to resolve themselves naturally amidst a larger vision of what might be possible.

To place political and social concerns within narrow definitions that limit them even before they have had the opportunity to effectively assert themselves among us prevents us from envisioning just what type of society we might inhabit. Part of the problem, of course, is that in today’s Internet age with the appearance of the 24 news cycle on cable television, the media is not only more able to define for us how political leaders should look and act, but to also narrowly define the context of important issues. And so we remain not as open as we otherwise might be to potentially larger visions of these issues.

Ultimately, it makes no sense to pigeonhole the forces with which our society must deal by constantly preventing them from expanding into what they might eventually become, particularly when this is done in the name of dogmatic expediency and political correctness. Maryanne Williamson may not be ready to be President, but her appearance at two of the recent Democratic debates may have provided a welcome respite from narrowly defined issues; and in so doing gave us all a slight peak over the edge of what might be possible if we were to open our minds just a little.

Lyn Lesch’s book Intelligence in the Digital Age: How the Search for Something Larger May Be Imperiled is being published later this year by Rowman & Littlefield.

Abstract Thought and Memory in the Digital Age

Lyn Lesch

September 23, 2019

In April 1929, as reported in this week’s issue of The New York Times, a journalist from a Moscow newspaper turned up in the office of Dr. Alexander Luria, a neuropsychologist, complaining of an unusual problem, which was simply that he never forgot anything. When Dr. Luria tested the man, he found that he was able to easily recall long strings of numbers and words, foreign poems and scientific formulas. Decades later, the man was still able to effortlessly recall all of these things. Yet there was one significant problem, which was that he had a hard time understanding abstract concepts.

If there is indeed a certain inverse relationship between the ability to retain specific facts and information, and our capacity for abstract thought, then this is something that needs to be investigated in our current digital age, one in which we are endlessly inundated with facts and information coming at us on our phones and PCs. In short, is our ability to retain specific information, or to know know how to come in contact with it by employing various search engines and websites in effect hampering our ability to think abstractly to the point where we may be significantly losing our capacity for abstract thought simply because we are no longer focusing on it to the degree which we did formerly?

Yet that may not be the real problem. Our capacity to think abstractly is significantly related to how well our long-term memories can retain the facts and information that we use for abstract thought. And although the storage capacity of our long-term memories is veritably limitless, the storage capacity of our short-term memories has specific limitations, ones related to how our working memories take in information. And as those limits are approached or passed, our short-term memories lose their capacity to effectively take in facts and information which they can then pass onto our long-terms memory.

So the problem with Dr. Luria’s patient’s inability to engage in abstract though may not have been that there was anything the matter with his capacity for abstract conceptualization. Instead, it may have simply been that his short-term memory had been inundated with so many facts and so much information that he wasn’t able to pass these on to his long-term memory, where he could then use these to think abstractly. And in considering this unusual incident concerning thought and memory from another age, it may not be so far-fetched to consider its specific implications for our own.

Like the patient who was losing his ability to conceptualize, might we in our current digital age be losing our capacity for abstract thought simply because we are overwhelming our short-term memory with an amount of facts and information to which it had formerly not had to contend, and by which it is becoming easily overwhelmed? And so likewise are we diluting our long-term memories in a manner in which they don’t have access to the necessary amount of information which we need to think abstractly?

In a cyber age which is growing and expanding exponentially, this would appear to be something which we all need to seriously consider; this potential loss of our capacity for abstract thought. For ultimately, this would affect so many different areas of our lives, from our capacity for scientific exploration to our comprehension of great works of art and literature to our ability to remain psychologically free in a world that is now largely being constructed by the algorithms inside our digital devices. In addition, abstract thought has always been the basis of the growth of human intelligence and innovation throughout mankind’s historical development. Without it, we would almost certainly regress as a species.

Lyn Lesch’s upcoming book Intelligence in the Digital Age: How the Search for Something Larger May Be Imperiled, published by Rowman & Littlefield, will be available later this Fall.