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    Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For the Better
    Unavailable
    Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For the Better
    Unavailable
    Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For the Better
    Audiobook10 hours

    Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For the Better

    Written by Clive Thompson

    Narrated by Jeff Cummings

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    How technology boosts our cognitive abilities-making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever before

    It's undeniable: technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson votes yes. The Internet age has produced a radical new style of human intelligence, worthy of both celebration and investigation. We learn more and retain information longer, write and think with global audiences in mind, and even gain an ESP-like awareness of the world around us. Modern technology is making us smarter and better connected, both as individuals and as a society.

    In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson documents how every technological innovation-from the printing press to the telegraph-has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt, learning to use the new and retaining what's good of the old.

    Thompson introduces us to a cast of extraordinary characters who augment their minds in inventive ways. There's the seventy-six-year-old millionaire who digitally records his every waking moment, giving him instant recall of the events and ideas of his life going back decades. There are the courageous Chinese students who mounted an online movement that shut down a $1.6 billion toxic copper plant. There are experts and there are amateurs, including a global set of gamers who took a puzzle that had baffled HIV scientists for a decade and solved it collaboratively-in only one month.

    But Smarter Than You Think isn't just about pioneers, nor is it simply concerned with the world we inhabit today. It's about our future. How are computers improving our memory? How will our social "sixth sense" change the way we learn? Which tools are boosting our intelligence-and which ones are hindering our progress? Smarter Than You Think embraces and interrogates this transformation, offering a provocative vision of our shifting cognitive landscape.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateSep 12, 2013
    ISBN9781480535305
    Unavailable
    Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For the Better
    Author

    Clive Thompson

    Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired. He is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.

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    Reviews for Smarter Than You Think

    4/5

    71 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I don't really remember where or why I acquired this book, but it's been on my shelves for a bit. The sort of a book that clearly has an agenda, so it's not looking for arguments against its thesis -- but as our society is currently swamped with the opposite message -- that smartphones are ruining our memories, our relationships, our children, our ability to be in the moment, etc., etc., this feels like a needed counterpoint.Thompson comes up with a lot of fascinating stories, studies, anecdotes. One of my favorites is the section on how humanity has always externalized parts of its memory/thinking. From the earliest designation of one person in the community to be the "storyteller," to the advent of the printing press and its abundance of books, to the married couple where one knows where they get the car fixed and the other remembers the names of actors and movies they've seen -- and each explicitly stops trying to remember the other's sphere of knowledge -- leaving more "room" for their own.It's good to think about the ways that the strengths of human brains can be paired with the strength of computers to make new leaps and feats possible. A very interesting read.
    • 4/5
      This is a very interesting book. It show us how technology does not make us as stupid as we believe it does, but what allow us to do is to interact in a very different way that we did before, it allow us to create things in a different way and to work in a new, and many times more effective manner. The book does not stop with just the good side of technology it also show us some of the problems that we have because of it and some of the limitations (or things that seems like it) that the constant use of technology produce in the different task that we have in our life. Is a very interesting perspective of technology and the different uses that it has.
    • 2/5
      Another writer reporting on a hodge podge of things based on a central premise. If you work or are even just a bit up to date about the internet world, this book will really disappoint you. A bunch of correlations were made so that it will fit the central premise but not evidence for me. Maybe I'm just too ingrained in the industry that I don't find any of his presumptions surprising or enlightening.
    • 3/5
      Well written and researched. Easy to understand. A positive argument for all that social media that surrounds us daily. Popular thought might be that the ability to locate information so easily is actually making us dumber, Thompson argues the opposite. We can actually remember more of what is important to us leaving trivial matters to the Internet. He argues that allowing cloud storage to keep our memories, we know we can access them readily. But there are moments in our lives that are reserved just in our brains that are not digitally retrievable. Technology allows this to happen. A married couple to can collectively remember more together than individually. Ever have a "tip of my tongue" moment that drives you crazy when you can't recall something. Let Google relieve your stress. It is always there waiting for you to ask your question.
    • 1/5
      Shallower than you think.
    • 5/5
      There are lots of doom'n'gloom laments out there about how technology -- specifically, computers, smartphones, and the internet -- are dumbing us down, distracting us to the point where we can never concentrate on one thing for more than five minutes, alienating us from face-to-face contact, destroying our privacy, and inundating us all with relentless waves of the obnoxious and banal. Clive Thompson, while he readily admits that these technologies have downsides that should not be ignored, also thinks it's important to consider the other side of things: the way the internet can connect us to each other and improve our lives and our societies. To this end, he considers a wide variety of topics, from the way team-ups between computer and human chess players can be better at the game than either is individually, to how recording technology can help us augment our fallible memories, to the remarkable results math tutoring programs can achieve in schools, to the use of Facebook to organize protest movements. Not to mention a thoughtful consideration of why all those tweets about what your friends had for breakfast might not actually be as useless as they look. He doesn't go to Polyanna-ish extremes on any of this, however; he is as skeptical of claims that Twitter will bring about world peace as he is about claims that Google is completely destroying our memories and leaving us with blank, empty brains. Most of the general topics and many of the specific examples he talks about here were already familiar to me, but some were fascinatingly new, and even when he's going over ground I found highly familiar, he does so in a marvelously lucid and compulsively readable way. And I do mean the "compulsively" quite literally. I kept reaching the end of a chapter, thinking I should get up and do something else, and then turning the page and reading on, anyway.Definitely recommended to anyone who wants a little more insight into this crazy, digital modern world of ours, or a different perspective on all that grumbling commentary about kids today ruining their minds, and possibly the future of the world, with all that semi-literate texting.
    • 5/5
      The author illustrates how the advent of digital technology and the internet have impacted communication on many different levels. He provides a very diverse set of examples, from the Arab Spring to elementary school classrooms.

      The author does an excellent job of describing the nature of interpersonal and social communication, which has changed little over thousands of years. He then shows how technology is making this communication much more available and widespread. He does all this without speaking down to the reader and without being pedantic.

      If you want to get a glimpse into how the next generation will use these technologies, and why you should be encouraged, I suggest you read this book.
    • 5/5
      Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think is a refreshing approach to the proliferation of modern technology. Many writers and thinkers are quick to point out the inherent dangers and trials of each new technology, with positive applications treated as interesting but presumed to be already known to audiences. Thompson proves that this is certainly not the case. Drawing numerous examples across many disciplines from the last decade, he provides a well-nuanced perspective on some of the best uses of our developing tech.Thompson’s central point is that our technology is not actually making us lazy, foolish, unconnected and unengaged with the world around us. Quite the contrary, his examples cite frequent instances where individuals and small groups have effectively used the technology available to us to be active and engage in what appears to be an increasingly disconnected world. Beginning with human-machine synthesis, Thompson explores the current state of how machines are removing barriers to deeper, more meaningful thinking. He examines how we think, remember, consume media, seek out intellectual challenges, learn, perceive, and connect to each other, all relative to the past, present, and future potential state of technology, and his reasoned conclusions are not nearly as grim as other commentators have led us to believe.Beyond this, the book is exceedingly accessible. The moments of personalization add a touch of direct connection to the reader; these are not things that are happening in the abstract, “out there”, but are absolutely present in the world we live in. This is not high technology controlled by government and big business, but rather what is and can be done by the average person. In fact, that is a large part of the point that Thompson drives towards, and it runs as a subtext throughout most of the work. For those wanting more in-depth information on any of the many sources used, the notes at the end provide amply annotated references.One of the greatest flaws of the book is a dismissal of the neuroscientific research being done in the modern age that examines the impact between technology and biology, but Thompson is up front about this. In the very first chapter he acknowledges that he will not be discussing this aspect, which has the unfortunate side effect of removing a number of interesting topics (among them, the use of technology to augment the physical components of our body, downloading digital copies of our brains, and so on). However, in doing so Thompson is able to address a much broader range of topics, and his fundamental point (that technology is actually making us better connected and able to think more deeply) doesn’t suffer from the aforementioned absence.This book is of great interest to anyone who enjoys good analysis of technology, culture, and modern social issues. The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr, The Brain that Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge, Reality is Broken, by Jane McGonigal, and You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier are all excellent texts either to read as a follow-up to this book, as they deal with similar themes from different perspectives.
    • 2/5
      Good content and great narrator. However the book skipped in a few spots. Chapter 7, about 63 minutes in. It skips several times within the next few minutes. Also skips in Chapter 8 around the 28 and again at about 29 minute mark. Lastly it skips the entire 10th and 11th chapter. It plays about the first 30 seconds of Chapter 10 and then skips right to the end, telling me I finished the book.

      1 person found this helpful