Send Your Brain To the Gym

Chapter 1: Flash Memory

It is estimated that one week of the New York Times newspaper contains more information than a person who lived in the 18th century would see in a lifetime. My brother phoned me one day a few years ago to read me a part of an article in a magazine. Before he began, he named who wrote the article and the name of the magazine (Ann Druyan - wife of the late Carl Sagan – and the article was in The Skeptical Inquirer). At the moment he phoned, I was at my computer and I immediately Googled the information.  By the time he was halfway through reading the first paragraph, I began reading aloud with him.  He was startled and said, How’d you do that?  I explain to him that I merely searched two terms and the article popped up on my screen. That happened quite a few years ago; these days that sort of thing is common place.  It was one of the first times that I remember realizing that the way I think about memory and information was changing!  I had to define exactly what ‘memory’ is in new ways.  Not the memory in my head but my ‘outer memory’. The outer memory - meaning all the information stored outside my head.

The phrase ‘outer memory’ is attributed to Alvin Tofler’s in his book Future Shock. The internet has given us all the ability to retrieve that ‘outer memory’ almost as instantly as the memory inside our brains.  I call that ability our flash memory.  Our flash memory is the memory we can summon and use free and instantly.  Historically, outer memory has always had geographical and time limitations.  Back in the third century B.C., the Library of Alexandria Egypt became the largest collection of stored or booked memory in all of history.  Alexandria was an international port and Egypt was ruler over many countries and most of the world.  Ships sailing through the ports of the great capital were stopped and required to leave all their scrolls at the library to be copied.  There were hundreds of thousands of scrolls of science, philosophy, history, and the arts. This was the largest collection of books (scrolls) ever.  Cleopatra and Mark Antony contributed over 200,000 scrolls to the great Library of Alexandria.  The royals of the day funded excursions to foreign lands to gather all the books they could find. It was the largest most comprehensive and most expensive collection of data that had ever existed in all time in all the world. Unfortunately, it was all completely destroyed by years of wars and fires, the equivalent of a hard drive crash with no backups!  Today, almost any one of us has more facts and more memory available to us that ever existed in all the years and history of man - including that great library.

The internet negates geographical and monetary limitations for memory.  Each of us that surfs the net has more information that a lifetime of travel and reading would have provided only fifty years ago.  The great library of Alexandria pales by comparison to the memory that is available now on the web.  Estimates are that Flash Memory 2 petabytes (20 to the 15th power) would hold all the written word of mankind; the internet is thought to have over 20 petabytes of written words (this does not include pictures, music, programming, or operational memory).  To put this in perspective, Facebook uses only one petabyte to store its estimated 10 billion pictures!

I remember how very boring history was when I was in grade school and high school. It seemed to be an almost endless stream of dates, names, and places that had little to do with the ‘real world’. While I will admit to some belligerence on my part, I was one of the many kids who chimed, We’ll never use this stuff to the teacher - a protest that carried absolutely no weight of course.  Later in college, I had the same complaint and was told, It’s required to graduate, get over it.  Just this morning, only to prove a point, I Googled ‘Whigs and Tories'.  Wow! 391,000 hits in two-tenths of a second.  Basically, in 18th century England: The Tories thought they ruled because God chose them, and the Whigs were under the illusion that the finest people in the land wanted them to rule.  It was the base of the two-party system full of nepotism, bribery, and corruption – filled with people who had an unrealistic sense of how important they were.  Sound familiar?

No wonder I never understood what Whigs and Tories were; I was an innocent eight-year-old.  My whole world consisted of a hamster and a bicycle.  I wasn’t ready for Whigs and Tories.  I just wish I could hop in a time machine and travel back to my fifth-grade history teacher.  I’m sure she never imagined 391,000 scores of information in only 200 milliseconds.  She’d probably faint!  The internet is cheap, fast, inexpensive, available everywhere, and easy to use.  There is however, one more thing - one more very important thing to realize about using this internet to retrieve information: In Tunica, Mississippi there is a casino called The Horseshoe.  Inside the Horseshoe is a very remarkable buffet.  In a giant horseshoe shape all in one giant room in one humongous restaurant – is a buffet of buffets, over twenty different kinds of food in one restaurant - all in a semicircle almost a football field long.  Chinese, country cooking, BBQ, Japanese, Cajun, French, Italian, Mediterranean,…you name it, it’s there.  There is an entire buffet of just different kinds of breads, another for salads, and a dessert bar over seventy feet long with every imaginable configuration of pastry, cake, cookies, confections, ice creams, and pies.  You pay one ticket at the door – and the entire place is yours for as much as you can eat.  The first time I saw this amazing place, it took me twenty minutes just to walk around and see what all was there.  Now imagine you go to a place like that, and order a hamburger and fries.  That would almost be a crime, right? All that wonderful variety and you wind up eating a small simple fare of only hamburger and fries.  This is how many people use the internet; they - metaphorically of course, order the hamburger when there is an almost infinite variety of information available.  There is so much available that it is hard to comprehend.  Of course the internet by any measure of history is still fairly new – and this is why we have barely scratched the surface of this almost magical resource.  Unlike the resource limited history classes I had in elementary school, the internet allows any of us to take an exciting armchair tour through time and geography.  The internet is revolutionizing the ways we think about information.  As we entered school, most of us are taught to research topics and ideas by ‘looking them up’.  We were taught to find a source or two and then read the information.  This was the accepted method and it was a good one, or at least the best available of the day and time.  This method was used to retrieve contained information; the information in a book or library.  The internet is not contained but linked information. Books usually ‘surround’ a subject, and this is fine; that’s what we expect them to do and they often do it very well.  Internet searching allows the researcher to string information and to branch out from that string in an almost infinite way.  Using strings-of-information is open-ended; we need to train our brains to think about information in new ways.  Keep the tried and true methods of ‘looking up’ things, but also add some new ways of thinking about information.  Literally, teach your brain new habits of information retrieval.  We think and act differently when we use information in new ways.

There is also a new aspect to the timing of information.  Prior to internet, information had a huge time lag before it was available to schools and the public.  There was a time not long ago when we had to find an expert, or buy a certain magazine or book to retrieve information.  It was often time-consuming, expensive, and there were severe geographical restrictions.  Back in the 1950’s and 60’s, many homes had sets of encyclopedias to lower the time and cost of accessing information.  In those days encyclopedias were indeed state-of-the-art information systems.  The standard of practice for information retrieval was for people to literally travel to where the information was stored.  For a fifth-grader, this sometimes meant getting on a bicycle and peddling to the public library.  Those barriers are gone now!  Poof!  We access information with the click of a mouse.

The Battle of New Orleans took place on January 8, 1815, and was the final major battle of the War of 1812.  American forces with General Andrew Jackson commanding, defeated an invading British Army intent on seizing New Orleans and America's vast western lands.  The Treaty of Ghent had been signed on January 24, 1814, but news of the peace would not reach New Orleans until February.  The speed of information has altered history, and every advance changes the rules. The pony express only lasted a few weeks; the new technology of telegraph lines changed the flow of information.  

The challenge now is for us to change the ways we think about and use information. If you’ve ever seen an elephant near a circus tent before the big top show, you may have noticed that a relatively small chain is shackled between his foot and a stake in the ground to keep the elephant from running away (presumably).  If the elephant would only try, he could snap the chain easily.  The reason he does not – is that when he was small - he learned he could not break the chain.  Now, older, he still thinks he cannot break the chain – and so it never occurs to him to try.   Likewise, we are now free to think and use information in new ways; all we have to do is form a few new habits. We have to drop the limitations we learned years ago.

Chapter 2: Predicting The Future

If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans. – unknown

During those formative years – when earlier generations attended school for the first time, any research depended strictly on books inside brick-and-mortar libraries.  By necessity, we were also taught how to narrow our searches to pinpoint information; we learned to exclude everything except what we intended to find.  This was the chief limitation that came with the technology of the day.

Taking advice or counsel on what the future may bring from those who are famous for successes, is little more than betting on the horse that won the last race.  It may seem counterintuitive not to listen to those who are in positions of success, but if history portends things to come, the successful are not very good at deciding what is possible and what is not.  The man who invented television introduced a technological breakthrough of the first order.  Learning how to send sends pictures and sound through the ether at the speed of light is a pretty fantastic thing; but this same inventor promised us that it was impossible for man to ever go to the moon.  A Nobel prize winner for physics swears that man can never tap the power of the atom - and the chairman of IBM corporation predicted that the world demand for computers would only be for about five computers. Technology now advances so fast and unexpectedly, that we take news of improvements almost for granted.

Here’s what a few leaders in technology of their day said about innovations of the future:

Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances. - Dr. Lee DeForest, Inventor of TV

The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosive. - Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Atomic Bomb Project

There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom. - Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons, - Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year. - The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

640K ought to be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates, 1981

This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. - Western Union internal memo, 1876.

The wireless music box (radio broadcasting) has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular? - David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.  Fortunately, Sarnoff did not listen to them and the work with the ‘wireless music box’ spawned RCA and NBC.

But what ... is it good for? - Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.   

I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper. - Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in Gone WithThe Wind.

A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make. - Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.

We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out. - Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

Perhaps you have heard the story of how inventing the 3M Post-it pad was an experiment gone wrong. The inventor said: If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment.  The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this, said Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M Post-It Notepads.

Steve Jobs went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary and we'll come work for you.  And they said, 'No.'  So then (says Jobs) we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.' - Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible. - A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp. Frederick W. Smith's grandfather was a steamboat captain and his father built a bus system that led to the southern Greyhound Bus system.  This gave Smith a seeming history and influence to do something with travel and business.  The original funding for FedEx came from an investment of 4 million dollars that he inherited from his father.  Venture capitalists gave Smith 80 million dollars to help him purchase his first Dassault Falcon planes.  His college professors rejected his initial idea, but the venture capitalists that backed him with the large sums of money seemed to have more faith in him.  Smith's company didn't always go as well as planned, however.  Postal companies held a