Is outboard memory so bad?

The Internet is changing our memory, but perhaps not by weakening it (as some have surmised, most notably Nicholas Carr).

A new study led by Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University, cited by both Discover Magazine and Silicon Valley Mercury News) suggests that people are just adapting to the availability of the Internet by spending less time memorizing things better retrieved through a Google search.

In a series of four experiments at Columbia and Harvard, Sparrow and her team found that students are more likely to recall a trivial fact if they think it will be erased from the computer -- and forget it if they're assured it will be there.

Similarly, the team proved that people are better at remembering where to find facts, rather than the facts themselves. The students, they found, recalled the names of files where information was stored, rather than the information itself.

In the same way that painters shifted from realistic representations to impressionism when the camera was invented, people may just be optimizing their mental processing for tasks a computer isn't able to do better yet.

Why spend time memorizing thousands of digits of pi when you can look up as many digits as you'd like with one simple Internet search? Chuck Klosterman posed a similar question in sidenote #3 in this Grantland article about the limits of human speed.

We should not overlook the large contingent of long-distance runners who find the whole question of "the fastest man alive" patently ridiculous, simply because humans are all relatively slow (at least compared to most other major mammals). Humans are designed for distance running. Christopher McDougnall, author of the best-selling book Born to Run, actually thinks this debate is borderline sexist. "My bedrock feeling about sprinting is that we only get excited about it because boys are better than girls. Men set the entertainment agenda, so we pick the events that give us an edge over women. As a species, we're awful sprinters. Really bad. The average amputee dog can hold his own against any high school track star. … It takes a really prosperous, secure society to perfect frivolous pursuits.

While this sounds good in principle, I'm not sure that being outdone at the extremes minimizes our appreciation of relative differences further away from the margins. Humans are, of course, most empathetic to the limits of human achievement, so I compare Usain Bolt running a 9.58s 100m dash to my own time in the same, and I compare someone memorizing 67,890 digits of pi to the number I can recall offhand, and I'm suitably impressed.

Related: lmgtfy and The Most Human Human

The Tour

In recent years, I've wanted to give up on watching the Tour de France. What has dominated the headlines of the sport are allegations of doping, or reports of yet another rider testing positive and having his past wins thrown out. If Contador and Armstrong were to be found guilty of using banned substances, you might have to go back to the early 90's to the days of Miguel Indurain to find a Tour de France winner that hadn't been caught in one doping scandal or another in their career.

I've never been that interested in watching the flat stages of the race. Most consist of long stretches where nothing visually interesting happens. The peloton chases some breakaway group consisting of some riders with no chance of winning the Tour, riders hoping to win some TV coverage mindshare for their sponsor or to gain some points for one of the competitions within the competition (the Tour gives out jerseys beyond the yellow jersey for the Tour leader; there's a green, white, and polka-dot jersey, too). Most breakaways are caught, leading to a furious sprint finish in the final minute or two of the race. Even during these brief peak moments of the stage, it's hard to see what's going on. Shot head-on, it's hard to discern who's ahead of who until they show the replay from overhead or the side. Without names on jerseys, and with most teammates decked out in the same sponsor gear, it's often hard to see who's who unless someone's clearly wearing the green jersey.

This year the early stages were more eventful than others, but only because of a multitude of crashes, including one spectacular but unfortunate confrontation between rider and car. In that, the laws of physics held: size matters (this image of the aftermath is not for those who are squeamish at the sight of what happens when human flesh in motion meets barbed wire). The crashes were most interesting consumed in hindsight in highlight form, like hockey fights or soccer goals breaking up long stretches of jockeying for position best appreciated by those with a deep knowledge of the subtleties of the sport.

But despite all that, the mountain stages of the Tour always draw me back in. In part it's because I've ridden many of the Alps and Pyrenees myself, but for the most part it's the pure competition of it all. When the road kicks up, the riders slow up, to the perfect speed: just slow enough that you can see each attack, but not so slow that you lose interest. When TV coverage goes commercial-free for the last half-hour of Tour de France mountain stages, the results is one of longest stretches of uninterrupted but dense drama in sports. The ascent of the final climb usually takes 30 to 45 minutes, and even the moments in between attacks are fraught with questions and possibility. Who will be the first to attack? When? Who will respond first? Who just got dropped?

Salt

Nutrition professor Marion Nestle argues that we should lower our salt intake, and that studies showing no correlation between high salt intake and poor health outcomes only fail to do so because finding a low-salt-intake control group is now almost impossible. 

For her, the two main culprits are processed food and restaurant food.

The latter isn't surprising; in culinary school one of the cardinal sins they hammer into your head is to never send out a dish that is under-salted. Salt enhances flavors of a dish. At a poor low-end restaurant, most dishes tend to be too bland or under-salted. At a higher end restaurant, it's more often the case that a dish comes out over-salted because the chefs there err on the high side.

How to feed 9 billion people in 2050

That's the problem contemplated in this article in The Atlantic. That's one way to look at the problem, to back out from some predicted future population figure and then solve for that equation.


The author's conclusion is that biotech won't solve the issue, that the only way it's possible is if we (1) raise incomes the world over (because some people aren't fed today purely because of poverty, not because of a lack of food supply) and (2) convince people to eat less resource-intensive food, of which meat is a large culprit (the higher up on the food chain you are, the more resource-intense you are as a food source, which is why we couldn't feed many people at all if we just fed them lion meat).


Here's a long and related article in the NYTimes: Beyond the Eternal Food Fight.