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What social media is doing to our brain can be understood by looking at how the printed word influenced previous generations
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Speaker 0 (0s): Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the TrueLife podcast. Got a great show for you. It's a real head-scratcher. I think it is getting into some of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Some of the ideas about the medium is the mess. It sounds a bit daunting. Let me break down what I mean when I say the medium is the message. Think for a moment about how you receive information.
Most of us are familiar with books, with television, with the internet. These would be the medium through which we receive our information. Another dimension of that is think about the senses you use in order to receive that information. We have audible, which is listening to our ear. We have tactile, which is feeling using our hands, our skin.
We also have visual, which is perceiving and taking the information into our eyes. Quite often. You've probably heard people say, I'm an audio learner. I'm a visual learner. And it's true. Most of us have ways of taking in information that seemed to be better for us than might be for other people. As we begin this roller coaster ride into the mind of Marshall McLuhan, we're going to be talking about is the medium or mediums in which we'll receive that.
So let me start at the beginning. The first book that I talk about is the Gutenberg galaxy. And this is a book that Marshall McLuhan way back in the sixties. And it talks about how print the type of graphical print can you read in books, kind, you read in letters, texts how this particular type of communication fundamentally changed the world around us, not just by making it possible for everyone to read it, but the way we actually processed it may be that a great forum.
The secret of the brain's powers is the enormous opportunity provided for interaction between the effects of stimulating each part of the receiving fields. It is this provision of interacting places for mixing places that allows us to react to the world as a whole to much greater degree than other animals do. But our technologies are by no means uniformly favorable to this organic function of interplay and of interdependence to investigate this question with respect to alphabetic or typographic culture is the task.
So what I think is a good way to look at that, or at least a way that I look at that is understanding that we need all of our senses to decode the information around us. And when we can use all of our senses to decode the information around us, we get a very good deal of what the world is trying to communicate to us.
When we use just one of our senses, we get a limited view of how the world around us noticed and obscured. It's an obtrusive view. It's an angle that may not be able to be seen by other people. Let me try to give you a visual example of this. So imagine putting a penny on a table, you know, just your regular penny and you, you put it heads down on the table and now you stand over that table and you look at that penny.
And as you look at that, penny, you can make out the shape of a man. You can see some writing around the edges. You can see some, some letters and some numbers. Some of the designs, you can see that it's a circle. You can also see that there is a little bit of fitness to it. It's got some depth. And if you look close enough, and if your eyes are still 2020, or if you have your glass on, you can see that the, the letters also have depth. The numbers have depth, and there's a lot of detail too.
As you're looking at it, you can see all this stuff. As long as you're looking down at now, let's say that you drop down so that your eye level with the penny. Now you're almost on your knees and you're looking at the edge of the table so that your eyes are exactly level with the penny. You no longer see the depth. You no longer see the circle. You no longer see the president. You no longer see the writing. All you see is a straight copper line, even though it's the same penny, even though it has the same numbers letters, the same circumference it has.
It's the exact same only from the angle you're standing at. You can no longer see any of those features. It looks just like a straight line. There's another book called flatland points this out amazing. And what we've done there is we allowed ourselves to pare down the senses. And now we're just getting a strict visual stimulation from an angle that does not allow the full suite of our senses.
Do you see how it really strangles your view, how it narrows your view and it takes away from the whole, that is an example of what happens when we not only use one of our senses, but we don't even use it to the fullest of the capability. It's reminiscent of what Plato tells us in to me, it's right into me.
As there's a story called the faders. And in that story, we learn that Toth, the writer, the inventor of writing before he allows mankind to use this technology called writing TOF goes, and he tells his elder. He tells him that he has come up with this great, unbelievable technology called writing, and that it's going to help humanity forever.
And the way it's going to help humanity is in allowing humans to understand experiences without having to go through them. In fact, he believes that writing will allow all of mankind to understand the wisdom and knowledge of those who've come before by reading their stories. And he is shocked when his creator smiles down on him and tells him, oh, Toth, my Paragon of wisdom, what you have created as a beautiful technology.
And it is indeed powerful, but it will have the opposite effect on men. You see it is unwise for the inventor of a technology to make predictions about what that technology is going to do over its lifetime. The technology you have created will in fact, make mankind worse off you see going forward, mankind will indeed be able to read the accounts, understand somewhat of the experiences of those who've gone before.
And this will provide the illusion of wisdom. This will provide the illusion of understanding the experience. So you will have generations of mankind who appear to be wise. However, will be unable, will be disabled as an individual, as a society. And as a world.
I want you to think about that for a minute, because that's essentially what Marshall McLuhan is going to tell us. He's telling us that the books we read, the accounts we read art are only and should only be a companion to the experience itself. And if you look at the way we teach our kids, if you look at university today, you can see the people who teach in university.
A lot of them don't have any experience in the real world. They are in fact, relaying accounts of people, new people, new people who did the thing they're teaching. So that may kind of sense. And they have no real world experience. And that's why, in my opinion, we see the things happening in our world right now. No one knows no one, no one any longer understands what it's like to be a statesman because they haven't had to do it.
No one understands what it's like to really manage other people, at least not right out of college. They don't. And I would argue, at least for the 20th, I would argue that you were unfit to be a leader till you've had 25 years in the, in the field in which you want to be a leader. There's a funny joke that talks about a, a man who started a business and his business was going to go public. And he got a call on the phone.
This large multinational corporation wanted to buy his business. And they said, look, why don't you fly out here to New York, we'll have a meeting and we'll make you an offer. Man was excited. He lived in California and he bought his plane ticket. He'd never been in New York before. So he lands at JFK and he jumps out of the, he gets out of the plane, grabs his bag and he jumps outside. And all of a sudden he realizes that he doesn't know where the meeting point was. So he looks at his phone and he goes, oh yeah, the meeting point was at Carnegie hall.
This will, that still doesn't help me. I don't know how to get the car. So when a mad scramble he's looking around and he sees this woman, who's carrying an instrument case, a violin case. And he runs up to her and he says, ma'am do you, do you play in the orchestra? She says, yeah, I do. Like I just played at Carnegie hall. How do you get to Carnegie hall? And the woman looks at him with him up and down. She pauses. And she says, practice.
You see? So it's this, it's this idea that we no longer know how to learn. It's this idea that the literature, it's this idea that we have chosen explanation over experience. I have another listen to this court right here. This is from a Karl popper. It is the open society and its enemies by Karl popper, a work devoted to the study of aspects of de tribalization in the ancient world and of re tribalization modern for the open society was affected by phonetic literacy and is now threatened with eradication by electric media.
Needless to say, that is rather than the art of all these developments is alone. What do you think? He means when he says, what if we devote the study of aspects of de tribalization in the ancient world and the re tribalization in the modern? It seems to me that it's been quite some time that we, as the west have gone in and colonialized and Taken advantage of and attempted to detribalized third world countries we've gone in.
And we have tried to push our culture in the west onto third world countries In the hopes of creating a little bit. It seems to me, at least that goal of the corporations going into third world countries is to fundamentally steal all their resources and distribute those resources to a handful of people.
I would argue that's what's happening in our countries today, not even the third world, but in the first, But I want to talk more about this D tribalization and the re tribalization Let's shift here for a minute and think about the way in which language, the way in which the word shapes our world.
Do you think that the interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear, to the neutral visual world. Okay. So let me try and give you some examples of the way language can change the way you see the world. Think about your favorite book. Think about reading some texts, presumably a hard let's just do a hard copy of the book first.
So you're looking at the book and you're reading. What do you notice? Well, there's words on a page. They go on a certain word or the words, a certain color and put the page. What colors the page. Well, if it's a normal book, you have black words on a white page. Most people don't think about how that sort of frequency changes the way you think, but it begins to establish a way of thinking that is foreign to someone who's not literally right.
You got black, white, black, white, black, white, black, white, black, white, black, white, black, white, black, black, white, black, white, black, white, black, white, black, all the way to the right. Okay. Start over to the left. You see, as you're reading, you're getting like this frequency, this flashing frequency pattern, right to left, right to left, right. Black, white, right to left black one, right to left black, white.
You see how that could be kind of training your mind to see things I can wait, can you see how people can get stuck? Believing what they read is a fat black, white, black, black, black, white, right? How many words are on a page? If you're reading a book, that's a thousand pages.
How much training is that for your mind? It's like taking the chicken and putting it to the chocolate. It just gets stuck there. And think about some of the scholars unit. Are they people with open minds that just really in love conversations and more than willing to have people challenge them on their ideas and even admit when they're wrong or are more scholars today, people who are willing to defend their published work at any cost, we have decided that their ideas, right.
And that no other ideas can in fact challenge because they're right. Doesn't that hardening of position seem like the cause of a callous mind. I believe that if we were doing dis just do some research on psychiatry of the written word, I think we can begin to see how the written word has fundamentally changed the way in which we see the world.
There's been some work done on it. When the book I'm reading right now, Marshall McLuhan, the sixties were done at the scratching the surface yet. So here's another interesting point. We try and wrap your mind around the Ratio in which we use our senses. If you live in the west, probably use your visual sense more than your audio or your tech to tactile really visually oriented.
Do you think that maybe some of these other senses are atrophied because you use one Sense so much. We all heard stories of people who've gone and their other senses are heightened, or they lose their sense of smell. And the other senses compensate for it. If we can agree that that does happen. And we can agree that using one sense, more strengthens that say, don't, we also have to agree that by forcing the world to use 1 cents more than the others, that we alienate, other people who aren't using those senses, maybe we alienate ourselves.
Here's an interesting quote from the book. The westerner depends on a high degree of visual shaping of spatial temporal relations, without which it is impossible to have the mechanistic sense of casual relations so necessary to the order online. Maybe that's why we have people just waiting to talk. Instead of listening, we're receiving so much information, visual sense that our audible sense barely using our, our audible sensation, it's quite different, but the quite different assumptions of native perceptual life have led me to ask a question.
What has been the possible role of written words in shifting habits of perception from the audit visual stress, when words are written, they become part like most of the elements of the visual world. They become a static thing as such the dynamism, which is so characteristic of the auditory world in general, and of the spoken word in particular, they lose much of the personal element in the sense that the heard word is most commonly directed at oneself.
Whereas the scene word most commonly is and can be read or not as whim dictates, they lose those emotional overtones and emphasis, which have been described for instance, by Monrad Chrome. Thus in general words, by becoming visible, join a world of relative indifference to the viewer, a world from which the magic power of the word has been abstracted.
It's a fascinating thing to think about that. The Written Word gives you an eye for an ear. I think there's something to be said about the great poets of the past. Be it the Iliad or the Odyssey, or some of our, our Muslim friends who were able to quote the cran from memory.
I think that there's something to be said about poetry in first meter, all these techniques of audible translations, all these techniques of using the audible to communicate. Maybe that's why when you see a great speaker, you're moved to your feet. That's when you hear a beautiful song, your skin gets goosebumps.
That's why, when you hear the sounds of love, whispered from your lover, your face gets flushed. See to me that verbal communication or the spoken word. When you watch someone who's at great origin, we can stand in front of people and speak well, you are consuming the word with all of your senses instead of just using one or two of your senses.
I think it's a much better way of communicating. I'm not advocating will stop reading books. I love books and I love reading. However, I think it's important to understand what's happening to our brain train at a certain way at repetition is the mother of skill. Repetition is the mother of skill. Repetition is the mother of skill. If we're constantly training our brains to do something, I'm going to get good at it. In fact, you might get so good at it that we no longer remember some of the things that we used to do think it's a good place to leave it for right now.
I think that there's more, I'm going to get into a lot. This is just, just the tip of the iceberg, because I think what is happening with the internet to our kids is the same thing. That's been happening to us, parents or grandparents with the Written type. Let me know what you guys think. Love you guys love.